Beyond the Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect is a figure of speech borrowed from meteorologists used by social scientists to describe an essential element of the chaos theory, "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." Fancy words for the simple idea that everything is everything (else).

Originally announced to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the murders of 9/11, but really for reasons that had everything to do with the Reverend Terry Jones' pathetic sense of inadequacy and almost pathological need for attention, and absolutely nothing to with the Lord's work, there were promises/threats of Koran burnings by the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida.

A flurry of headlines, satellite up link trucks scattered all across the church's parking lot delivering updates like hot pizza to a semi-somnambulant nation, concerns about wholesale reprisals as responses voiced by national leaders who were infuriated at the malevolent stupidity of such a grandstanding gesture and finally, at almost the last moment, the Righteous Rev dialed the rhetoric back to eleven, but only for a time, it turned out.

Proving that those who claim to follow Jesus can be at least as hateful and stupid as those who believe they are followers of Mohammad, Terry torched a Koran and half a world away, people who wanted nothing more than to help humans living in the fourteenth century get closer to the world of today were murdered in a violently extreme reaction by a mob who saw disrespect of their religion.

I'm impressed that in what I think of as a sixth or seventh-world nation (in terms of infrastructure and living standards) such as Afghanistan, word of the burning could have spread as quickly as it has, but there are numerous reports that the Dove World Outreach Center actually carried the desecration live on the internet which certainly helped spread and speed the ferocity of the protests.

It's discouraging to see the haste with which we take every tool we invent and turn it into a weapon against one another. Perhaps we beat plowshares into swords only because we can't figure out to kill one another with the damn plowshares. Hatred, TJ, begets hatred and a world view that dictates an eye for eye leaves us all blind and unable to see the beauty which surrounds us. If there's a God in the sky, looking down, what can he think of what we've done to the world that He created.

-bill kenny