Warren The Illiterate or, " My Dear, Dear Ragheaded Infidel Friends, Let's Work Together."

And Us Christians Will Rule The World!

I know it's two weeks old. I know Rick Warren's speech to the Islamic Society of North America was picked over. The "together" theme and the "talk is cheap" quote ran the media rounds and quickly died. I heard/read about them, but since it was Rick Warren, I guessed it would be a "let's all love one another" generic speech.

Now I realize that it was an insulting speech.

I had put a google alert on the text of the speech. It became available TODAY. What's up with that? And it was accompanied by this statement:

From Beliefnet.com

This is an exclusive transcript of Pastor Rick Warren's remarks at the 2009 Islamic Society of North America conference that concluded a few weeks ago, kindly provided to me by his staff and reprinted with their permission.

Rick Warren has the old Dubya Bush generic-foreigners-speech down pat: repeat the buzz words over and over again until you've numbed them into thinking the words are real.

"I love you!" "My dear, dear Muslim friends." "My next door neighbors, I love you!" I'm surprised that he didn't say "I have Muslim friends who have had me over for dinner." He knew that he couldn't say "God" too much and that he'd have to stress "together-ness." Click on the Wordle below and you'll find that the word used most often was "together."

Try to find "love." It's there. Barely. He starts out with it. That's all.

And the rest is a hodgepodge of cliches, brainless fluff and the grammatically absurd.

For instance, he wrongly links secularism to atheism:

"Secularists, those who don't believe in God."

wikipedia:

Secularism is the assertion that governmental practices or institutions should exist separately from religion and/or religious beliefs.

Then there are the remarks like:

And there are a lot of things that we could do together but tonight I would quickly want to mention 4 things.

Perhaps he was oblivious to the fact that reference to Holy Scriptures is a bit off-puting to Muslims:

And as the Holy Scriptures tell us since we are created in the image of God, each person has intrinsic value and dignity.

And most of the speech was fraught with fragments of attempted reasoning:

And since today much of the press is actually clueless of what you believe, and as to what I believe, and then there are frequent mischaracterizations in the media, frequent ignorant generalizations, generalizations are generally wrong, and frequent stereotyping, of all of us.

But the most insulting rhetoric of all was the self-aggrandizing. Warren lists how many nations he's been to with his message of "togetherness", how many Christian congregations there are in Rwanda as opposed to Muslim mosques (the ratio is about 80 to 1), and how compassionate all faith-based organizations are in comparison to evil secular government-run, atheistic programs and clinics.

You can see the full manuscript with annotations HERE.

Or you can view the full speech and the perplexed audience below. Don't be squeamish!