On April 22, Good Friday, under the headline "SLC church distributes copies of the Qur'an," The Tribune reported on our church's decision to respond to Pastor Terry Jones, a Florida clergyman who, along with his church, burned a copy of the Qur'an. That act led to the deaths of 20 people in Afghanistan, including a number of U.N. aid workers.

As the pastor of Wasatch Presbyterian Church, I've heard from many people who understand and appreciate our small gesture. I've also heard from others who are either confused, disturbed or at times totally appalled by what they think the leadership of Wasatch Presbyterian has done.

I've been called many things in the last few weeks. The most vivid among them was "surrender monkey preacher." That's not all. The day after the article hit print, our church's computer system was hacked. The F.B.I. investigated. They were great, and fortunately the mischief did not lead to huge losses of information.

I was pleased to see that the copies of the Qur'an we purchased were given away, one–at-a-time, in 90 minutes, by King's English Bookstore.

In doing this we were not, as some people thought, promoting Islam. We were simply funding a project to enable people in our town who are unfamiliar with the book to read the Qur'an and decide for themselves whether it's message incites people to violence, as some believe. If the people of Salt Lake read the Muslim scriptures and decide they do that, so be it. If they read them and decide the Qur'an has many different messages, some in keeping with our Western values and some not, so be it.

Some claim that we have fallen away from the faith. I respectfully disagree. In fact, it is because our faith is so firm that we aren't afraid to fund this project. Like many Christians, we believe that people should follow their consciences. But as Presbyterian Christians, we also believe that conscience uninformed by facts and untethered by reasonableness can do very wrongheaded and wronghearted things.

Pastor Jones followed his conscience and his act, inflamed by unfriendly rhetoric abroad, led to the deaths of many innocent people. We hope our action might, in some small way, help to protect lives, and the mail I've received from service personnel and civilians in Afghanistan who support our troops tells me we are doing just that.

Our military personnel are apparently eager to report examples of religious tolerance to moderate Muslims, the only people who have the power to rein in those who advocate terror in the name of Allah. As I write this it is being reported that these moderates are glad Osama bin Laden is now gone because he was an embarrassment to true Islam.

A number of people contacted me to say that they see nothing at all wrong with burning the Qur'an. They call it an American right. Well, it may be a right, but burning books is always a lousy idea. Heinrich Heine, the 19th century German poet, was prophetic on the subject: "Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people."

How tragically correct Heine was. Less than a decade separated the Nazi book burning of 1933 from the crematoria of the Final Solution.

This is not to equate Pastor Jones with Hitler. Not at all. My point is simply that education is critical to taking any effective moral stand. Had someone burned a copy of the Book of Mormon we would have bought copies of that book, too. We take the Bible very seriously. It's our prime guide for life. But wisdom can be found in many books. We are not afraid of finding some of it anywhere. It doesn't make the truth we find in our scriptures any less critical to our living.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is worth quoting here: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness.  Only light can do that."

The Wasatch church is simply seeking to hold up some light.

The Rev. Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Wasatch Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City.