nixsight

Make with clicky for the most concise breakdown of the argument over the Danish cartoons and the following furore I’ve seen.
The thing that I most appreciate about this strip, apart from that it’s pretty damn funny, is that it raises a point that has been bugging me since this whole thing blew up.

I’ve heard a lot of normally reasonable, very moderate part-time Christians get in quite a frenzy over the Muslim response to the cartoons, and they normally cite the fact that you can say what you like about their god, and they don’t care because they’ve got a sense of humour about their religion.

The problem with that is twofold. First, none of those people are actually all that religious. The interesting thing about Christianity is that almost anyone who believes in God and Christ considers themselves a Christian, whether they observe religious practices or not. Actual, church going Christians, proper ones, not ones who attend the more modern churches and sects of Christianity that allow whacked out outsiders like homosexuals and single mums to attend, are actually a lot less tolerant of their beliefs being lampooned or worse, ignored. They may tend to take the more smug, silent stance when you piss them off, but they’re just as capable of kicking off when they’re unhappy about something.

And nearly every western religion has it’s “buttons”. As the cartoon implies, you don’t get to make jokes about the holocaust not happening to a Jew. Christians don’t always much like it when you imply that Jesus may have hung out with whores.

Second, no-one’s really paying that much attention to what actually triggered this whole islamic outrage thing off. The main viewpoint seems to be that it was the cartoon with Mohammed’s turban composited with a bomb, but I suspect that the average crazed rioting Muslim hasn’t even seen any of the cartoons, and if they have, it’s already come ready-wrapped in the political fervour applied to the images by some Islamic leaders.

As for what whipped them up, I think it’s more likely to be one of the three unpublished, unverified cartoons, which were bundled in with the much tamer images. I suspect that subjected with a crudely drawn picture of Jesus Christ servicing young men with the crucifixion holes in his palms, many of the moderate Christians speaking up on the subject would suddenly lose their sense of humour. I’ve been in pubs where gentiles have threatened me with violence for saying that Oscar Schindler wasn’t what I’d call a hero… The fact is that you can’t even suggest that maybe Princess Di liked cock in the UK without being vilified, so it’s quite reasonable to assume that a group might take issue with the suggestion that their most sacred figure is a paedophile, or that they only pray the way they do because they’re being sodomized by dogs.

Unfortunately most people, on any side of this argument, probably won’t have even seen any of the source material. Outrage is what the modern human does, it’s in our nature, and all of us (me writing this included) tend to jump to the least logical conclusions that are most attractive to our pre-existing sensibilities, based on the most tissue thin of information.

Still, I’m not planning on changing my ways any time soon. It’s a laugh, innit?