Jesus was or wasn’t married. We can still speculate. And even parody the speculation in cartoons. And what was your favorite line from Jesus Christ Superstar? Personally, I’ve always liked Herod’s challenge: “Prove to me that you’re no fool. Walk across my swimming pool.”
But I also get how some believers don’t appreciate the irreverent, everything-is-fair-game crowd and see satire as sacrilege. Monty Python’s The Life of Brian wasn’t funny to all the faithful, and tempers flared, of course, over Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Andres Serrano’s intentionally provocative Piss Christ art. And The Book of Mormon, you can believe, has some insulted detractors.
But it comes with the territory of modernity, global-reach media and evolving concepts of freedom–from thought to expression. Most of us have made an accommodation to living in the post-Inquisition era.
But obviously not all of us.
We’ve seen Danish and French cartoons depicting Mohammed prompt outrage and street violence in numerous Muslim countries. We’ve seen a fatwa hit put out on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. We’ve seen Theo van Gogh murdered for his movie short, Submission. We’ve seen scores of people, including Americans, die as a result of that amateurish video, Innocence of Muslims. We’ve seen a Pakistani Cabinet minister offer a $100,000 reward for the death of the bozo responsible for Innocence. Ironically the filmmaker was born in Egypt. We’ve seen France go pre-emptive by shuttering 20 embassies after a French magazine ran a Mohammed cartoon satirizing Muslim–you got it–overreaction.
Well, we’ve seen enough. And, no, I’m not channeling Terry Kemple or in league with some of the anti-Muslim yahoos ferreting about in the county.
It’s one thing to turn cultural contortionist and bend over backwards to be sensitive to religious differences in our global village. “Live and let live” is more glib than easy. But lives are worth it. And it’s another thing to misuse that freedom for profit or mean-spirited perversion. We have our share and we deplore–and apologize for those responsible. Even if one of our political parties considers that appeasement.
But nothing–including blasphemy laws, lack of a free-speech tradition, a cultural thin skin and a frustrating love-hate relationship with the West–excuses the de facto encouragement of lethal overreaction to insults, perceived and real. In the name of religion, of all things. A “religion of peace” at that.
At a certain point–and it has nothing to do with ethnocentrism–it should be fair to ask: Aren’t you bigger than this? Aren’t you better than this? And aren’t you overdue to grow up?
We have our societal shortcomings, to be sure, but this one isn’t on us. It is about Islam.