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February 24, 2006
There is this house on the way from NorthwestHigh School back to my house that flies a confederate flag. Now I am about as true blue southern as they come (watch it! I am from SOUTH Carolina), but seeing that flag irritates me to no end. Why? Because I know it is offensive to so many people. Why intentionally offend a third of the population? It just really bugs me.
I feel protective of people who are being offended. Maybe that is part of my calling as a Christian, part of looking after my neighbor, protecting them from needless offence. I would feel the same of Muslim neighbors if I had any that I knew of. I would stick up for them.
And man has it open season for years as far as offending Evangelical Christians. If Evangelicals and Catholics added up the cheap shots that Hollywood and local papers and various pundits took at historic orthodox Christians and decided to go ballistic every time that happened we’d just be in a constant state of rage. There would be massive rioting. There wouldn’t be a building left unburned. The book and soon to be released movie “The Da Vinci Code” would be cause to send Dan Brown running for his life faster than Salman Rushdie can say “fatwa.”
But I treasure the freedom that Dan Brown has to print the lies he has printed. I treasure the freedom that that family on the way back from school has to offer up its offensive speech. I treasure the freedom that Martin Scorsese had to offend Christians and utterly blaspheme the Lord Jesus Christ in his movie “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
Why? Because this same freedom allows our church to assemble without hassle on Sunday morning. It allows me to write this blog post, good or bad as it is. It will protect Christians down the line when we are indeed an embattled minority. This freedom allows us to criticize our government and question decisions of state and church and industry. Maybe one day it will even extend to the world of university education.
So, Muslims have a thing about depicting prophets. Well, Jews have a thing about saying and writing God’s name. And Jews and Christians alike have a thing about depicting God’s image visually yet people do it all the time. What, are we supposed to burn down the theatre over Bruce Almighty?
And the fact is, as disgusting as the movie is to me, “The Last Temptation of Christ” does ask and provoke really important questions about the nature of Jesus’ temptations, and it does point to the ultimate reality of his real mission, to die on the cross as a ransom for many, and how everything in his ministry involved a temptation not to do that.
Muslims have a problem with depicting prophets in visual form. But they are not consistent even about this. And though I may not have printed the pictures in the first place, I will stand with those who claim the right to print such depictions. Is our press to be blackmailed into silence by every group who would threaten violence over what is printed. Hey, look, it works. Scream and yell and burn down some buildings and you can get the papers to print what you want them to print. Maybe we should all try that.
And just as the movie The Last Temptation, as disgusting as it otherwise is, asks some significant questions, so do the cartoons depicting Muhammad with bombs strapped to his head. OK, maybe they could have just pictured a miscellaneous Muslim. But the real question is, does Islam at its core condone suicide bombing? Does Muhammad? Does the Koran? I think the innocent victims of 9/11, if nobody else, deserve an answer. I think the citizens of New York City deserve an answer. I think the workers at the Pentagon deserve an answer. I think the passengers on flight 93 deserve an answer.
If Islam is what the more moderate Muslims say it is, then maybe we should be hearing a lot more apologies for 9/11, a lot more clerics denouncing suicide bombings and other murders. Where is the outrage over that? It’s just pure old fashioned hypocrisy, Muslim style. It’s not just conservative Christians who can be hypocrites.
We see the results of an non free press all over the Muslim world. These people, poor and disenfranchised, with no decent objective news, getting whipped up by imams who are using this story as a way to enrage their people against the west. These are the same people who believed that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy against the Muslim world. You remember the story about how all the Jews slipped out of the towers just in time, and how the guys who flew the planes were really Jews, and the whole thing was designed to change public opinion against Muslims?
Is that the kind of world we want to live in?
I for one stand up for the right of others to offend me and my religion and my God. He is a very big God. People who want to get in His face will get theirs. I might want to counsel against such a course but it’s not ME they need to worry about.
Which gets me to another point. If the United States wants to make any substantive progress in relations with the Muslim world it will need to take a greater role in addressing economic/poverty issues in the third world. It just does not help that there are masses of young poor uneducated frustrated people ready to be manipulated by imams who have their own agendas.
Sometimes when cultures clash one culture just has to lose. Ultimately this is a matter involving freedom verses tyranny. Whether it’s fascist tyranny, communist tyranny, tribal tyranny, or Muslim clerical tyranny, we have to be at work promoting freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and the other core values enshrined in our bill of rights (which really bugs me about Microsoft and Yahoo and Google in China, but that’s another story).
A long time ago some very brave men and women and children undertook long and dangerous voyages to a strange new world to free themselves from religious tyranny. For a while what they established was not so much better in that regard than what they left. But in time, here and there, this colony and that, people were energized by a new experience, a freedom to worship, assemble, protest, write tracts and papers, and otherwise live a different kind of life. This great heritage we have now given back to the world, or much of it. We cannot let Muslim mobs intimidate us backwards into a world of wondering if what you say will get you “fatwa’d.” Been there. Done that. Go Rhino. I wish you well.
And that Danish paper. Why did they apologize? Wimps.
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