Independent UK: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil

[marmar]

Johann Hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil
This enforced 'respect' is a creeping vine: it soon extends from ideas to institutions

Friday, 19 March 2010


What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite – religion. In the past week we have seen two examples of how people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith. It has led some to regard people accused of the attempted murders of the Mohamed cartoonists as victims, and to demand "respect" for the Pope, when he should be in a police station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children.

In 2005, 12 men in a small secular European democracy decided to draw a quasi-mythical figure who has been dead for 1400 years. They were trying to make a point. They knew that in many Muslim cultures, it is considered offensive to draw Mohamed. But they have a culture too – a European culture that believes it is important to be allowed to mock and tease and ridicule religion. It is because Europeans have been doing this for centuries now that we can no longer be tyrannised into feeling bad about perfectly natural impulses, like masturbation, or pre-marital sex, or homosexuality. When priests offer those old arguments, we now laugh in their faces – a great liberating moment. It will be a shining day for Muslims when they can do the same.

Some of the cartoons were witty. Some were stupid. One seemed to suggest Muslims are inherently violent – an obnoxious and false idea. If you disagree with the drawings, you should write a letter, or draw a better cartoon, this time mocking the cartoonists. But some people did not react this way. Instead, Islamist plots to hunt the artists down and slaughter them began. Earlier this year, a man with an axe smashed into one of their houses, and very nearly killed the cartoonist in front of his small grand-daughter.

This week, another plot to murder them seems to have been exposed, this time allegedly spanning Ireland and the United States, and many people who consider themselves humanitarians or liberals have rushed forward to offer condemnation – of the cartoonists. One otherwise liberal newspaper ran an article saying that since the cartoonists had engaged in an "aggressive act" and shown "prejudice... against religion per se", so it stated menacingly that no doubt "someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again". .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-pope-the-prophet-and-the-religious-support-for-evil-1923656.html

[MisterP]

1. does he mean the same newspaper that was caught refusing cartoons mocking Jesus because it would be

religiously offensive?

of course, Hari comes from the same simpering, loftily-smug "paleoliberal England" tradition as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Philip Pullman, or the Ditchkins-beast, for whom things are a Manichean war between freedom (free speech, democracy, secularism, secularized Protestantism, science, the West) vs. slavery (Islam, Catholicism, often Communism/"Sovietism," "authoritarian" organized religion, theocracy, people who take their religion more seriously than Dawkins or Wilders demand that they do).

[Fumesucker]

2. Excellent article, thanks for posting.. Recced..

[pscot]

3. Religion has always been avid

in its embrace of the dark side. There is no evil that has not been justified as the will of god. The 7 deadly sins were a catalogue of clerical behaviour. At that, they barely scratched the surface.