Religion of peace? Not on your life - literally.

I’ve never really been much of a Manichean – something about dividing the world up into a ‘light’ and ‘dark’ universal battle has always bothered me. Nonetheless, as I have continued to amass experiences and an understanding of history, I’m reluctantly beginning to believe that, in fact, the simplistic way of looking at reality that has hallmarked the major religions of the world is correct. Perhaps the world is the stage for a cataclysmal war between two divergent and antagonistic paths.

Unlike most religions (the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths in particular) that see the world as a battle between good and evil, I’ve come to the conclusion that the sides are somewhat more nuanced – but make no mistake: your choice of allegiance in the battle is one of the most important decisions that you will ever make in your life.

On one side of the battle are found the principles of the Enlightenment. These are a commitment to scientific understanding, education, reason and rationality, and the freedoms that many people in the civilized West take for granted. On the other side of the battle is religion, which urges people not to think, but to believe – to believe in the absence of evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence. It is unwilling to examine it’s bases, and unless watered down with a humanism picked up from its opposition (which ultimately destroys the religious content), is unvaryingly at odds with the expression of freedoms won in the Enlightenment.

I discussed this issue partly back during the period when there was the ferocious uproar among the world’s Muslim population (not the Muslim’s who’ve cherry-picked their scriptures and surahs to better reflect the humanistic principles of the Enlightenment, but the ones who actually stand by their holy documents as written) over a spate of cartoons in Denmark. If you will recall, buildings were burned down, people were beaten, more than a hundred people were killed, and death threats against the cartoonists, newspapers, and government officials even remotely related to the incident filled the airwaves. If there could be any evidence that accommodation of Enlightenment freedoms with hardline religious sentiment is impossible, that incident should have provided it in spades. I mean, I couldn’t believe that people were ready and willing to murder people in cold blood over a couple of cartoons depicting a religious figure. Little doubt was left in my mind that, had some magical power whisked one of the cartoonists into the ether and deposited him into the middle of one of the mobs that were televised in Pakistan or Egypt, he would have been slaughtered.

Freedom of speech (and its corollary, freedom of expression) is the backbone of the Enlightenment. No idea is too sacred to discuss and no conclusion is too offensive to merit an open-minded hearing. That’s not to say that at the end of the hearing, we can’t pronounce the conclusion to be wrong, but to stifle the expression of that conclusion before the hearing has been given does a grave disservice to both the person making the claim, the person refusing to hear the claim, and every other person in the community as well who might have profited by the discussion.

Well, once again, the ire of Muslims has been raised and death threats are accumulating. A Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks, consciously opted to draw an offensive picture of the Muslim prophet Mohammed (as a dog – an ‘unclean’ animal) in an effort to bring to the world stage again the discussion about the importance of freedom of expression. Surely enough, Muslim groups have issued a reward of $100,000 for any Muslim who manages to murder Vilks. As an added incentive, a $50,000 bonus will be given if the death is by slitting Vilks’ throat. Vilks is under police protection, must live in safe-houses, check his car for explosives, and gets death threats on a daily basis (from people living very near to him, no less).

Can there be any accommodation between the humanistic goals of modern civilization and the type of depraved, sociopathic irrationality that personifies these extremists? No. What compromise can there be between the civilization of the 21st century and that of the 14th? Ethical advancement is just as objective and real as is scientific and technological advancement – and some cultures simply are behind the curve by their own choice.

I fully support the work done by cartoonist Vilks. His works are offensive for all the right reasons and serve to highlight the ridiculous and anti-civilized behaviours of an astonishingly and appallingly large percentage of the world’s population – a population that loses the respect of rational individuals with each new outrage.

Most artists see the absolute need for freedom of expression, and abhor the self-censorship they are required to implement in order to pass their own crafts through a filter of relativism. Strangely, most media outlets (like CNN) refuse to side with those who support the freedom of expression (the bedrock upon which the press is built in the United States), and refuse to show the works or oppose the howling masses demanding outcomes that would have been right at home among the leaders of the Catholic Inquisition.

Self-censorship in the face of irrational responses is the downfall of Western, Enlightenment values, and I won’t be a part of that. To that end, I’m going to say some things that I think should be mentioned.

First, Islam’s prophet Mohammed was an illiterate pedophile who married a six-year old girl and consummated his marriage to her when she was only nine. For any man to engage in sexual intercourse with a child less than ten is abominable, and to hold up a man who made his pre-pubescent wife clean semen-stains off of his clothing (as his young wife wrote) as moral is the mark of a people who don’t understand the meaning of morality. We should denounce them for exactly the same reasons that we should feel comfortable denouncing the medieval Europeans – one of whose favorite pastimes was gathering up a big sack of cats and then throwing the sack on a bonfire, just to hear the cats howl as they burned to death. There can be no middle-ground between morality and immorality, and to condone the absolute barbarism of a large fraction of North-Africa, the Middle-East, and South-central Asia in this particular case is to be no better than those who accommodated the Nazi war machine, the violent racist policies of the American South prior to and after the U.S. Civil War, or the cold-blooded murders of medical professionals by Christian anti-abortion activists.

Freedom means something special, and no amount of ‘offense’ to the sensibilities of a people mired in the mentality of the middle ages should be reason enough for civilized people to discard it. Nonetheless, discard it many will.

Am I the only one who seems to think it is time to fight back and scream into their faces ‘Get you therefore hence, poor miserable wretches, to your death!’ and send the snarling dervishes back into the wilderness? When will the civilization built on the freedoms of the Enlightenment find the gall to muster its strength and crush the cringing remnants of iron-age thought beneath the wheels of modernity? For all of our sakes, we had best hope soon.