January 14, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield

As a deeply religious person, I don’t like blasphemy. My religion and its holy books are sacred to me. And I understand perfectly well why a Muslim would not care for a cartoon of a naked Mohammed.

But the debates over freedom of speech and the sensitivity of religious feelings also miss the point.
For non-Muslims, the right to blasphemy is also the right to believe. While we may think of blasphemy in terms of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, each religion is also mutually blasphemous.

Muslims argue that the West should “respect prophets” by outlawing insults to Mohammed and a panoply of prophets that it gathered from Judaism and Christianity. But Islam considers the Christian view of Jesus to be blasphemous and Christianity considers Islam’s view of Jesus equally blasphemous.

If we were to truly prosecute blasphemy, the legal system would have to pick a side between the two religions and either prosecute Christians for blaspheming against Islam or Muslims for blaspheming against Christianity. And indeed in Muslim countries, Christians are frequently accused of blasphemy.

Malaysia’s blasphemy laws were used to ban Christians from employing the word “Allah” for god and to seize children’s books depicting Noah and Moses. The reason for seizing the children’s books was the same as the reason for the attack on Charlie Hebdo; both featured cartoons of prophets.
While Charlie Hebdo pushed the outer limits of blasphemy, every religion that is not Islam, and even various alternative flavors of Islam, is also blasphemous relative to Islam.

It isn’t only secularist cartoonists who blaspheme against Islam. “Mohammed seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure,” St. Thomas Aquinas wrote. Maimonides called him a madman.

To Bill Donohue, there may be a world of difference between Charlie Hebdo and Aquinas, but not to Islam.

snip

While some religious people may take issue with the celebration of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, equating them with such things as the infamous “Piss Christ”, there is a fundamental difference.

Piss Christ or a museum which exhibited photos of naked women dressed in Jewish ritual garments are acts committed against the unresisting making them the equivalent of spiteful vandalism. There are no Jews or Christians murdering artists or bombing museums. By attempting to enforce the theocracy of blasphemy laws, Muslims themselves made the Mohammed cartoons into a symbol of free speech.

It was not the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, who specialized in offending all religions, who made their Mohammed cartoons into a symbol. It was their Muslim enemies who did it by killing them. It is intellectually dishonest for Muslims to create martyrs and then to complain about their martyrdom.

Blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism fizzles because the lack of a violent response makes those responsible seem like bullies. Instead of revealing flaws in those religions, works like Piss Christ or Monster Mohel reveal the flaws in their makers. Their attempts at blasphemy prove self-destructive.

Muslim violence against the Mohammed cartoons however turns them into the bullies. The Hebdo cartoons did no damage to Christianity or Judaism. They did a great deal of damage to Islam, not because they were well done, but because Islam is shot through with violent anger and insecurity.

The spiritual power of religion balances between violence and non-violence. Most religions believe that there is a time to fight, but only Islam believes in violence as the first and final solution.

Mohammed cartoons exist because of the Islamic inability to cope with a non-theocratic society. Islamic Cartoonophobia is not only a danger to cartoonists. It’s a threat to all of our religious freedoms.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenf...e-of-blasphemy/

Quote: conservgramma wrote in post #3

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Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #2

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Zitat

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Religious people need not embrace the extremes of French secularism or the anti-religious positions of the ACLU to see that some distance between religion and state is a good thing for both. A separation between religion and state should not mean compulsory secularism,

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Hence:

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances

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The above is exactly why Islam is incompatible with western civilization, particular America.

Islam is THE one religion which does not recognize separation of church and state. Islam IS political in nature not just religious.

Within Islam the state must be subject to Islam and vice versa. Within Islam they are not exclusive or separable. For the 1st amendment to apply to Islam, Islam must first advance Sharia Law whereby the state is subject to the religious authorities, then they can use the 1st amendment for their own purposes. And within Islam no other religions may be afforded these protections, these protections would ONLY apply to Islam.

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Great comments Gramma!

"It is not permitted to make a statue out of snow, even by way of play and fun," Munajjid wrote on his Web site, according to Reuters.
He also pointed out that making images of humans and animals — anything with a "soul" — is strictly off-limits."

Hence their affection for mosaic tile