Islam and religious satire
The furor in Europe over the publication last fall of cartoons depicting the prophet, Mohammed, highlights a disturbing reality. Many Muslims can't separate their religious convictions from their secular lives. Whether this is the dominant or merely the noisiest segment of the world community of Islam isn't clear. Around the world, other religious persuasions also have adherents who see no line between civic life and their religious beliefs (the death pickets in Ohio for example), but such people are in the minority and their persuasions are disavowed by most of the rest of us.
While it may offend some people, Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" is an example of an entire film based on satirizing the holiest person in Christendom, Christ himself. And this isn't a rare example. Cartoons depicting heaven, hell, and the inhabitants thereof are so common as to draw little notice in our culture. In fact, they represent an entire thread of humor which most people, Christians included, enjoy.
As we engage increasingly in dialogue with the Muslim world over critical civil issues such as the production of oil or the democratization of governments, we must be able to get past this civic and religious intertwining if the relationship is to be rooted in values that we can accept.
A similar if secular issue arises as we embrace more completely our relationship with China. There too the Chinese take umbrage and demand behavior that is inconsistent with our principles in the realm of a free and unmonitored electronic media. The danger to us is that we will not model the values and behaviors of our own beliefs and urge others to meet those high standards, but that, out of expediency, we will bend to accept constraints on civil life, a life that cannot be if it fetters its own dialogue.
While it may offend some people, Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" is an example of an entire film based on satirizing the holiest person in Christendom, Christ himself. And this isn't a rare example. Cartoons depicting heaven, hell, and the inhabitants thereof are so common as to draw little notice in our culture. In fact, they represent an entire thread of humor which most people, Christians included, enjoy.
As we engage increasingly in dialogue with the Muslim world over critical civil issues such as the production of oil or the democratization of governments, we must be able to get past this civic and religious intertwining if the relationship is to be rooted in values that we can accept.
A similar if secular issue arises as we embrace more completely our relationship with China. There too the Chinese take umbrage and demand behavior that is inconsistent with our principles in the realm of a free and unmonitored electronic media. The danger to us is that we will not model the values and behaviors of our own beliefs and urge others to meet those high standards, but that, out of expediency, we will bend to accept constraints on civil life, a life that cannot be if it fetters its own dialogue.
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