I have often said the religion is like candy bars. The package may claim to to be free of nuts, but you can bet that there's some in there somewhere.

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Excellent Post. Unfortunately only Western Christian Fundies are allowed to be impugned.

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*snerk*

Allowed by whom, precisely?

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Totally agreed -- but it's the American Jesus Crispies who are making _my_ life hard. So they get the majority of my bitching.

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Fair enough. But at the same time, fundamentalist Islamics are causing hell for women in other countries. So save a little for them, too - that's all I'm askin'.

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Well, I hate to be the nitpicker, buuut... "Buddhism isn't a religion!" ...Okay, you can yell at me now.

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If I didn't say it, then some other Buddhists would say they were a religion. I've heard it from both sides, so I can't win.

Ah well.

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Really, I've found that the whole fundamentalist wacko, take over the airwaves and spew only your core beliefs problem is pretty much directly attributable to only Western, and typically middle eastern religions. You rarely see hindu fundamentalists and, to my knowledge, Bhuddists just dont seem to have these problems either.

I think it's a matter of ingrained cultural mindset. I don't know what it is about westerners and folks from the middle east that generates this sort of thing, but it seems to me that folks from the east just don't have it.

Now, I could always be mistaken, but I'm just stating what I've seen.

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There have been problems of buddhist fundamentalism in both modern day Sri Lanka and pre WW2 Japan.

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Yes, it is insensitive for the cartoonist to step on the religious beliefs

what gets me is less that than the danish and especially norwegian papers going "Gosh, we sure are sorry if people are offended, but" blah blah free speech. i mean, free speech, yes, sure -- but pretending to be surprised that people are offended is just disingenuous. if, with the protection of free speech, you do something you know will offend someone, you don't get to be all surprised when your plan works.

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if, with the protection of free speech, you do something you know will offend someone, you don't get to be all surprised when your plan works.

Or if you wear a protest shirt to the State of the Union with the intent of making a statement, don't be surprised if you are removed from the building ;)

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True, but they're never going to be in a position of power. The problem that religions like that face is that unlike the proselytizing religions, they're always going to be in a minority. If you want some real fun looks at how a religion starts and how it evolves into a juggernaut, Under The Banner Of Heaven shows how the Mormons started out as a small sect, almost splintered apart, and eventually became something very different.

Liberal Quakers may not attract the nuts (and I can't say for sure, but their tenets sound fairly nut-free), but then again as a largely self-governing sect they're not going to attract that many other people, either. This isn't to say it's a bad religion; just not the sort that's going to pick up a million marchers.

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But I don't necessarily blame the Islamic protestors, either, since if you are offended by something, you have the right to stand up for them.

Protesting == fine.
Threatening retaliation != fine.

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I thought The Book of Daniel was quite funny, especially with Jesus showing up every time Daniel popped a Vicodin. How could you confuse that with an actual intervention of Divinity, when it's clearly this crazy pill-popping priest's figments of his imagination talking to him?

But then, I liked Ally McBeal and the dancing baby gag too. So maybe it just wasn't funny and I never noticed.

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I don't think it's that so much as the idea of the idea of a looney priest. I mean, if there was a TV show depicting LARPers as barely-functional, asocial morons who all lived in their Mom's basement and had whacky hijinks breaking each other's bones in mock fights in the local park, would that be a funny show to you?

It's probably more perception than anything else.

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It's not Christianity that's the problem, it's religious fanatics.

Hear, hear.

The world would be a better (and easier to live in) place if everyone who called themselves a Christian actually acted in a manner somewhat resembling that espoused by the teachings of Christ.

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Hear, hear.

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I go in for freedom of speech to mean.
For expression: You are free to say whatever you say so long as you are willing to take on the social consequences of what you say, however there should be no legal consequence to what you say.

I.E. if you say something that totally offends 90% of the population then you should expect to be shunned, possibly lose your job and expect to get some vitriolic responses, you should not however fear being put into jail or being fined by the government.

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I agree - that sounds reasonable.

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Well, there have been some people who have tried to force people to become Buddhists in the name of that religion, but most of them were political leaders trying to subjugate the local population who weren't Buddhists.

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It's funny how so many defenders of the taxpayer-funded Piss Christ twenty years ago are remaining eerily silent in this case.

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That was an American case. This isn't.

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Along these lines, there's an organization called CrossWalk America that you might want to check out. The Resource Coordinator for the Seattle Symphony just quit her job to walk with them, and when I read their literature, I almost joined up on the spot until I remembered that I'm not a Christian. http://www.crosswalkamerica.org, assuming you don't block comments with URLs.

In a nutshell, it's an organization that is trying to wrest the public image of Christianity back from the wingnuts. They seem to be doing a good job reframing some important issues, and I think you'd be interested. Check 'em out if you feel like it.

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In a nutshell, it's an organization that is trying to wrest the public image of Christianity back from the wingnuts.

That is something that is definitely long overdue.

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Fact is, almost any religion will try to tinker with the media whenever they're placed in a position of sufficient power (with the notable exception of Buddhism, and I could be wrong about that).

And you are wrong about that. Progressives in this country tend to think of Buddhism as a total chill-out progressive religion. And, in the West, it pretty much is.

However. There is fundamentalist conservative Buddhism. When we lived in Hong Kong, the main Buddhist guy there (like a local Buddhist bishop) had some astoundingly conservative things to say about morality and what was culturally and spiritually acceptable. And he wielded an incredible amount of power - if he said something, it was in the papers!

In Hong Kong, we met a lot of people who were raised in the high-context (socially complex - lots of traditions and de-emphasis on individual freedoms) Buddhist society and felt squelched by that. In turn, they'd become Christians because they saw it as more socially progressive.

The dominant religious paradigm of any culture is generally subverted by the human agenda of those in power. It's no different for Buddhist cultures, then it is for Christian ones.

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Isn't that more an issue of personal power than generalized religious interference?

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And that's why I picked science as my religion. At least it comes with built in dogma checker.

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Two things.

One, last time I checked, science wasn't a religion. Religions are, in a nutshell, methods of defining good and evil. Science never goes into good and evil, it goes into factually correct and factually incorrect.

Two, I know people for whom science is a religion. They're just as likely to be dogmatic fanatics as anyone else. As was said elsewhere in the replies, the problem isn't the religion (or idea), it's the fanatic. The comment made about people using religions (or ideas) as duct tape is a good one, and probably fairly accurate as analogies go. However, it also points out that anyone replying in such a fashion (getting violent over a cherished idea being questioned) is obviously not well, and in need of help, not scorn or counterattack.

Of course, sometimes the best help is the application of boot leather to posterior.

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I think the most warped part of the whole thing is that the people protesting in the Islamic world are predominately protesting the entire country of Denmark (and assorted countries that reprinted the cartoons) - at least that's the impression I get from the news coverage.

It would be like if "Last Temptation of Christ" or "Passion of Christ" caused Christians world-wide to condemn America.

I guess maybe its a cultural thing. I'm guessing Denmark has freedom of the press, while many/most of these Islamic countries have a much more limited (or non-existant) freedom of the press. So to them, anything published in a newspaper is therefore approved by the church and/or state and therefore they see the publication of these cartoons as an official act of the Danish gov't. Of course, this is just a theory, and I could be wrong. But if someone has a better explanation, I'd be quite interested to hear it...

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For an explanation, try this on for size: "They [all of them] hate [all of] us" isn't unique to American pundits either. And yes, there are movements that try to spoonfeed the populace of Muslim countries with "all Westerners hate us".

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A couple people beat me to it, but the version of buddhism we hear about in the states is a bowdlerized, feel-good fluffy-bunny version of the faith/philosophy/life path/whatever that has little bearing on history and practice. If you want a convenient shorthand, think of anything the church has done in Europe, and I can nigh-upon guarantee that some buddhist sect or other has done it in Asia.

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NO ONE EXPECTS THE BUDDHIST INQUISITION!!

*power chord*

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I think that "learning to live with being offended" is a critical skill in creating an actual democracy; sometimes, people are gonna pummel your sacred cows, and knowing when to stand up and when to sit down is a fine art that doesn't get enough coverage.

Exactly. Choosing to take offense is not equivalent to sustaining injury, no matter how much some people wish it to be true. We're all going to experience things that we find offensive for one reason or another, and in a lot of those cases it would be much healthier for most of us to develop a sense of humor about such things than it is to handle those situations the way we do now, by trying to call in the ACLU or what-have-you. We need to remember to not sweat the small stuff.

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But who decides what's small stuff and what's not? Though the depiction of Mohammed might not be a big deal to most of us, for muslims it's blasphemous. Which makes it a big deal. It's all in the eye of the beholder and I've noticed that people,in general, easily forget that.

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Generally, church signs make me wince (at the best of times), but I actually saw one recently I liked:

"God expects spiritual fruits, not religious nuts."

Pleasantly surprised, actually!

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Wow, that's impressively awesome.

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My thought is that if God is so offended by something that he wants someone punished he should he should do his(her?)smiting himself. If he wants you do it for him, go find a new one.

Don't Support Lazy Gods.

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*laughs* That's fantastic, and my new motto.

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I'm waiting for the wave of protest over people who eat pork now, too. After all, pork is forbidden by two religions - Judaism and Islam - so there should be twice the protests against people who go out and do it!

It's not Christianity that's the problem, it's religious fanatics.
I'd go a step farther, and remove the word "religious" from this sentence. Any fanatic can be dangerous.

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Google piglet banned UK Muslims and see what you get.

Not baby pigs, but the friend of Pooh.

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It's not Christianity that's the problem, it's religious fanatics.

As a Christian who is often horrified by what others profess to do or say in the name of Christ, I couldn't agree more with this statement.

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It's just a cost-benefit analysis. People take on the Christian wackos because the Christian wackos (generally) don't issue fatwas calling for their beheading.

I know I'd rather pick a fight with someone whose philosophy is "turn the other cheek" as opposed to "slay the infidels."

Theo van Gogh, anyone?

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I was wondering when Theo would turn up in this discussion. Doctors shot at an abortion clinic anyone?

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