Threat Threat Threat Bless You
And there arose a great noise in the land, and a whirling on the waters, and the people were sore afraid, or upset, or worried, or puzzled, or something. Why? Because of a movie, of course. What movie? you ask, all athirst to know. Well what movie do you think? The Rembrandt code, of course. No no, I know; the Renoir code. No no, I’m just playing silly buggers; the Kandinsky code. Oh all right, the Da Vinci Code. (A title which causes a faint electrical hum of irritation every time I hear or see it, because as any fule kno, Da Vinci is not Leonardo’s surname. It’s like titling a book and movie The Of Devonshire Code after the Duke of Devonshire, or the Of Arc Code after Joan of that ilk. Tsssss.) Okay so the Da Vinci Code and how people are all knotted up about the underwear. There’s this cardinal for instance.
“Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget,” said Arinze. “Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical…This is one of the fundamental human rights – that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected,” said Cardinal Arinze.
See, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that it was a fundamental human right that we should be respected. (We who? Christians? Humans? Cardinals? People who pitch fits about movies? Zealots? Wannabe censors? Nags? Bullies? Who?) I also didn’t know it was a fundamental human right that our religious beliefs be respected and our founder Jesus Christ be respected. That is news to me. Here’s me trundling along from day to day with my human rights being violated from here to Sunday, because I can tell you for a fact that there are people in this world who don’t respect me. The ones who’ve never heard of me would be one place to start; the ones who know me well and think I’m a bore and a nuisance would be another. And yet, all the time, it is my human right to be respected (and not, apparently, everyone else’s human right to decline to respect me, however boring and useless and a complete waste of time I may be), and nothing is done about it. Comrades, what we have here is a wholesale violation of civic order, a massive breakdown in the fabric of how things are supposed to be. What we also have here is a potentially worrying state of tyranny, in which we are all required to respect more than six billion people, at least five billion of whom we wouldn’t recognize if they sat next to us at the annual Bus Spotters’ Gala and said howdy. That seems like a lot of respect-duty we’ve all been falling down on.
The cardinal goes on, in his pleasant mild humble conciliatory way.
“Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking.”
Ah! Very true! They will not be just talking, they will be shouting and threatening and torching and killing. They will be putting out bounties, they will be traveling towards Denmark, they will be taking action. How heart-warming it is to see a cardinal using their pleasant example to threaten the blasphemers. How exhilarating it is to know that religions think they have a right to veto novels and movies that tell stories about their story. How the walls do keep getting closer and closer and closer.
This is one of the fundamental human rights–that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected…
Umm. Nope, Cardinal, sorry, but I’ve never heard of that one.
I mean, I can look, I guess… (flips through pages…) Okay… I’m looking at the charter right now, kiddo, but no, I really can’t see anything in there that really says anything like that, exactly.
I mean, apparently we’re to ‘act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’ (as I have two brothers, I’m not entirely sure this is really such a positive suggestion, but whatever), and there’s some stuff that says apparently you’re allowed to believe whatever idiotic nonsense you’d like to believe about invisible sky fairies and all that rot and it shouldn’t affect your charter rights, but there’s really nothing much that says I can’t mock you for it, as there doesn’t seem to be any clause that says anything much like ‘everybody who’s pissy enough about it has the right not to be made fun of’. Nor is there anything that even remotely suggests hack novelists can’t take a mythical figure you revere and speculate wildly about his life.
Nor, for that matter, is there much about my guffawing loudly and uproariously every time you’re quoted in a newspaper… And as to this claim of yours about my respecting… erm… sorry… (guffaws uproariously)… okay, let’s try that again: respecting (guffaws again, wipes tears from eyes)… sorry… respecting (titters between clenched teeth) the god-man-superdude guy you believe in, well, nope, I can’t really find anything that remotely impinges upon that, I’m afraid… Nothing in there. Is there another document I should know of, perhaps? The Universal Declaration of Mythical Deities’ Rights, maybe?
I mean, I can read it again… (pause)… And… Nope. Still nothing there.
There is this bit, though:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Hmmph. How about that. Misprint in his copy, maybe?
AJ Milne,
No, the cardinal has the same copy as you, its just that the right for respect doesn’t have to be really there, all you need is to have enough faith that it is. And this in turn in turn will make you really deep.
Another fine job.
Once again, the great Bill Hicks nailed it;
‘after the show these three rednecks came up to me. ‘Hey, buddy! C’mere! Hey Mr. Comedian! C’mere! Hey buddy, we’re Christians and we don’t like what you said!’ I said ‘Well, then forgive me.’ Later, as I was hanging from the tree…”
Ok preaching to the converted maybe, but… Galileo was constantly forced to defend himself against accusations of heresy by the church. At 70 He was threatened with torture if he did not publicly retract his views. He was sentenced to imprisonment and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Vatican finally forgave him in 1992.
I noticed recently that a favourite pastime of religionist ‘leaders’ lhese days is to get together and engage in something called ‘interfaith dialogue’. I asked someone on another messageboard what ‘interfaith dialogue’ sounded like and what it acheived. I got some vague answers about promoting understanding and cooperation.
Since then I hear the Church of England Bishop of Wales saying:- “…they’d never get away with saying the same things about the prophet Muhammad.”
And then the Catholic Cardinal with:”-There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking.”
Now I see how interfaith dialogue works. The Islamic clerics have been quite successful in promoting understanding and cooperation among faiths in their particular area of expertise i.e. how to deal with insulting blasphemers.
The Islamification of Christianity. It’s all so horrible, especially as in the UK these unelected bufoons in fancy dress are still allowed a constitutional position in which they can debate and influence legislation proposed by elected representatives.
Yeah, and Christian Reconstructionists and the like are busily working away to make that happen here. The way things are going, they could win. It is indeed all so horrible.
So, the believers in different versions of god are exerting themselves temporarily to put aside their differences (doesn’t always work, of course) to try to clear the field of all non-believers. Once we’re firmly under control again, like in the good old days, they’ll deal with each other. Good, clear, logical thinking. I mean, how can they truly fight the good fight while people are allowed quite openly to say that they shouldn’t have power at all? They certainly have their priorities right; we are much more dangerous to them as a group than they could possibly be to each other.
yup, it’s all tombola, cucumber sandwiches and sweet reason while they are without power, but they haven’t forgotten where they stashed the thumbscrews and faggots.
There was a street in London once upon a time, named after George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. It was called Of Alley.
It is interesting that the appeal is to a secular right, actually. This is progress. It isn’t about the Islamification of Christianity, as if the Church were some harmless vehicle for benign truths that was corrupted by those big bad mullahs. The church was happy enough presiding over concentration camps in Yugoslavia in the 1940s, and killed considerably more people than were even killed in the Iranian revolution. And the Church was happy, afterwards, to help smuggle the clerical war criminals to Argentina, where some of them had the opportunity to arrest disrespect against the church in the dirty war in the late seventies.
Alas, a real film about the crimes of Christianity will probably never be produced — and if it did, of course, the defenders of the Western way will say, well, must be that damned influence from the Islamicists. After all, didn’t history begin with those Danish cartoons?
History certainly shows that Christianity has nothing to learn from Islam in any and every area of corruption known to mankind. Indeed, at the present time these past masters of deceit and duplicity have spotted an opportunity to (they hope!)re-expand their powers, which they feel have become too constrained within the constitutional confines of modern (often secular) democracy.
They see Islamists acheiving results by aggressive action and say “if they can do it, why can’t we”?. There must be equality for all. It’s not that the Islamists have any designs or desire to influence Christianity, (why would they?)it’s that Christianity has spotted a useful bandwagon to jump on.
So no, history did not start with the cartoons, but the event did make the bishops and cardinals see that they might use it to make back some lost ground. Hence their pronouncements in support of the Muslim attitude. They would not have cared if it was Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs or Tree Huggers. If any of them had got the same results, the Christians would have lauded them and hung onto their coat tails. They are not that fussy:all’s fair and all that.
Islamification of Christianity in the long historical sense, no, then. But as a current deliberate and calculated political ploy, yes.
It’s the achieving results thing that’s key, I think. The cardinal no doubt observed Jack Straw and Kofi Annan and all the rest of them saying Shut Up, and wanted Straw and Annan and the rest of them saying Shut Up on their behalf too. Plus of course it’s such fun to threaten people.