HOLY CRAP!!! HOW LONG WAS I GONE???

Do not fret, kiddies. Mr. Medved (America's greatest movie critic) stayed up late to make an important point.

Bloody Christian Riots Protest Blasphemous Album?
Posted by: Michael Medved at 1:58 AM

You’ve probably already heard some of the horrifying news…

In more than a dozen nations around the world, angry Christian mobs have attacked U.S. businesses and British embassies, venting their rage at a what is perceived as a grievous affront to their faith. Beginning in Nigeria, some of the Anglican faithful left church services last Sunday after being whipped into a frenzy by fiery sermons, and proceeded to burn cars, smash shop windows, attack police officers, and to burn Bush and Blair in effigy. Catholics in Bolivia bombed a police station and vandalized railroad cars, while Pentecostals in Ukraine called a two day general strike and staged mass protest rallies to demand that their stunned government take prompt action.

The basis for the worldwide Christian fury, still seething in many corners of the globe and ready for further explosions of violence, was the release of a “death metal” album on a nominally British label (EMI) by the controversial American group Slayer. The name of the album, “Christ Illusion,” seemed calculated to provoke devout believers, especially because the shocking cover art featured an image of Jesus with both arms amputated and an eye gouged out of its socket, posing in front of other bloody severed heads and limbs. A featured song on the album, “Skeleton Christ,” further provoked outrage from religious communities that seemed unable to control the spontaneous indignation of the furious masses.

If you haven’t heard chilling reports of these world-wide riots, don’t blame the news media: you haven’t learned of them because they never happened. There have been no Christian riots in Nigeria, Bolivia, Ukraine or anywhere else. I made the whole thing up --- in order, I hope, to make an important point.

Christians everywhere have been too busy caring for their families, working hard at their jobs, helping the less fortunate, worshipping God and studying his word to surrender to the temptations of outrage and revenge. (Emphasis mine.) The album from Slayer, “Christ Illusion,” is all too real, and it is indeed calculated to wound, insult and offend Christian believers. But one of the reasons I love, honor and respect my faithful Christian neighbors and fellow citizens is that they have reliably refused to take the bait. In India, leaders of the tiny Catholic community lodged some peaceful protests and the corporate officials at EMI India agreed to remove the offensive albums from sale. This moderate response appears to represent the most intense objection anywhere to the album’s international release.

The contrast with the Muslim reaction to any perceived insult to Mohammed or Islam is hugely instructive. The now infamous Danish cartoons really did provoke worldwide rioting (and cost at least 200 lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage) while representing a far less formidable affront than the new Slayer album. The veteran rockers are far better known, with a vastly wider international audience, than the obscure Copenhagen cartoonists, and the corporation promoting “Christ Illusion” is one of the world’s leading music conglomerates, not a single newspaper little known outside of Denmark. Try to imagine that the death metal geniuses had called their new release, “Mohammed Illusion” instead of “Christ Illusion,” and had featured cover art with an image of the Prophet with his arms cut down to bloody stumps and a missing eye and mutilated face. Isn’t it safe to assume that such a pop music release would have provoked universal denunciation, death threats, fatwas, fire-breathing sermons everywhere, bombs, hysteria, surging lynch mobs, self righteous ululation, UN resolutions, vandalism, hijackings, recalled ambassadors and new confirmations of the epidemic of paranoia among hundreds of millions of crazed adherents of ROPO (the Religion Of Perpetual Outrage).

HEEHEE!

The fact that Christians didn’t respond in this way to the Slayer silliness isn’t an indication of the weakness of their faith, but a demonstration of its strength. The constant agitation of Muslim leaders, always ready to explode over some new expression of alleged disrespect, doesn’t show the power and sincerity of Islam, but its pathetic insecurity and its prevailing sense of vulnerability.

Yep. The truth shall set ye free, my mohammedan brothers and sisters.

Is it any accident that atheists and secularists today display a touchiness and a quickness to take offense that more closely resembles the attitudes of fanatical Muslims than the long-suffering, tough-to-shake confidence of believing Christians? The insistence on erasing or at least opposing public religious symbols of every kind – including those that were installed many decades ago – echoes the eagerness of the Taliban to obliterate the 1,600 year old Buddhas of the Bamayan Valley of Afghanistan. For both secular militants and Muslim extremists, the intolerance of any dissenters and infidels stems from a deep-seated sense that the tide of history is running against them: that the battle of ideas and the ongoing struggle for the souls of a new generation don’t favor the frenzied followers of either Mohammed or Bertrand Russell. Judeo-Christian believers, on the other hand, comfortably can accept expressions of religious attitudes very different from our own because of an unshakable inner certainty that our faiths are flourishing.

Exactly, Brother Medved, exactly!

That doesn’t make the ugly Slayer album any more acceptable --- or their wretchedly adolescent, cacophonous music any more endurable. But the mild, philosophical, largely indifferent reaction from fervent believers (who have learned to expect and accept heavy doses of Christian bashing) serves to remind the world what constitutes the true “Religion(s) of Peace.”