Tuesday 17th February

Once again we are faced with the ugly face of Religious Intolerance.  Hardly noticed by the media who were busy covering an horrific shooting in Copenhagen, Isis apparently issued another video of twenty-one Christians being beheaded somewhere in Libya.   Is it that we have become immune to this particular horror, or is it simply that they were only Arabs anyway, not American or Australian or even British citizens caught up in the current wave of Religious Intolerance.

I was brought up a Christian, and though I am now (more or less) an Atheist I believe in Religious Tolerance.  It does frustrate me sometimes when talking to friends who hold strong religious beliefs that they are so obstinate in their illogical faith, but I am quite happy to let them reside in their ignorance.  One thing that does strike me is that almost all people with strongly held religious beliefs just happen to have been born into the Religion they worship.  Did they never question it?  Is it just co-incidence that the God they worship (always the only true one too) just happens to be the one their parents did too? Mind you, converts can be even worse – I still shudder at the creepiness I experienced when many years ago I attended a Carol service with my ten year old daughter, only to be implored by a devout Evangelical Christian to give my heart to Jesus.  I find it hard to give my heart to a woman, let alone to Jesus.  And he wouldn’t go away, he just kept pestering us, even gripping my hand at one time, so we were forced to get up and leave.  So, as long as other Religious believers do not try to convert me I am quite happy for them to continue to practice their rituals and believe in their particular fairy stories.

But we are now confronted by a growing Intolerance.  What is it that drives fanatical Muslims (not as many as the West would have you believe either) to kill people simply because they drew silly cartoons or even worse because they are Jewish.  The first signs of this came with the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book “The Satanic Verses”, because it apparently questioned one of the tenets of Islam and made unsavoury suggestions about one of his wives.  In Britain we had ‘The Life of Brian’ and similarly many Christians were outraged, “How dare we make fun of Jesus” – mind you no-one threatened to kill John Cleese.  We have had Christians in America (another religiously intolerant state) burning the Koran and now Benjamin Netanyahu stoking the fires of intolerance by asking Jews in Europe to return to their “home” in Israel.  I know a few Jews who are as English as anyone and religiously tolerant too, whose grandparents came here to escape Pogroms in the last century.  And I also know a few Muslims, who while upset at the Media bias in reporting of attacks on Christians over those of their own faith and the general trend towards a war (yet another) against Muslims, are the kindest and most peace-loving of people.

So where does all this intolerance come from?  And more frighteningly, where will it end?