freedom of expression .politics of blasphemy.

The Greek gods were rather human in their doings and undoings- like the gods  in India. The idea of a single male god came with the monotheist Religions of  The Book.With them came the idea of Blasphemy.  A concept that the new Hindutva forces of the new Hinduism are adopting by ignoring the reality of hows countless Gods and Goddesses were thought of and treated in this part of the world.

 In Kulu, the Valley of the Gods , Gods are treated like humans. If they make things hard for their worshipers the worshipers make things hard for them. No daily change of clothes or even offerings if things are not going well for the worshipers. In the world's richest temple, Tirupati, Balaji is manacled (with gold manacles) if the daily offerings do not reach a certain level.

The idea of Blasphemy, then is about the reality of the politics of power.

One might suppose that the omnipotent, omniscient, patriarchal God worshipped by practitioners of the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – would be more thick-skinned.   He is not.  The Almighty may be a perfect Being, but He is not beyond human foibles.  Those who blaspheme Him are the worst of the worst.

According to the Torah, they should be put to death.  According to as astute a thinker as St. Thomas Aquinas, their sin is worse than murder.   Of all the Abrahamic religions, Islam is the most tolerant of blasphemy, or rather it used to be; its foundational texts don’t make a big a deal of it.  Even before the dawn of the modern era, however, it had caught up with the others.

Now that faith has waned for the majority of Christians and Jews, and revived in Muslim lands, Islam has taken the lead.  It was not always so.  Throughout all but the most recent history, the opposite was the case.

Perhaps the fact that Islam’s monotheism is less adulterated than its rivals’, and its God more unambiguously transcendent, explains why.  Or perhaps Muslims were more clearheaded than Christians and Jews.   If “God is great,” He should be great enough not to care what people say about Him.

But if that was what Mohammed thought, his followers no longer do.  Religions, like God, move in mysterious ways, and not always for the better.

Back in the sixties, when political Islam had not yet even been conceived, when Judaism’s God was all but finished outside Alta Kocker circles, and when even Time Magazine deemed the Christian God on His last ropes, nobody would have expected this.

But it is not as odd as may appear.  Blasphemy has always been at least as much about politics as religion.  And we live in a political world.

The need to maintain free expression is paramount.  And it is always well, in general, to expose the Abrahamic religions for the menaces they are.  But when through a sad concatenation of circumstances hostility towards Western blasphemers becomes a means of self-assertion for anti-imperialist insurgents in the Muslim world, it is also necessary, indeed urgent, to come to their defense.  If there was ever a time when remonstrations and efforts at persuasion are called for, it is now.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/21/the-politics-of-blasphemy/