…by standing up for it:
William Saletan, I am fairly confident, would be quite effusive in describing all the manifold ways in which the Christian mind is “closed” and “hidebound” and “haunted by superstition.” He would, I’m reasonably certain, be quite in favor of any artistic project which undermined the foundations of Christian thought.
And yet, when we turn to fundamentalist Islam, he becomes… a censor. He becomes not an agent of the Inquisition per se, but a bit of a fanboy of it.
And why? Why the anger directed towards someone who is doing what Saletan would almost certainly praise were it directed at any other religion?
I think I know. There is a line of magnificent wisdom in the film The Spanish Prisoner (by David Mamet). It is spot-on about human nature.
The circumstances of the quote are that a young financial wizard has created a “Process” which is worth, literally, trillions. However, it was created as work-for-hire. He created it, but the company owns it. And he’s wondering if the company will actually compensate him for it, as they have promised.
Steve Martin gives him the bad news (paraphrased): “I think if they have a moral obligation to you but not a legal one you will begin to find them behaving cruelly towards you. You will find them treating you poorly, isolating you, speaking badly about you when you are not present. Even as they decide to stiff you out of what they owe you, they will compound that with bad manners and worse intent. They will not be apologetic about it; they will become increasingly hateful towards you.”
The reason is this: When people know they have a moral obligation towards someone which they do not feel like honoring, for reasons of personal interest, or personal safety, or personal political agenda, they feel awfully bad about themselves for not honoring the moral obligation. They feel awfully bad that they are ignoring a moral obligation in favor of their own personal interests.
And people do not like feeling bad about themselves.
So what people do, is this: They begin demonizing the person to whom they have an inconvenient moral obligation, convincing themselves that he is in fact the Bad Guy because, hey, he makes them feel bad. So he must be the bad guy.
Put more simply, people like this are cowards. And the hypocrisy of these people who hate religion in all forms, other than Islam, is sickening.
This reminds me of the scene in the movie “Becket” where the captive Saxon girl tells the Norman Becket that the Normans stole the Saxon’s lands and took their property and women…. so naturally Normans have to hate Saxons
You know, what I find interesting is that even in terms of the U.S. those attitudes only changed in the last 150 years or so. Recall the events in Nauvoo in 1844? And the Witchcraft trials in Salem? And in terms of Europe the Spanish Inquisition was only disbanded in the 1830’s… And those were ALL actions supported by the government, or in the Nauvoo case the government basically closed its eyes to what happened. There is no evidence of the governments in the Middle East support the attacks. In fact they are sending their police and troops in harm’s way to protect the embassies…