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MugenOne
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**Why can’t Muslims take a joke?
**By Spengler
Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular West, but it came with a price.
More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. “Humor is intrinsic to Christianity,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because “truth is hidden in mystery”. But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes after the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the
French revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide toward secularism.
Like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, muses the secular West after the Danish cartoon catastrophe, “Why can’t a Muslim be more like a Jew?” After all, Arab newspapers daily publish hideous caricatures of Jews, who do not burn down Arab embassies in response. But the Jews learned to swallow humiliation at a dreadful cost. When Rome defiled their temple at Jerusalem in AD 66, the Jews rebelled. Rome crushed them, but they rose again in AD 132, fighting more Roman legions under Tiberius than had conquered Britain. After most Jews were dead or exiled, the remnant invented self-deprecating humor. [1]
Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity’s 2,000-year history. Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against mockery of the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy was a certain William Gott, who received nine months’ imprisonment in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.
to read more: atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html
**By Spengler
Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular West, but it came with a price.
More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. “Humor is intrinsic to Christianity,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because “truth is hidden in mystery”. But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes after the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the
French revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide toward secularism.
Like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, muses the secular West after the Danish cartoon catastrophe, “Why can’t a Muslim be more like a Jew?” After all, Arab newspapers daily publish hideous caricatures of Jews, who do not burn down Arab embassies in response. But the Jews learned to swallow humiliation at a dreadful cost. When Rome defiled their temple at Jerusalem in AD 66, the Jews rebelled. Rome crushed them, but they rose again in AD 132, fighting more Roman legions under Tiberius than had conquered Britain. After most Jews were dead or exiled, the remnant invented self-deprecating humor. [1]
Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity’s 2,000-year history. Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against mockery of the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy was a certain William Gott, who received nine months’ imprisonment in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.
to read more: atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html
