Islam does not prescribe any punishment for blasphemy in this world nor vests any such authority in anyone. I sometimes wonder whether God has given up on us and emigrated to some other dimension. We take his name in vain as a matter of course and he is continually used as an excuse to justify the unjustifiable in some war or conflict.

In our DNA is a great dollop of religious intolerance and violence too- Kenneth Zammit Tabona

The weirdest thing is that most times the litigants think they have God on their side! Either the Almighty has infinite patience and a huge sense of humour or he’s dematerialised into stratospheres where he will no longer have to listen to the inanities and criminalities of humankind any longer.

By God, I do not only mean our own Sistine Chapel type of bearded old man but all other global manifestations of the Supreme Being. For, were we immortal, would we be so obsessed by the afterlife in this one? We have just had yet another instance wherein religious bigotry sparked off a deadly series of protests. A Pastor called Terry, somewhere in America has backed the propagation of a fifth rate film; a wannabe Life of Brian; this time dealing with the Prophet Mohamed.

This pastor also sparked off similar protests a couple of years ago when he threatened to burn the Koran. Why doesn’t the good pastor boil his head instead and let us live in peace?

We Christians may have become totally blasé about what others do to ridicule our religion; almost too much.

Very few of us, if any, would ever resort to violence of the type that killed the US Ambassador and his staff in Benghazi last week should, for instance, Jesus were to be portrayed as a layabout, or a sexually frustrated transvestite: things that have been known to happen and which we have all taken in our stride, tututted over and forgotten.

Not so Islam which as a religion is still going through its Reformation and Counter Reformation stage with its attendant wars of religion and Inquisition.

Useless to look down our noses at the 21st century’s militant Islamists as we have all been there, done that and bought the T-shirt.

Can we officially stop the publication of cartoons and films in our countries that offend Islamic sentiment? No we cannot because we have only in the last century obtained freedom of expression. A double-edged sword as now freedom of expression is causing insurrections. Can these things be stopped? I doubt it.

He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind. Europe is largely responsible for the backwardness of the countries in which Islam proliferates. For centuries the Ottoman Empire ruled these countries with an iron, but ever so corrupt, fist and when that started breaking up the great western empires went into serious competition as to which of them could grab, colonise or protect what it once was and what was left of it. Then ‘black gold’ was discovered and soon the boot was on the other foot. The religion of the ex-Ottoman Empire however, Islam, remained uncentralised, and divided within itself into Sunni and Shiite. The divide in fact is rather like the Great Schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism which ostensibly still exists to the extent that the Pope, to an Eastern rite priest, is the embodiment of the Antichrist!

Western economic and cultural progress has long delegated such niceties to the dustbins of history but there was a time that Catholics burnt Protestants at the stake and vice versa.

In 1090 when the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem, they killed everyone; forgetting that the city was full of Maronites, Armenians, Copts and other Christian sects not to mention Jews and Muslims. They just slaughtered the lot; men, women and children crying “God wants it!”

So let us not throw our hands up in horror in too much of a hurry for in our DNA is a great dollop of religious intolerance and violence too. John Lennon died because he penned a song in which we are asked to imagine what life would be were there no religion; the religion that Lennon referred to was of the blind and bigoted ritualised version and not the kind of religious spirituality he himself practised.

We live in very troubled times. Since 9/11 we have realised that there are very strong and fanatical religiously-fuelled organisations in the world that are determined to finish off all opposition. What poor old God has to do with it God only knows, however, I have to admit that I am disappointed with the lack of involvement by the Vatican in this regard.

We all know how influential Pope John Paul II was in bringing down the Iron Curtain and restoring Europe to its pre-First World War lines. The Cold War is now a thing of the remote last and no longer a threat. During the Cold War, had anyone told us that our next global bogeyman would be Militant Islam we would have laughed our heads off. I would have thought that the reputation won by the Vatican in the 1980s and 1990s would have made it logical to expect the Pope to lead the way towards reconciliation between the three religions of the book but sadly nothing has materialised.

The Vatican had, only last week, to hire a PR firm to help it cope with its shady financial reputation while morally it is still reeling after the waves of paedophile scandals practically engulfed it.

There is therefore no natural and acceptable leader to effect that much needed reconciliation. Because of this we have to be constantly vigilant and must try to avoid unnecessary provocation; something tantamount to trying to pour all the waters of the Mediterranean into a hole in the sand.

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