The Disgrace of Islam

Some European papers ran a cartoon of Muhammad wearing a bomb on his head and Muslims are on the warpath. Not all Muslims, mind you, but more than enough to strengthen my conviction that Islam is a sorry excuse for a religion. It isn’t just that so many Muslins all over the world are calling for wholesale jihad and beheadings when they’re not busy rioting or burning buildings. It’s also the fact that few prominent Muslim clerics have denounced the violence and that those who have appear to have been ignored by the raging masses.

Do these self-righteous zealots believe that this cartoon harms the great Allah? Wouldn’t that make Allah a pitifully weak excuse for a God? Do they believe it harms Mohammed? How so? They obviously see the cartoon as an insult to their faith. But why can they not see that they and the incredibly intolerant and unspeakably violent behavior they support or in which they engage directly are the biggest insults to their faith?

I try to respect everyone and everyone’s faith, but I struggle to restrain myself from holding Islam in utter and complete contempt. I see it as an essentially primitive and barbaric religion promoting primitive and barbaric behavior with built-in barriers to its evolution into anything even faintly resembling a genuine wisdom tradition, its Sufi offshoots notwithstanding. If I’m wrong, let Muslims prove it by acting like people of God rather than bloodthirsty savages or de facto abettors of fanatical intolerance and savagery through their habitual silence.