Refusing to be Drawn

Muhammad, as depicted in a controversial cartoon.

Have I mentioned religion yet? No? Right.

Well, religion is a popular thing out here. It comes in four or five main flavours, although there are lots of local variations. Religions are really sets of beliefs, and usually have an associated moral framework, or views of certain behaviours that derive from the beliefs.

Seems reasonable enough so far, doesn't it? The problems really begin with the beliefs themselves. Take Christianity, for instance, a religion that started about two thousand years ago and which remains very popular. It has since split into a number of what are called sects, although none of them would accept that description. This is another thing about religion: to keep a religion going, I mean, a proper, millennium-straddling, continent-devouring religion, you need to maintain, in addition to the other weird beliefs that are your stock-in-trade, an absolute and impermeable conviction that your lot are right and all the rest are somewhere on the spectrum between those who are sadly deluded and those who are soon to be steeped in molten lava for eternity as punishment for their lack of theological discernment.

Christianity is founded on the belief that a being called God created the universe (well, "the heavens and the Earth") in six days (I know, I know, how come there were days before there was a rotating Earth?) and then had a bit of a rest. This God then created two people, called Adam and Eve, from whom every other person ever born was descended. This part has reproductive implications that we'll talk about when you're older.

Everything went fine for a couple of thousand years. People lived to be enormously old (a guy called Methuselah lived to be 969, apparently) and begat lots of sons (presumably, they had to beget a few daughters too, but the Bible, a collection of very old texts where most of this stuff comes from, is relatively silent on this point). Then, things started to get away from God a little, and the people he had made drifted into "wickedness".

When this had happened before, he had tried flooding the planet. You might think, given that God can do anything (this is called omnipotence), that he might have simply made new people that were incapable of wickedness, if he was so upset about it, or made some adjustments to the old ones. But no, only a big flood would do, at least for the God who appears in the parts of the Bible called the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, God seems to mellow quite a lot. He decides to take a new approach to the wickedness issue, and sends his son to Earth in human form to sort things out. Well, maybe sort things out is the wrong phrase. You see, Christians believe that God's son took the human form of a man called Jesus of Nazareth, who really did exist.

Now, Jesus himself seems to have taken quite a reasonable approach to the problem of correcting people's behaviour, once you accept that correcting people's behaviour is in itself a reasonable objective. He began preaching to crowds of people (there were no blogs in those days). His themes were unobjectionable, even admirable. Love thy neighbour. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

But the preaching, apparently, wasn't the point, or at least wasn't the whole point. The plan was that Jesus would die for our sins. I must confess to being hazy on the details of this arrangement. The death was to be some kind of atonement, clearly, but whether it covered future sins or only those already committed I'm not sure. For that matter, I'm not sure quite how Jesus's death atoned for anything, and why God couldn't have engineered some kind of forgiveness solution without having his own child incarnated and executed by the Romans, but then there's a lot I don't get about religion.

The point of all this is that religion involves believing things for which there is no evidence. Quite often, it involves believing quite elaborate and outlandish things for which there is evidence to the contrary. For example, there's a lot of evidence that people evolved from other animals over millions of years, a process that does not accommodate the whole Adam and Eve scenario.

Of course, individual religious people don't arbitrarily decide to believe something bizarre. Beliefs are handed down through generations, acquiring venerability along the way, and are usually part of a greater cultural and social fabric. There are many quite sane people who would describe themselves as religious, but to whom many of the tenets of their particular religion would not be literal beliefs, but traditions of emotional value. This is all well and good.

On the other hand, there are religious people who accept the tenets of their faith with absolute and unflinching literalism, no matter how absurd or even dangerous they may be. For instance, some members of a Christian sect called Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to allow their children to receive blood transfusions that may save their lives due to their belief that a passage in the Bible prohibits them. That the passage refers opaquely to abstaining from blood, and was written many centuries before blood transfusion was even conceived of is of course secondary to the obscene moral dysfunction that allows a person to put any religious belief, bizarre or not, above the life and health of his or her own child.

And then there's Islam. Islam has origins in common with Christianity and Judaism, so some of the God stuff is similar. Islam, however, reveres a sixth century prophet called Muhammad, to whom they believe the tenets of their faith were revealed directly by God, or Allah. This much is no more or less wacky than most religious beliefs.

Muslims (adherents to Islam) also believe, based on their interpretation of a passage in their Koran, which contains all the stuff God is supposed to have revealed to Muhammad, that you're not allowed to draw pictures of Allah or Muhammad. With Allah, the idea was that he was too great and majestic to be depicted by human hand. I'm not sure how this got extended to Muhammad, who actually had human hands himself, but that's how things stand in Islam.

Interestingly, depicting any living things is discouraged in Islamic tradition. This oddity persisted right through the middle ages, a time when Islamic scholarship was flourishing while Christian countries had descended into brutality and ignorance. It gave rise to artifacts like the beautifully illustrated herbals in which all the plants are strangely stylised, their anatomical detail carefully distorted in a strange attempt to depict them and yet not depict them at the same time.

Anyway, you can't draw Muhammad, if you're a Muslim. That's another thing about religion. They all tend to insist on doing certain things and, more commonly, not doing lots of other things. Of course, these prescriptions and proscriptions are generally applicable in theory, but in practice, religions are normally content to apply their rules only to their own members, if only to avoid embarassment. There's not much point in the Pope admonishing, say, the Maori people of New Zealand for eating meat on Fridays (I didn't make that rule up, by the way; that's a Catholic one).

Sometimes, though, some religious people do get the idea into their heads that everyone, not just people of the same religion, should observe all the odd rules they've made up. Now, clearly, this is not a tenable position and one that is likely to meet the objections of non-believers. If I stop someone in the street and tell him that he must take off his glasses because Naktush, a God made of discarded tractor tyres who lives in a cave in Venezuela, prohibits the wearing of spectacles, I shouldn't be surprised if he fails to comply. Or if he starts to back away uneasily.

This week, though, many Muslims professed to be not only surprised but angered when cartoons showing Muhammad with a bomb in his turban which had originally appeared in a Danish newspaper, were reprinted by other papers across Europe. The other papers did this in support of the Danish paper, which was under attack from Muslim critics in Denmark. It was intended as a demonstration of the freedom of the press, a very important part of the democratic system, and a concept which sadly does not have much currency in many countries, including some where Islam is the dominant religion.

Now, you could argue that the cartoon itself relies on a lazy stereotype (the association of Islam with the violence of some of its fundamentalist adherents), that its likelihood to give offence was not outweighed by any great journalistic merit and that perhaps a poor editorial decision was made. But this is all beside the point.

The point is that in European democracies have achieved their freedoms at great cost, and those freedoms are precious. They are also utterly beyond the jurisdiction of any religion. It's worrying that many Muslims don't seem to accept this.

Of course, it's not that simple. Nothing ever is. A lot of the anger that's being expressed about the cartoon (or cartoons; I think there were twelve of them) is really anger about what is perceived by some as widespread aggression towards Muslim countries by the West. It's about the continuing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's about the inexcusable mistreatment of Palestinians by Israel.

These are real grievances, but it's disheartening that they are being expressed in religious terms. As we've seen, religions are founded on propositions that are irrational and often bizarre. Conflating political disputes with religion is unlikely, therefore, to clarify or help to resolve them.

Adding violence hardly helps either, and it's a sad irony that some Muslims have reacted to a stereotypically murderous image by threatening the lives of innocent Danes, including humanitarian workers.

So, that's religion for you. You can make up your own mind when you get out, obviously, but personally I don't recommend it. Apart from all the stuff about not being allowed to get a blood transfusion or draw pictures, there are usually services at least weekly, not to mention prayers and other extramural activities. It can be a real drain on your time, especially when it's the weekend and the weather is nice.

By the way, you've been in there for just over seventeen weeks now. I know you've probably got everything just the way you like it and you're starting to feel at home, but this means we're almost at the halfway mark. We're really looking forward to seeing you very much now.

There are only five months left, and there are all kinds of things I haven't described to you yet: chimpanzees, credit cards, eucalyptus trees, iPods, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the feeling of clean sheets. And of course there won't be time for most of these things, and even those things we do have time for I probably won't explain properly.

But that's OK. You really have to see these things for yourself.