I am a Christian, an imperfect one, but a Christian nonetheless. I am not a fundamentalist Christian; I haven't read the Book of Leviticus in a decade and I doubt whether I would abide by its dietary strictures if I could remember them. I do not froth at the mouth at the lewd and lascivious manner that the name of the Christ is used for in popular media, including in pornographic films.
I have absolutely no problem with crass monsters of all shades taking the Lord's name in vain; he after all turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, burned down Sodom and Gomorrah, flooded the earth for forty days and forty nights, allowed His Son to make a blood sacrifice of Himself for my sins and caused the sun to stand still in the midday sky for twelve hours. God - Jesus - is a badass who can take care of himself.
That is me. Mine might not be the attitude that, say, Canon Peter Karanja or John Cardinal Njue might take when it comes to the holy symbols of our shared faith. There have been times in the history of the development of our faith where heresy was dealt with with finality. Death was the preferred punishment for heretics and apostates.
Mine is almost certainly not the attitude that a billion plus Muslims will take when it comes to the symbols of their faith. I know well enough from my experiences with fundamentalist Christians that on matters of religion there is rarely common ground between divergent intellectual positions. We know this to be true when it comes to Islam and its adherents. We also know this to be true: throughout history, men and women have manipulated the interpretation of holy scripture for selfish ends. It is not scripture that was wrong but the use to which it was put in the name of the people.
Knowing the passions aroused when we take Islamic symbols of faith in vain, I don't see why we should provoke the lunatic fringe among the Umma to extreme violence, such as Charlie Hebdo magazine seems to delight in doing. Its defenders argue that it has lampooned all religious symbols and that, anyway, its target is bad government, but that is no excuse in a nation that seems to specifically target the Umma with repressive laws and encourages officialdom to marginalise them as un-French. In the incredibly insensitive name of free speech, the magazine provokes mad men to murder its staff and blames the murderers for doing what they did because of the provocation.
I do not condone murder in the name of God; He is God, after all, and he can do His own murdering as the bible amply demonstrates. But I am not an idiot. I will not invite the lunatics inspired by the derangement of Usama Bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Abubakar Shekau to murder me by mocking the revered symbols of Islam (which they have distorted beyond all recognition). That seems to be something freedom-loving Anglos seem to enjoy doing. And after they get murdered by other mad men, they wring their hands and speak of their right to be offensive and, thus, invite the terrible wrath of the mad people.
I hope Kenya does not succumb to the false romance of absolute freedom. One may have the right to speak their mind, but they should be prepared for the backlash of that speech. Caricaturing the Prophet is stupid. It is doubly stupid when it is done in a country with a restive population. It is three times as stupid when it is done in a country with a restive population among whom are to be found extremists and radicals who believe killing is justified if it is done in the defence of the faith or in the name of God. The cartoonists in France did not deserve to die, but let us not pretend that they were safe simply because they offended everyone.
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