Ironic Surrealism II » lars vilks: "Iran protests over Swedish Muhammad cartoon"
Here we go again. The irony of this Islamic obsession with the imge of the prophet should be obvious...Islam has become idolatrous. The prophet's image has become a holy object like the idols he threw out of the Kabbah.
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It took me me years before I realized, along with Bertrand Russel, that there is nothing wrong with idolatry. To use a weird comparison ... the Republican party seems to have an extraordinary share of gays, not because there is some odd linkage between gender preference and ideology but because the hypocrisy of a Larry Craig makes the issue a
public concern. The same thing seems to me to apply to religions that loudly proclaim that the worship of idols is terribly wrong. indeed in Islam this is a cause for holy war.The hypocrisy of muslims decrying idolatry by declaring the prophet as an idol is hard to miss. The Jesus and mo web site compares the hypocrisies of Islam and Christianity.
Of course the same thing is true of Christianity ,,, even more so because of all the statues of their God and his gruesome self sacrifice. And then there is the replacement of Astarte with Mary.
So where does this put Judaism? Well, at least Judaism is not hypocritical.
The closest we come to idolatry is that we venerate a book. Even as an atheist, I always kiss the Torah when it is carried around the room. There is something divine about the world's oldest book especially the human effort that goes into each scroll. Of course I would be upset (and have been) when a Muslim or Christian misuses a Torah. Maybe I am the idolater? At least my idolatry is limited to respect for a physical object and I am able to distinguish between the disrespect a nonjew might feel for the book and their misuses of the actual object.In that regard it occurs ot me that both the Quran and the Gospels dispute the accuracy of the Torah. The Quran actually claims the Torah is not the word of God, but that only their book is divinely accurate. Now that is blasphemy! Imagine what would happen to a scholar who was able to prove that the Prophet used some source other than Gabriel in reciting the original Quran? is Rushdie still alive?
