Mike's musings

Cartoons and laptops

Let's get rid of the small-talk first: my laptop's kind of back. Never managed to get to the root of the problem, and the 100 Gig disk we replaced the old one with self-destructed, but when I replaced it with the old one, reformatted the offending partition (which reiserfs had said had bad blocks at the hardware level), and all seems OK again.

Cartoons. I'm sure that everyone reading this knows about the furore among Muslims about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. I find this very difficult. I'm very much in favour of free speech, and have always liked the comment attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". I don't have that kind of courage, but it's a good precept. At least it is in a liberal Western democracy, which we might want to add a "Christian" to, at least in brackets: a liberal (Christian) Western democracy. But many people - possibly millions of people - were very, very offended. I believe very strongly that this kind of offense is something that you have to take on the chin, and I try to, every time someone insults my faith, and the things I hold dear, but that's not the way many Muslims see the world.

In the end, I think that respect is the word, that and "Love". "God is Love" is a basic tenet that I can build on, and in order to love others, we need to try to understand those others. Or it doesn't work. I'd like to have the opportunity to talk to Muslims: I'd like to understand. Part - a large part - of what I believe my vocation to be is to try to engage with the difficult questions. This is one of them. Women bishops and gay clergy - and laity - are other difficult questions. Maybe not to some people, but they are to many Christians within the Church of England, and its sister churches in Christ, and the other faiths through which the Holy Spirit reveals the Word of God to the world.