October 26, 2006
To judge by today’s report entitled Danish court rejects cartoon suit, there is such thing as “anti-blasphemy law” in Denmark. Who would have thought?
It was lucky for the biblical Abraham that there was no such law in ancient Mesopotamia, when, as per the Talmud, he blasphemously broke his daddy’s idols and than added insult to injury by telling his outraged sire that they were useless.
Some thousand years later, Socrates found to his chagrin that there was an anti-blasphemy law in Greece when he was sentenced to drinking poisonous hemlock for violating that law by thinking too much.
Yet another twelve centuries or so passed, and Mohammed had to flee his native Mecca because blaspheming Meccan idols was not allowed by the Arab sheikhs.
And now that the idol of Islamic “True Faith” came under attack from a bunch of cartoonist, the Danish government promptly introduced the “anti-blasphemy law” to defend it.
But is idolatry worth defending? The problem of the third party makes it impossible to know whether Mohammed was a prophet or not, and to claim that he was, is idol-worship. Under our present condition of not being able to know who is a “prophet” and who is not, what is God‘s word and what is not, “blasphemy“ is simply impossible, Mohammed cartoons or not.
And isn’t it absurd to forbid something which does not exist in the first place?