What doesn’t matter
Many Muslims consider it offensive to depict the Prophet Mohammed in any circumstances – even if those depictions are not intended to be mocking.
I don’t care. I just really don’t care, in any way. You might as well say many hoopoops consider it offensive to depict hurpurps in any circumstances. It’s not my problem. Now if you were offering a chain of reasoning to explain why Xs consider Y offensive, with some real-world harm at the end of it, I might care, but just the stand-alone finding offensive is a big fat nothing. Or it’s worse than a nothing, because it becomes a pretext to punish and threaten and kill people, for an utterly stupid worthless me me me reason.
Religious people can have their rules about what’s “offensive” within their own community of believers, within reason (they can’t murder each other over it), but those “rules” are meaningless to people outside the community of believers, and we don’t care about them. We don’t care. They don’t matter. They’re not important. The “offense” is factitious – it’s only there as a pretext for flying into a rage. It’s a way to make the religion seem important and scary. It’s all dreck and it’s long past time for people to grow up about this nonsense.
People gathered in protest outside Batley Grammar School, in Batley, near Bradford, West Yorkshire, this week after a teacher showed students a cartoon of the Prophet, widely reported as taken from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Commenting on the matter, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said children should be taught “contentious issues appropriately”, adding: “It must be right that a teacher can appropriately show images of the Prophet Mohammed.”
However, Dr Alyaa Ebbiary, a researcher in Islamic studies at the SOAS University of London, believes the Muslim community at large would disagree with Mr Jenrick’s comments.
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. “The Muslim community” can disagree all it likes, but it doesn’t get to impose its taboos and fears and rules on everyone.
Dr Ebbiary said: “There is a lot in Islamic legal and theological texts prohibiting image-making, in general and in relation to the sacred more specifically.”
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Islamic legal and theological texts don’t apply to everyone else, and everyone else is not obliged to pay attention to them or respect them. If you’re putting together a model from instructions, that doesn’t mean I have to follow the instructions too.
It doesn’t matter. We don’t have to care. You can’t make us care.
They don’t want to make you care about their rules, they want to make you obey them.
I used to call this sort of thing the “Little People Argument” — that while atheists (and Western theists) were capable of not only undergoing life without God but dealing with reasonable dissent on the topic, the Little People aren’t. Whether they were Muslims, or just the devout, these are simple folks who are dependent on their faith. Do not ask what they cannot give. Like children, their crotchets and vulnerabilities need to be catered to: unlike us, they can’t handle the truth.
The Little People Argument was one which gnu atheism pushed back against. It was insult disguised as compassion, superiority masquerading as multicultural sensitivity. And all these years later, it’s still being put forth — and seems to have spread beyond religion, and into the gnu atheist communities themselves.
Not only that, but it’s bad P.R. Surely members of the “community” must realize that theirs must be a pretty ineffectual god if we mock him on purpose or even accidentally, and apparently he can’t do a thing about it. It certainly hasn’t escaped our attention.
This blustering is not even directed at us — it’s directed at other believers. “See, we’re not standing idly by, we’re, we’re blustering.
There are pictures of Mohammed in Shia mosques. The ‘community leaders’ aren’t willing to attack Persians over that one. Meanwhile, real life genocidal attacks against the Rohingya and Uighurs don’t raise even a ripple of protest in the Ummah.