http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37280104/ns ... d_gadgets/

It can only be a matter of time before there's a Facebook game for all this, if there isn't already...

No one would give a [LIFTED] if people were drawing Jesus

Yip, even that team have been somewhat forced to modernize

Christians draw lots of pictures of Jesus themselves though. In Islam its sacrilegious for anyone to draw Muhammed at all, so that's not a very useful comparison.

The Qur'an does not explicitly forbid images of Muhammad. Various sects of Islam have decided that images of any of the prophets are to be discouraged, as they could be seen as encouraging idolatry - which is forbidden in the Qur'an.

All seems a bit precious to me. Idolatry is forbidden by the ten commandments, yet Catholicism happily worships graven images of Christ and his mother.

And the value of outsiders telling someone how to live their religious life or interpret their scruptures is?

None. Just as I hold the right to draw pictures of whoever I want.

As long as you don't also wish to assume the right to regard any offence you cause as a failing on the part of the people whose feelings and values you have made no attempt to take into account.

All we achieve with these spiteful and petulant attacks on other people's religions is to confirm the notion already widely held that we are arrogant, self obsessed and rude. If we don't come up with a better excuse than "we have no law against doing this, so we will", then our actions seem almost determined to break down any worthwhile communication between civilisations based on our western principle of moral equality. We simply demonstrate that even the most harmless of their moral concerns are worth nothing at all to us.

Personally, I think all religion is a load of hogwash. I came to that opinion quite early in my life, and haven't really had reason to question it since.

However, if someone has a faith and wishes to practice it, I am fine with that. Live and let live, as they say.

I don't choose to ridicule anyone's religion or faith. I accept they have the beliefs they have, and I like to learn a little about such beliefs, to understand their faith, so that I can at least give people due respect. In return, I expect much the same - respect my choice and don't make out I'm in any way affected by your religious perspective, and above all don't try to proselytise me.

I worry that we get an impression of the Muslim world filtered through the prism of religious fervour. I don't believe for one minute that every Muslim on the planet goes out baying for blood if someone in "the west" dares to question a pillar of their faith. I rather fancy it may be quite the opposite.

We should bear in mind that in the time when the Qur'an was written, the Catholic church was a small and distant religious organisation. The brands of Christianity that Mohammed and his followers would have encountered were the Eastern Orthodox, various Syrian heresies now largely forgotten, and the Coptic population of Egypt, with the Orthodoxy of the Byzantine empire being far and away the most important.

The Orthodox faith has and had a strong tradition of icon veneration that would strike many as verging upon idolatry as proscribed by the Bible, this followed from pre Christian tradition and could well be seen as a continuation of ancestor worship by other means. There are many other areas in which Christianity had notoriously sold out to the gentiles (eating bacon, not cutting up converts' genitals, Easter bunnies). In these areas, we should also bear in mind that Jesus never said any of them were ok (indeed, the Sermon on the Mount specifically states otherwise). Allowing such things was a post Jesus compromise to enable wider conversion.

Local Arabic animist religions were of course highly idolatrous as well, and so there would have been a deep concern that their own religion would, if not regulated, allow old traditions to continue in disguise. Rejection of these traditions was seen as absolutely essential to securing the favour of God, and therefore the prescription of anything that could lead to idolatrous behaviour was embedded deep into the DNA of Islam from its inception. And so, to prevent people praying to himself instead of directly to God, Muhammed (or one of his very immediate successors) discouraged any form of art that people might confusedly suppose to share in the holiness of God.

Some might infer from the above that this makes it ok to ignore that sort of thing; we can patronise Muslims and tell them not to take that item of their faith so seriously, because we can explain how it came about without reference to any commandment of God, and therefore it's not as serious as they think it is.

I prefer a less patronising approach. We should recognise that this is a genuine and serious concern for many millions of people. I see no value in wantonly disregarding that, only mean spirited arrogance. We are more advanced, technically, socially, artistically and politically, than countries like Pakistan. But that doesn't mean that none of their feelings count, or that our free speech legislation means we have moral authority to piss on them for fun.

I don't think the majority of people are/see it as being malicious regarding religion, just open to ridicule, like most things in this world.

And frankly, without ridicule or embarrassment of some description, we'd go around just never laughing at anything in this life

Just playing Devil's advocate (no pun intended), shouldn't a religion and it's supporters be able to stand up to questioning, and therefore potential ridicule?

It doesn't really matter if the outsiders doing the cartoons think they are ridiculing the religion for malicious purposes or whether they think they are being deliciously witty and ever so clever. They stand outside the religion in question, and cannot therefore tell it how to regard their actions.

If they have a clear and valid point to make, then let them. If they are only doing it to prove that Mohammed lacked their excitingly avant-garde sense of humour and post ironic wit, then the effort is self defeating. To show how immensely clever they are, the cartoonists should draw their cartoons on a Baghdad pavement, then they can self righteously mock the ignorant crowd of humourless peasants that will promptly dismember them with for having sense of irony whatsoever.

Who are we to say they're definitely doing any of the above? Ridicule can be just light-hearted.

No. The intention can be light hearted, but if the effect is to cause grave and massive offence, then the intention was based on a misunderstanding.

It's no good saying "this is only a light hearted joke" while you throttle a puppy or drown a kitten in your toilet. You will offend somebody by that action, and they will not take little account of your protestations.

How is the intention based on a misunderstanding?