Meditations upon Blasphemy and Idolatry

I can understand not wanting to represent Mohammed or any other living being as a way to avoid worshipping idols.  I think it’s a bit of an overreaction, personally, but I can understand the reasoning behind it.

I can also understand having a feeling of reverence and respect for someone who is important to you and your belief system.  Furthermore, I can understand feeling upset or even angry when you feel that others are not showing that person—be it Mohammed, the Buddha, Saint Paul, Pope Francis, Joseph Smith, or whoever—the proper degree of respect and tolerance.

But when you declare that any word spoken against a person is blasphemy, have you not, in your mind, at least, raised that person’s importance to something like that of a god?

When you declare that any slight, real or imagined, against your designated object of veneration must be punished swiftly and by violence, has your reverence not crossed the line into worship?

Isn’t that a form of idolatry too?

That’s the horrific irony of the atrocities perpetrated against the French people this week.  A small group of religious terrorists—let’s identify them for what they are—killed nearly twenty people for the commission a sin of which they themselves were guilty:

Idolatry.