Religious zeal keeps demanding more

     Readers sometimes suggest that I am against religion. Which is simply not true.
     Life is a long time, pocked with misfortune and death. Faith in some kind of comforting story seems to help, filling the empty hours, creating the illusion of meaning, and comforting sufferers when reason fails. I’d never dream of trying to yank that blankie away.
     Rather, I believe religion should be voluntary. A radical thought, I know, so let me explain. You review the beliefs and practices dictated by a particular faith — angels, Kashrut, the giant tortoise balancing the universe on his shell, whatever — and freely decide what to embrace and what to reject. Your call. Not mine.
     This liberal lunacy can confuse religious types, who consider forcing their practices upon the unwilling an integral part of their belief system. So much that to oppose their doing so strikes them as attacking their faith, root and branch. If I decide not to celebrate Christmas, I am deliberately offending them.
     And the faithful have a genius for taking offense. The acts of others, if contrary to their religion, are a sort of death ray, effective over huge distances. That baffles me. There’s almost nothing you can do to offend me. Call me awful names? Get in line. Make a big pile of my books and set them on fire? Fine, if you paid for them. I’ll tweet a photo of the flames. That kind of vituperation is a compliment — people sharing hate mail are slyly bragging: “I matter; look at the reaction I inspire!”
     To me, taking offense only draws attention to criticism. By culling books on America’s racist past, the state of Florida didn’t suppress history; it magnified it.
     The ability to absorb criticism is a challenge everywhere. Are you following the problems radiating from Sweden? On June 28, Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee, burned pages torn from a Quran in front of a Stockholm mosque during the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha (while waving Swedish flags and blasting the Swedish national anthem — a dramatic touch). The complication is that in Sweden, you need official approval to hold a protest. He had it.
     The burning turned an isolated act into an international crisis. Iraq expelled its Swedish ambassador and a mob attacked the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad. Some argue that burning Qurans is not free speech, but hate speech, and thus illegal. That makes some sense to me — a burning Quran could be like a burning cross. The whole imbroglio might stall Sweden’s membership in NATO.

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