Fear of the Muslims--A Remedy

In recent days, all over the world there have been demonstrations against the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed. Curiously, the cartoons were published last September and the fuss is now. Secondly, several cartoonists did the caricatures, not just one.

Violence worldwide has resulted in demonstrations and death. The other day as I was walking my laps around the gym, I wondered who was getting killed in all of this violence. The answer I found later in a headline of the Calgary Sun. It shrilled: "Christians Murdered." Shopkeepers in Nigeria were the unfortunate victims in that newspaper account. But a lot of other headlines could have been written.

There may have been many other hapless victims other than the Christians--but probably many of the victims really have been Christians. What is new about all this is that the news media in general, with some exceptions, like a couple of magazines in Calgary, Alberta, have been afraid to publish the cartoons.

The fear has been leveraged into North America and the West. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech have been supplanted by fear--Threats have been made against the cartoonists and large sums of money have been offered for the revenge killing of the offending artists.

The electronic media of the global village makes it certain that every threat is amplified. And fear multiplies once again. Decapitation and throat slitting are the usual methods urged, megaphoning the fear yet once more. All this in the name of deity and religion.

Thankfully, fear does not come from God, not at all. "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." This is the beautiful promise in a scary world.