Don't call me violent or I'll fucking kill you!

Following Pope Joseph "Adolf" Ratzinger's recent use of a medieval quotation suggesting Islam is a religion tainted by a history of violence, Muslim firebrands around the globe have done a great job of proving his point by once again going completely apeshit.

This kind of stupidity I simply can't understand. A word to the wise guys, if you're hell bent on expressing your outrage at someone who dared suggest your religion encourages violence (and jeez, I wonder what might have given anyone that idea), then baying for blood, burning churches and gunning down elderly nuns is quite possibly the most stupid and self defeating of all possible ways to go about it.

This is the problem with fundamentalism of any sort. It breeds people completely devoid of the ability to laugh at themselves and lacking any sort of perspective. Isaac "Chef" Hayes, was cool with working on South Park which lampooned everything under the sun right up until the day they had a crack at his own beloved Scientology. Then all of a sudden it wasn't so funny.

I once met a born again Christian who chuckled merrily at jokes about Jews but freaked the fuck out when I called Jesus the world's most popular draft dodger.

If you must live your life based on a heavily edited collection of two thousand year old documents, is it that fucking hard to focus on the parts that don't require large quantities of blood and dismembered limbs? I know adhering to certain sections of what purports to be the word of God and ignoring others pretty much makes believing any of it completely pointless but if I get started on that I'll be here all night.

Back to the point. What is it about Islam that makes so many of its followers incapable of ignoring the less savoury bits in their holy book? Why is it that any perceived insult, no matter how slight, is greeted with complete outrage and the sort of righteous screams for vengeance that seem to be the red hot lifeblood of this particular religion? Perhaps they're just more honest with themselves and are just struggling gamely to adhere to all aspects of their contradictory religious text as opposed to Christians who happily pick and choose which parts of God's word they feel are worth following.

While we're on it, don't give me this bollocks about the perpetrators of this religious hatred not being "real" Muslims. I'm sorry but that shit doesn't fly unless you're going to say that John Howard and George W. Bush aren't "real" Christians because they set in motion events that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. They certainly consider themselves to be Christians. Are you going to tell them they're not? A religion can not absolve itself of any connection to the abhorrent behaviour of a member of its congregation by claiming that person wasn't a "real" member of the faith. Any attempt to do so is nothing more than a cheap cop out and evidence of a moral dishonesty unworthy of any organisation which would attempt to tell people how to live.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three religions of the Word, each one a new and supposedly improved version of the last. Could it be the developmental stage of each faith that results in such strikingly different behaviour in its followers? Stay with me here. I don't know where I'm going with this but I've got this theory by the reigns and I'm going to see where it takes me. Try this on:

In this the year of our lord 2006:

• Jews are the grumpy old codgers who have been around, seen a thing or two and are convinced that everyone younger than them is out to get them.
• Christians are 21st century teenagers. Smug, overprivileged know-it-alls who are often too preoccupied with shiny things to be bothered with being a good person.
• Muslims are the toddlers of the religious world. Petulant and emotionally driven crybabies who will throw the toys out of the cot when things don't go their way.
  

You heard it here first.