Islam - the tolerant religion

At the moment there is a big hoohah going on about some caricatures of Mohammed printed in a Danish newspaper. People have taken to the streets to protest outside embassies with guns, threats have been made, Arab nations have recalled ambassadors...it's pretty unbelievable for something so innocuous. It's making me spit bricks.

Here are the four opinions I posted to BBC's Have Your Say

Perhaps next time the Ayatollah (or Jerry Falwell, for that matter) announces that atheists are evil and deserve to be tortured for eternity in hell, we should cause an international outrage? All religions are a bunch of tripe, and anyone who has been brainwashed into attaching such importance to an object or an idea that they will interfere with freedom of speech to protect it needs therapy, not respect. If God is so great he can defend himself. Pity he doesn't exist then.

All religions believe most other religions are purely or partly invention or delusion. Yet they all agree we must respect those beliefs. Religionists think we have to respect invention! Can I invent my own religion that purports to hold Elvis or Charlie Kennedy sacred and take revenge on anyone who mocks them? The cartoons were offensive and provocative, but they did not incite violence and so were not and should never be illegal.

What is the Enlightened world coming to when an idea must be immune from criticism or mockery just because it is held sacred? Many tenets of religion, such as Original Sin, Holy War, and the place of women offend me to the very core of what I hold dear. Yet I would defend religions' right to offend me as loudly as they clamour to condemn me.

When Bush got a second term I lost my hope that most Americans are reasonable people. Then this 'furore' destroyed my last vestige of hope that Muslims (if not Islam) really were a peace-loving and inclusive people. What a sick animal is man, when dogma and ideology become more important than compassion and humanity. Religion will be the death of us all.

Guess which one made it onto the pages among the hundreds of other comments?
It was the third one, the least controversial, obviously.

I want to believe that most Muslims are really peaceable, tolerant, inclusive people, I really do. But every chance they get to prove they keep blowing it! It seems that even the most moderate Muslim will defend dogma and ideology not just with words, but with hostile, possibly even violent action. I quite regularly hear moderate Muslims say that their faith is so important to them, if called to fight in a religious war they would die for it. I used to hear that with the same sort of shock I have when I hear a Jew say they can't marry a non-Jew because they must "preserve the purity of their race". Now it's just expected.

Of course other religions are not immune. Christians got all up-tight about Jerry Springer and the Sikhs got threatening about that other play a while back. But how often do you see Christians threatening with violence? Sometimes, but definitely not as often, and only from fanatics. Maybe it's because there are Muslim theocratic nations and so Islam becomes not just an idea, but your entire country. I don't know.

It is astounding to me that I must listen with cold compliance to the rantings of religionists the world over, telling me I am degenerate and evil because I'm an atheist; yet I must pander to the transparently infantile sacred beliefs of the many for fear of causing offense. The real reason why we must pander to them? Because there are lunatics among them, a great many. We must concede by force of violence. It is just terrorism by another route.