I wonder if humans will ever evolve.
The protests that have caused an international crisis in Europe and the Middle East following the publication in several European newspapers of cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad - which is considered a sacrilege in Islam - have only convinced me that the distance between Homo sapiens sapiens and our earlier ancestors isn't far.
I don't blame the protestors for their anger. They have every reason to be angry - newspapers that published the cartoons knew what they were doing.
But this does not justify picket signs with slogans such as "Exterminate those who slander Islam," as shown in an Agence-France Presse photo. Nor does it justify setting fire to foreign embassies and threatening violence against innocent people. Denmark recently urged its citizens to leave Indonesia following threats from an unnamed radical Islamic group, according to The Associated Press.
I have never understood why so many people think practicing a particular religion makes them special and more entitled to respect that everybody else. Newspapers in Islamic countries routinely publish inflammatory articles and cartoons about Christians, Jews and others.
For example, I don't remember seeing anyone set fire to the embassies of Arab countries when Al-Watan, a state-owned daily in Saudi Arabia, published an article in 2001 claiming that Jews plan to take over the world, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
But people who use religion as a switch to turn off their brains are not restricted to Islamic countries.
Here in the United States, the religious right - or "American Taliban," as advice columnist Dan Savage calls it - actively seeks to impose its sense of morality on the rest of the country without regard for other people's values and beliefs.
Though curtailing civil rights protections for gays and trying to have Christian religious beliefs taught in public school science classes are a far cry from setting fire to foreign embassies, these demonstrators have the same attitude the protestors in the Middle East and Europe do: It's their prerogative to make everyone live according to their religious beliefs.
Such a worldview only engenders intolerance.
One reason for the publication of the cartoons in Denmark is a sense among Europeans that Muslim immigrants seek to impose their values on Europe; in 2004, for example, a Moroccan-born Dutch citizen murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh because of a film that criticized Islam's treatment of women.
"The crisis over the cartoons has been an eye-opener and has shown that the culture clash we have been predicting for 10 years has come to pass," right-wing Danish politician Morten Messerschmidt recently told the International Herald Tribune. "These people we welcomed into our country have betrayed us."
Van Gogh's murderer doesn't represent all Muslims, just as Jerry Falwell doesn't represent all Christians.
Nevertheless, many Muslim immigrants in Europe forget to leave their anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia at home, while many Christians in America have yet to learn the meaning of "live and let live" when it comes to people who don't share their senses of morality.
People will have to learn that if they don't like caricatures of Muhammad, they can throw away the newspapers that publish them instead of trying to torch the embassies of the countries in which they are published. If they find homosexuality immoral, they can avoid the Castro District instead of using the ballot box to meddle with gay people's lives.
Only when that happens can we say we're a highly evolved species.
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
