More on "Tolerance?"

First, I'd like to thank "Anonymous" for his or her comments. Except for my wife (who occasionally reads my blog), I sometimes wonder if I'm just whistling in the dark. :)

I think that last night's comments deserve some more discussion. I can see that Anonymous and others could think that I'm condoning the murder of Theo Van Gogh. I'm not, nor would I condone the murders of any of the other "artists" I mentioned last night (Salman Rushdie, Elisabeth Ohlson, Andres Serrano, and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti). The Moroccans who murdered Van Gogh should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Did Van Gogh deserve to die for making his film? No. Did he deserve to be punished for making his film? Absolutely. Van Gogh deserved censorship, jail time and caning, but not death.

The country I currently live in, Singapore, has a well-deserved reputation for being a nanny state. While I and other Singaporeans would like to see the laws here changed to loosen certain controls the government maintains over society, I think the government has some policies that are very good for the maintenance of this society. One is an emphasis on maintaining religious harmony to prevent civil unrest. Singapore has a lot of religions practiced here: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sikhism, and so on. Such diversity in religions is a powderkeg, and could be easily ignited under the wrong circumstances. Singapore (and other governments in this region) clamp down hard to prevent society from erupting in religious rioting. I applaud these efforts.

The problem is, Western society - in the name of free speech - allows "artists" to denigrate religions if they so choose. A government like Singapore's would have prevented each of the "artists" named above from publishing or displaying their "art" in public. Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" was banned not only in Muslim Malaysia (as one might expect), but also by secular Singapore (it's still banned here). I suspect that any of the above "artists" (or others who help to publish or display their work here) would have been jailed and caned, in addition to being censored, if they had tried to make their "art" public in Singapore. This is one of the reasons why I was happy to see the other article on Egypt, in which both Muslim and Christian officials are able to censor the "poison" of anti-religious "art."

Theo Van Gogh was an idiot, and I don't mourn his death at all. He strikes me as the type of person who should appear in the "Darwin Awards." Islam wasn't the only religion he had publicly criticized in his "art," but he found out the hard way that Muslims take their religion a little more seriously than, say, the Christians whom he had criticized. Even so, he isn't entirely to be blamed for his death: Western society and government (the Dutch government in particular) bears some of the blame as well. Western society needs to reconsider its position regarding censorship and religious tolerance. Because tolerance in the name of free speech is going to continue to lead to the deaths of stupid "artists" who are intolerant of the religions of others.