"My religion's better than yours!"

Apparently Swedish artist LarsVilks was attacked during a presentation on free speech at a Swedish university yesterday.  Here's the video:

Ah pepper spray, so much fun.


Vilks is the guy who drew a cartoon of Muhammad as a dog, incurring a mass of Muslim hate.


I found out about this on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's website, complete with a beautiful little chunk written by Mr. Bobby Henderson, the founder of the CoFSM:

This latest attack bugs me a lot.  Here’s the disclaimer: I’ve received tons of hatemail and many threats and had more than a couple disturbing run-ins with religious nuts, and few if any of those nuts were Muslim.  By and large all the Muslims I know are awesome and not at all nutty.  I find Christian nuts the creepiest of all the religious nuts.  But I am way more scared of nutty Muslims than nutty Christians.

Lars has become a symbol for the right to criticize religion.  That’s a right we can’t lose.  I don’t believe this is about religion or values, I think it’s about dogma.  There is nothing inherently evil or wrong with what nutty Christians or Muslims believe – what’s wrong is that it’s no longer a set of beliefs, it’s a set of Truths that can’t be questioned, and that’s a dangerous thing.  Lars is completely right that it’s important to be able to criticize religion.

He's completely correct.  The ability to criticize religion is of utmost importance, just like the right to criticize pretty much anything else in a public setting.  I'm not going to go into a church and start screaming at the priest that he's an idiot, and I even show them the utmost respect any time I happen to run into one, but that doesn't mean I agree with pretty much any organized religion, especially rights crushing backwards ones.


(My disclaimer: yup, "rights crushing backwards ones" is pretty much directed at hardcore Muslim extremism.  I like boobies, among other things.  I'm not too worried about any attacks though, I put on a couch colored uniform once a month with a certain flag on it, so I'm pretty much boned as far as that goes anyway.  Nothing new.)