Happy New Year! Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

It seems....   And that is the mistake we often make, that it merely seems and we believe it to be fact.  Because the truth is completely different, and, as Will Rogers once said, "All we know is what we read in the newspapers."

I hear it said often, and know it is believed by many, that "Islamists" and Jihadists" are only a tiny fraction of the many numbered adherents of the faith founded 1400 or so years ago by the Prophet Muhammed; peace be upon him as the saying goes.  I hear it said further, and know it is believed by many, that the root of all of the Islamic acts of terror across the world is economic and cultural discrimination and exploitation by the West against the East, the North against the South, which really has nothing at all to do with religion.  I hear it said and I wonder about it.  I really do.

Then I read something like this and all of sudden the clarity of truth breaks through my wondering fog.

There is a woman in Pakistan under sentence of death by stoning for doing or saying something she is accused of doing or saying by some other women who would not even drink water from a bowl she had put to her lips; simply because she is not a co-religionist.  She is condemned for the same crime which caused the death of Christ.  She dares to call herself the child of God, and dares to say that God loves us all as His children.  She seems to be the proximate cause of the current roiling, though with things in that part of the world one ever wonders if any cause is needed for their insanities.  Let the Pope pray for her.

You will read that in Pakistan no one has yet been executed for saying or doing such a thing as blaspheming Islam.  Some have been jailed, scores have been lynched, hundreds beaten, thousands bullied, intimidated, made to live in fear.  But none have been executed.  I suppose that is merely a matter of timing and the diligence of the competent authorities; neighbors being more alert to pro-active measures there; ordinary folks saving the government the trouble and expense of trial and execution.  At the least their sense of civic duty is to be commended.

But, Pakistan is a special case, you may argue.  This is true.  It has a "Blasphemy Law" on the books, and while I write there are minorities, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, who are agitating for its repeal.  What is also true is that the law itself was simply a device to keep a dictator in power, a crumb thrown to the few "islamists" who held the balance some years ago.  The point is a valid one, but the question which needs asking is why were the fundamentalists in such a position then?  What has happened since?

But do not bother yourself with Pakistan.  Think rather of Turkey, long a "secular" nation, though more than 99 percent of its population is Muslim.  It is slowly being turned into a state which will be almost indistinguishable from Iran.  The persecution of religious minorities, and they are almost exclusively Christian in Turkey, though they number almost nothing, is becoming a commonplace.  Murders and beatings are common.  Curtailment of religious activity and intimidation are allowed by the police.

Of course such things do not make headlines here.  We long ago grew tired of hearing about them.  It takes a cartoon in a Danish newspaper, the assassination of a film maker in Holland to make us get up and go to the window to pay attention to the noise in the street.  And then?  And then we have the weather to pay attention to, and what we are to do about traffic.  Those people, it seems, will always do those things to each other.  Haven't they been for centuries about the same business?

Of what interest are the lives of a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand people half a world a way to us?  That churches are burned and blown up, people machine gunned at Mass, taken from their homes and beaten to death, torched in the street by their neighbors, that ministers and priests, nuns and children are gunned down while the police stand by, that authorities sit on folded hands cannot persuade us that what we have been told is, is not.  Besides, there is the Super Bowl.  In Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and so many other places, if these things happen it has nothing to do with religion.  It is merely a matter of centuries of Western exploitation, and excusable for that very reason.  Let the Pope pray for them.

The distance between the minds that produce that "explanation" and what often happens here is short and straight.  Consider this:  an ad which would get you killed in Pakistan if it was about Islam, or this, another ad from the same producers, whose ignorance of and contempt for Christianity is staggering.  Many are hurt and angry at such things.  None seek the death of the makers.  Some will sputter, some will pray, some will promise never to use what they are promoting in their ads.  How does this happen?

I am led to stop wondering, even, about that. Finally, what I no longer wonder too much about is the gradual decline into the shadows of the one thing which has been responsible for the freedoms under which such contempt is allowable, the very Christianity which is mocked.  Millions have orphaned themselves, here, laughing in their comfortable ignorance.  Well, they might say mockingly, "Let the pope pray for us."  For it seems that such things matter no more, if ever they did to the agile minds producing Super Bowl ads, and ignoring the deaths of thosands.

The blood of the murdered, the martyred thousands, waters the fields, their bodies the fertile ground in which the seed grows.  Let the people pray.  Amen.