Monday, December 3, 2007

More Proof Religion Creates Nutjobs, or Something More Basic?

The world had its weekly WTF moment earlier when a British schoolteacher working at a private high school in Sudan was arrested and threatened with death for permitting 20 of her 23 charges to name a stuffed teddy bear "Mohammad", a name which is also the most popular boy's name in the country.  On cue, religious nutjobs took to the street demanding that Gillian Gibbons be killed on the grounds of "insulting Islam".

Perhaps I should not be continually surprised by the ability of religion to turn civilized, sentient people into murderous knucklewalkers.  But I still am.  This case makes no sense, and makes you wonder what the motives for demanding the death of Gibbons really are.  We are all aware of how viciously misogynous Islam is -- most Judeo-Christian religions are, for that matter.  Nobody demanded the death of any of the students, who were raised in Islam and so should know better, and presumably male, since most Muslim countries pretty much proclaim women to be anathema upon puberty.  The fact that the teacher was female and Western likely also whetted their taste for blood.  I'm inclined to think that had the teacher been American she would be dead already (though I would hope that any American woman would have far more intelligence than to choose to work in a country like Sudan).

So is this really a case of Muslim overreaction, or are there people in Sudan who just want an excuse to kill?