in actuality as a lifelong nonbeliever, I share your mistrust of, and alienation from, the whole monotheism trip.  the world would be better off, perhaps, without it -- though the Soviet flavour of thug managed to do some pretty awful deeds in the name of an allegedly rationalist and atheist ideology, which imho just goes to show that you can have a murderous cult without a god.  true confession: I spent much of my high school lunch breaks baiting evangelicals (in order to do this effectively I had to read quite a lot of their Bible!)...  that said (i.e. we are on the same side of the net ideologically here)...

I note that Christian demagogues adduce the Soviet  government's crimes against the people as evidence that atheism itself is brutish, cruel, stupid, wicked and whatnot -- much as we who dislike/distrust religion adduce the crimes done in the name of various gods as evidence that religion itself is brutish, cruel, stupid and wicked.  I am not sure either argument stands up better than the other, though one is of course more congenial to my own belief system :-)  maybe what we should say is that sociopaths are an enduring reality, that power corrupts, and that even the most idealistic ideology can be used as a stalking horse by sadists and bullies.  name me one, just one, major ideology -- religious or not -- that hasn't been used as a flag to wrap cruelty in...?  is "religion" really the problem, or is it human beings?  the latest neuroscience disturbingly suggests that even when we think we're being rational, we're not...  so how much high cranial ground can we nonbelievers really lay claim to?

I think when we picture ourselves (or the taunting cartoonists) as Davids of rationality contending with lumbering, brutish Goliaths of monotheism, we leave out the other side of the picture that I was trying to paint in -- ourselves (the West) as gloating conquerors dragging the toppled idols of their colonised victims through the mud.  every imperial power has done this -- the literal or figurative pissing on the losers' gods, the profanation of the temple, whatever.  and as a gesture of colonial contempt I do dislike it and feel that, as with repeated Israeli provocations, vandalism, crop destruction in the OT, it only deepens the wound and postpones any possibility of making peace.

and let us face it, the feelings that are being stirred up in the proletariat by this type of cartoon are not about a lofty Voltairian disdain for doctrinal religion per se, they are about making fun of Arab-looking people with a "weird foreign religion".  they are playing to xenophobia, ignorance, BNP-like tendencies all over Euroland.  in that sense a present danger does exist, since Muslims are a small minority embedded in a large population during a time of economic instability (which is about like being committed to a land war in Asia, in the catalogue of unenviable strategic situations).

on momentary reflection I think it's indefensible to suggest that the person doing the taunting is the one who gets to define what taunting is!  that would be like... well, like a white person getting to decide there's nothing wrong with the word "n*gger", or a chain smoker getting to decide whether cig smoke is legimately annoying to a nonsmoker.  if someone is offended or insulted by a behaviour and we deliberately flaunt it in their face -- puffing smoke at them after they have asked us not to smoke, for example? -- I don't think it gets us off the hook to say "well, no reasonable person [as defined by me] would object to that behaviour, therefore my behaviour is not annoying and I am not taunting."   what is indisputable is that the intent is to provoke and offend.

is there really no "objective" danger in the public expression of contempt and scorn for an entire race and religion, when Anglo/Euro/US troops are in Iraq right now shooting "sand n*ggers" on sight, and when half the US public believes that the Koran is a bomb-making manual?  when persons whose only offence is having an Arab-sounding name are put on watch lists, when Muslim men are "disappeared" and held without trial for years, flown secretly to black gulags in Eastern Europe, tortured -- and when the majority of the AngloChristian world appears to accept these abuses tamely or even with approval -- Muslims are unreasonable in feeling endangered?

all cultural products must be seen in context, and the current context is a resurgence of the Anglo/Euro drive to control and expropriate the Arab/Muslim world, and a focussing of the xenophobic/racist tendencies in the US and Euroland on the new "enemy du jour," the Arab/Muslim stereotype (as it was on the "Japs" in WWII, and so forth).  I think we have to view this incident within that context, as part of a pattern of historical events and not an ahistorical textbook case of absolute free speech principles.  

one of the basic principles of a civil society, it seems to me, is to extend courtesy even to the habits of mind which one cannot understand or genuinely respect, i.e. for me to refrain from shouting "what utter nonsense!" when my Jewish friends keep kosher and attend Temple, and to keep a straight face and not mock or hoot when a Christian friend tells me she has asked God for advice on a difficult matter.  do we want to be Right, Right, Right, or do we want to stay friends?  must everyone think exactly as you and I do, before we will extend them respect or courtesy?

it is a thorny problem -- absolute principles vs good manners and practical peacemaking.  I have not solved it.  but I continue to assert that the motives behind this propagation of a set of banal racist cartoons are not as disinterested or principled as they are made out to be.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...