The topic was religion, or something to that effect, and came about in the car, on our way home from a family dinner. My dad brought up the movie "Bruce Almighty" and how surprised he was that no one protested a film in which a pretentious comic played God, when just months earlier thousands protested a cartoon which presented an image of a religious prophet. I had to think about that for a minute - on some level I suppose it isn't improbable for people to have protested Jim Carrey's performance as blasphemous, but that would never have occured to me. Yet I was as offended as many by the Danish cartoons that made headlines awhile back. Well first of all, there were some protests to this movie. It was banned in Egypt and Malaysia for portraying God as a human being. There were some other mumblings from other small groups as well, but nothing to the extent that occurred recently. Why?

The first thing that came to mind was intent. Clearly, there was nothing in Bruce Almighty that was intended to offend people on any essential level. They stayed away from heavy theological questions, or even any concrete elements that might make it overtly denominational. It was interesting premise with some cute ideas, and was in it for a bit of a laugh. Contrast that to the cartoons that were not only meant to offend, and gravely, but were clearly targeted to Islam. Two significant differences. The non-denominational aspect of the movie struck a chord for my father. He said that it didn't matter what denomination was represented as there is only one God, and everyone knows that. I find that difficult to accept. Perhaps the religious teachings tells us that there is only one God, but do we really believe that? Who among us doesn't secretly think their God is best? Why else would people be so careful to differentiate between "God" or "Allah", and find other ways of making sure people know which religion's being one is talking about? Perhaps that can also explain the lack of emotional outpouring to Bruce Almighty - no one felt there was a finger of disdain pointed at them, at their beliefs, and their religious identity.

My father also made the point that the people who protested the cartoons were doing so from the stance of idolization, representing God or his prophets in human form. While that may be the case to some extent, it is not sufficient to explain the anger that arose which was almost personal in nature. To me it seems that they were protesting the content, the political nature of the drawing that suggested an Islam-terrorist link that many Muslims have had to contend with over the course of the past several years.

It is really difficult for me to take my father's arguments seriously on this matter. Truly, I don't even know what he was arguing. He was surprised there was no protest to Bruce Almighty because it was clearly idolatory, despite the fact it was a relatively neutral piece of art. He was surprised at the protests to the cartoons, and found them ridiculous, because it was a piece of art arising from "the imagination of the cartoonist". Yet, last year he and I got into a very heated debate about the assasination of Theo van Gogh, who was killed for putting in one of his movies a scene where script from the Koran wrapped around the naked body of a woman. My father nearly justified it, saying he should have known what he was up against before making that movie, which was inherently offensive to Islam, and not excusable by it's artistic status. Someone drawing a cartoon is depicting something from his imagination to express a meaning. Someone putting the real script of the religious writing on the body of a naked woman (!), that is sacrilege and intolerable; there is no interpretation there, no meaning. His implication after all this was that van Gogh essentially asked for it. I can't accept that, and I don't really understand the three different reactions to what I feel is essentially the same argument.