Ouch!
Despite the offensiveness of this brief diatribe, its anonymous author has a point. Christians face a serious challenge. While it may make sense to them to deify a first century Palestinian apocalypticist and to worship him as a god, there are many people on the planet who look at what they do, scratch their heads in bewilderment, and decline to follow suit. Traditionally, Christians view the rejection of their religion by others as evidence of a "hardness of heart." And when they ceased being a persecuted minority and took the reigns of the Roman state, Christians went on the offensive: purging their own ranks of heretics and seeking out non-conformists and torturing and killing them. In various ways, this impulse to violence on the part of Christians continues to the present day.
After the Second World War, some Christians felt chastened by the orgy of violence that their German co-religionists had visited upon European Jews and a new, post-holocaust form of ecumenicism set in. But it appears that the warming of Christian-Jewish relations in the last half century has opened the door to a new form of "anti-semitism" directed towards Muslims. Christian attacks upon the Prophet Muhammad and defended as "free speech" fall into this category. In my view, such attacks do indeed constitute instances of free speech and must be defended as such. But let us not be naive: it is free speech exercised with the intent to wound. And when individuals who have been wounded succumb to the visceral impulse to strike back, it is disingenuous (to say the least) to play the victim.
"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Galatians 6:7).
In my copy of the New Testament, Jesus is recalled to have said, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you" (Matthew 5:44--if you don't believe me, look it up). Perhaps I have come into possession of an unexpurgated edition. Many people who identify themselves as Christians do not appear to find these words in their copy of Matthew's gospel, or do not feel that Jesus intended his words to apply to them. As an Alfarabian Abrahamic pluralist and practicing Tolstoyan I can only say: the gospel writer wrote those words and attributed them to Jesus in a sermon he is portrayed to have preached to his disciples. If you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, it would seem logical to presume that he intended those words for you.
As the diatribist says: "Makes perfect sense."
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