Adam’s blogbox: I could give a Presbyterian shit about the Pope or the Muslims, but there are 2 billion Christians, and a billion Muslims, so …

... in my usual thorough way, I’ve collected all the most interesting pieces about this Pope/Muslim flap among three billion people on earth. Three billion: that’s half of all of us -- hey, isn’t that just so absolutely very terrific? Now you know why we're such a mess, half of us have an omnipotent imaginary friend.

Anyway, today we have a balanced blog, even though we're covering only one subject, instead of our usual five or six:
1. From the Catholic side of the flap, a Vatican correspondent reports on the Pope's true intentions.
2. From the Muslim side, Tariq Ali questions the Pope's intentions.
3. Three pieces about the whole what-the-Pope-said and how-Muslims-are-pissed business, with an interesting Muslim perspective for all you ex-Christian ignoramuses like me.
4. From the Muslim-suspicious Western side, author Martin Amis.

And for those of you who give less of a blue shit than I do, there’s a piece about speed-dating for Muslims to start with -- just so you can read something about Muslims you might actually relate to (especially if you’re a moderate Muslim, like all the US Muslims -- with the possible exception of the black Farrakan Muslims, remember those guys -- who could give a shit about Muslims getting their knickers in a twist about something the fucking Pope heaved out of his Germanic ass).

I will leave you with this bizarro Christian thought: despite the fact that Catholics have scapegoated the Jews for offing Jesus, the Christian religion is the only religion on earth that sacrificed their own God, i.e. scapegoated God Himself by crucifying Him. The Muslims didn’t nail Mohammed to a cross. The Buddhists didn’t hang Buddha from his fat balls. Question: did Christ obligingly die for our sins, or did we avenge ourselves on Him because He created us in such misery? Listen, a religion that does ultimate violence on its own God either means to cleanse itself completely from violence, or prepare itself for ultimate violence -- which was maybe why that Christian nation, the Germans, holocausted the Jews. (The Pope, incidentally, is German.) Anyway, Christianity is more interesing than Islam, because it's got a picture of its God in a sadomasochistic pose as its central symbol, and Islam forbids any pics of God or the prophet. This is a video age, where the fuck are the Islam videos? Bad PR, guys. You even cover up your women, for chrissake.