Codeine and Comics

Well, if at first you don't succeed, give up and go see a doctor. I finally decided last night that enough was enough as I continued to hack up a lung at 3:00 am, so I gave in and scheduled a doctor’s appointment today. The good news is I'm healthy except for the bug that is going around. The better news, he wrote me a prescription for cough syrup with codeine. I may actually sleep well tonight.

Well my meeting with the Presbytery was today, and other then the fact that I think I was way overdressed, everything went very well. I'm now officially enrolled with the Presbytery as an inquirer. They really only had a few questions for me that were easy enough to answer, and we were done pretty quickly. My visions of the Alito hearings were pretty far off, unless you were looking at the republican response to him.

Ok, so one of the hot topics this week has been the outrage in the Middle East over the comics depicting Mohammed that were printed in papers in Denmark and France. I have seen a couple of the comics (thank you Google), and I'll agree that they were probably done in poor taste. I would be upset over that kind of depiction of Christ. What I find most interesting though is how this event illustrates how little the western and Middle Eastern cultures understand each other. The protests across the Islamic world seem to be aimed at the governments of Europe, instead of at the individual newspapers. One of the foundations of western culture is the freedom from government journalists are given. I highly doubt that the French or Danish government even knew that these images were going to press, or that they had any legal right to stop them. Protesting the governments is not going to do any good.
I also have to point out that in many of the protests, the point of the comics are being made. The image most commonly referenced in the media is a comic depicting Mohammed wearing a lit bomb as a turban. With demonstrators yelling "Death to Denmark and Death to France" in the streets, they are not helping their cause. I'm not arguing their right to demonstrate, we Christians do that often as well. In the media also right now is Christian outrage over NBC announcing that Britney Spears is going to do a cameo on Will and Grace as a Christian television personality with a cooking show called "Cruci-fixins". What you don't see are Christians calling for the death of NBC producers, but don't tell Pat Robertson you never know what he may do next.