One of the great things about this country is that everybody gets to decide for themselves what religion they are.

Obama says he's Christian, he's been attending a Christian church for 20 years, and thus, he's a Christian. Just move on, people.

There is no left-wing double standard, that is simply a RW talking point. Peace and tolerance to all is the only lw standard I know of. The so called Muslim "hypersensitivity" is way over blown, it is, in the west no different from the sensitivity of other religious groups.  Violent protests only take place in the developing world, where violent protests are common - be it over pictures of prophets or the price of vegetables. Try pissing on Christ in the Philippines or Uganda and see what happens.

Which leads me to an interesting story - when I was in India I saw a wall along the railway tracks painted with pictures of various deities - hindu ones and Christ as well. I asked why and was told it was to stop people from urinating or spitting on the wall. 

I think the suggestion was to open a gay bar across the now renamed Park 51 project, not a blog.

I have one Saudi friend who lives here. Studied engineering at the Colorado School of the Mines realized that he was gay and chose not to go back to Jeddah. His father disowned him and has told him that he does return he will kill him. His mother risks her life and goes to great lengths to stay in touch with her son in secret. Gay honour killing in the Islamic world are not uncommon though certainly honour killings of women are far more prevalent. 5,000 a year in Pakistan, the worst offender. Iraq now has the dubious honour of leading the world in gay homicides overtaking Brazil a country that is 9 times larger.

This whole debate is so troubling and I'm very conflicted. I'm not keen on Islam but I'm not keen on religion generally and I have an exceptional dislike of and contempt for proselytizing monotheistic religions. Read Jonathan Kirsch's God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism or the more scholarly Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. The Freeman book is a classic clearly demonstrating the deleterious influence of Paulite Christianity upon the Hellenistic world and ultimately upon Western Civ. Most people even today think that Christianity is a product of Western thought but it's not. It's an import and one that came to dominate but one that is increasingly out of sync as secular humanist values return to the fore. 

In the ancient world, it was a virtue to think for oneself. Christianity killed that aspect so prevalent in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. But Paul of Tarsus, a Jew with ties with the Essenes, successfully implanted his views on what was then the infant Christian communities in the Hellenistic world. Paul reasserted the ancient Jewish beliefs and began the three century long transformation of Christianity. First came the ascetics such Origen of Alexandria who castrated himself so that he could preach the gospel to women. In Greek culture, sexuality was to be celebrated. In Abrahamic ones, it is to be repressed. Men could not interact with unrelated women. But it is the rise of neoplatonism that wove Christian Semitic ideology into the Greco-Roman world that proved the final blow. Neoplatonism first under Plotinus, who again had a very Abrahamic view that all sex is dirty, pushed the view that faith comes before and trumps empirical evidence. For 1700 years, this has been the battle within Western thought. It is a battle we continue to see first hand every time say evolution vs creationism is discussed. Evolution is based on the empirical study on the natural world as the Greeks espoused (empiricism and skepticism are Greek words and concepts) while creationism is taken on faith. There are those who try to bridge both worlds. On the one hand these folks look to science for answers about the natural world but then they succumb to fear and look to faith on matters they perceive as spiritual. You cannot do both. But this was the leap of logic that neoplatonism accomplished.  In fact, neoplatonism destroyed Western empiricism for almost thousand years. The fight to restore science to primacy has been a long and arduous battle.

Ironically, the Islamic world fared better at first in this regard. When Islam exploded out of Arabia in the 7th century, it discovered the remnants of the Hellenistic world in Alexandria. For the next six centuries, empiricism did thrive in pockets of the Muslim world but over the long haul the reach of faith closed the Islamic mind to reason. 

But the matter now at hand revolves another Western virtue. Tolerance is a core Western value but there are limits to tolerance. One cannot be tolerant with the wholly intolerant. This is true with Islam as it is true with racism. Tolerance is a two way street. You give tolerance so as to receive it back. You can not extend tolerance to those who would reject it.

Yet at the same time I have hard time painting all of Islam with such a broad stroke. I've lived in Indonesia and spend months at a time in Islamic West Africa. But I've also been to Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco. So I know that there are vast differences within Islam.  I almost took a job last year in Saudi Arabia but in the end I couldn't live in Riyadh. Had the job been in al-Bahah or in Jeddah I would have taken it with some trepidation but also knowing that even within Saudi Arabia there are differences within Islamic practices. But Wahhabi, Deobandi and Shia Islam should be perceived as threats to our way of life though I certainly believe that co-existence with the Islamic world is not just possible but necessary. While I am cognizant of the harsh life for women and minorities in places like Afghanistan and Somalia, to impose Western values by force is equally wrong. People will defend their culture to the death. Just look at the extremes to which evangelicals in this country are going. They built their own parallel country within the country in their desperate attempt to fend off the advances of secular humanism which they believe to be evil, ungodly and non-Western.

But I view Christianity as little different than Islam. Both have produced "kinder, gentler forms" such as the Quakers and Sufism but that's because their adherents accentuate the positive and disregard the negative that's clearly there. Leviticus is hard to deny just as the hadiths that call for murder or non-believers are impossible to deny. It's actually remarkable how similar Christianity and Islam are in their missionary zeal. Judaism, at least, doesn't seek forced conversions.

Abrahamic religions are not Western, they are Semitic. Semitic culture was a desert culture with a very negative view of sex and a very paternalistic view of male-female relationships where women are viewed as property with few rights. Just to bring how pervasive this notion still is, Phyllis Schlalfy believes that rape within marriage does not exist. A husband can demand sex on demand and the wife has no recourse but to submit to intercourse. That's a Semitic belief. Hellenistic culture was far different in its view on sex, on human relationships generally, and most of all Hellenic beliefs are based on the view that natural world can observed and studied. Abrahamic thought rests on the belief that everything is God-given. In short Hellenism is based on the human power of reason, and Abrahamic religions are based on faith. Faith is, of course, entirely irrational because it dictates contradicting what you yourself can observe.

I'm not usually so blunt, but I've tired of these endless religious debates. other off. With all the pressing problems we face, we are spending countless hours on a cultural center that happens to have a prayer room facing towards Mecca. But I am more disturbed by the likes of Pam Geller and Robert Spencer who claim they are defending Western Culture when they are most assuredly not. Geller and Spencer represent everything that Hellenism decried.

"Perhaps one doesn't see much satire of Hinduism or Buddhism for the simple fact that those religions are more sympatico with a progressive-libertarian worldview."

You've got to be joking. 

I think your making the same mistake of confusing pop culture as some sort of evidence of a "leftist double-standard". Jay Leno, Russel Peters and the like aren't necessarily leftist - they are entertainers, and their satire is based on their targeted audience. "The Left" has no control over pop culture, so lets not do what conservatives do and confuse the two together. For evidence of a double standard you need to look at actual left policy organisations such as HRW, Amnesty, the ACLU etc. And as far as I can see they criticize Islam aplenty.