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36 2 Jens, Anne, and Christian I n a d d I T I o n To what the international surveys tell us about indicators of economic prosperity or infant mortality rates, and along with my own personal musings while riding buses through Denmark, to get a fuller, richer, and more intimate sense of life in a society wherein religion is minimal , it is necessary to sit down and talk with as many people as possible who are from those societies. That is, in order to attempt to understand people’s beliefs and worldviews—which would ideally offer a glimpse into the culture and society from which they spring—you have to conversationally engage various people in open-ended interviews. In this chapter, I share excerpts from three such interviews. Jens I met Jens at a birthday party. It was the birthday party of one of my daughter’s friends, who was turning five. Kids were running around all over the place, chugging plastic cupfuls of soda and eating fistfuls of candy. I remember seeing this one particular two-year-old boy sauntering around the living room holding two lollipops—one in each hand—and while he was licking one, the family’s shaggy dog was going after the other. Isoughtrefugefromthefestivitiesbygoingintothekitchen,whereIgrabbed a beer and started talking with the three adults who had already gathered there. The topic of conversation was the “cartoon controversy.” A leading Danish newspaper had recently run several satirical cartoon drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammed, which subsequently set off massive protests around the world, leading to death and destruction in several countries, as well as the boycotting of Danish products by many Muslim nations. The participants in the kitchen conversation included a journalist, a cardiologist, and Jens. The three of them were generally critical of the Danish newspaper. They saw the publication of the cartoons as a deliberate attempt to goad and Jens, anne, and christian 37 provoke the country’s small Muslim minority. They claimed that Denmark is becoming more xenophobic every day, and that the newspaper which had published the cartoons, Jyllands-Posten, was helping to fuel that xenophobia through anti-Muslim articles, editorials, and now these satirical cartoons. Someone did point out, however, that the cartoons had initially been published months earlier, in September 2005—and had even been reprinted in an Arabic newspaper in Egypt—yet there had been no major protests or public outcry back then. It was only after a notorious, fundamentalist , Palestinian-born Imam living in Copenhagen took the cartoons (as well as several others that were extremely inflammatory and had not even been published in Jyllands-Posten) on a tour through the Middle East, showing them to religious and political leaders there, that the actual protests erupted in December. The three of them wanted to know what I, an American, thought of the whole affair. I said that I firmly believe in freedom of speech and freedom of the press, which explicitly means the freedom to satirize and even mock deeply respected institutions and widely cherished beliefs. While the publication of the cartoons may have been insensitive and even hostile in nature , so be it. If people of a given religion cannot deal with jokes, ridicule, and outright criticism of their prophets, well, then they cannot deal with life in a free, open democracy. Jens understood what I was saying, but he calmly disagreed. Even though he of course also had a great deal of respect for freedom of the press, he said that one cannot use that ideal to smugly justify deliberate acts of provocation . He felt that the newspaper was out of line—that the publication of the cartoons was unnecessary and unkind. And furthermore, he believed that to insult people’s religion just because you can is not the wisest of editorial choices. Satire may be an admirable and useful tool for a weak minority to employ against a powerful majority. But when a powerful majority uses satire to mock a weak minority, it is a pernicious act. A week later, I called up the parents who had hosted the birthday party and asked for Jens’s telephone number. Then I called him up and asked him if I could interview him for my book. He said that he wasn’t religious, so he didn’t think he would have anything to offer. I assured him that being nonreligious was fine—in fact, it was nonreligious people like him that I was interested in...

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