Big Day for Blasphemy

Browsing the BBC RSS feed today turned up all sorts of news relating to Blasphemy around the globe. And not all of it involved religion per se:


There was the story about the government withdrawing a statement about the significance of Lord Ram's Bridge between India and Sri Lanka in relation to a proposed coastal waterway.

News about a bounty being set for those who published a Cartoon of the Prophet made me glad I once got a chance to see an etching by Dali that is part of a series portraying scenes from Dante's Inferno ... as art rather than part of a religious controversy.

A German Cardinal described a new stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral as entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), a term with clear Nazi connotations in Germany. Oddly, this seems to be an example of act of civil blasphemy by a religious person, which must have caught him by surprise.

Gates says a 40% cut in US troop levels is possible by the end of 2008. When a Democrat calls for a reduction of troop levels by that amount in a year or so, he or she gets accused of a policy of "cut and run".

Greenspan attacks Pres. Bush on the US economy, while the Dollar hits new low against the Euro. We will have to wait for the Sunday talk shows or his Monday appearance on the Today show (and lots of others, I expect) pushing his book to see if the connection between these two stories is missed. After all, the blasphemy of a Darling of the Conservatives attacking a "conservative" President is not unrelated to the blasphemy of a "conservative" President backing massive deficit spending by a "conservative" Republican Congress. Will this lead to an insistence by the current Congress that Pres. Bush find some taxes to pay for the extra money he needs to pay for Iraq?