Je suis Charlie

I've been them from the very beginning of this blog.  And I've had my share of threats, though almost none of them have been taken seriously.  Besides mockingly humorous and sometimes offensive words, for almost the full ten years that Brains and Eggs has existed, I've posted the best of mostly American cartoonists poking their special brand of fun at the wealthy, the powerful, and the well-connected.

Mockery of which includes the invisible man who lives in the clouds, raped a virgin to give you his son as your savior -- he died for your sins, you know -- and still judges your lifetime for signs of sinful behavior that would invalidate your admission into his nirvana.

Religion is at the heart of these assassinations, of course.  But let's not limit the blame to just one set of fanatics.  Religion is also to blame when a president says God speaks to him and tells him to start a war in a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in his own.  When you have someone that stupid and evil in charge, you just can't blame it all on the devil.  Oh, maybe you can blame Satan for a vice-president who authorizes torture of the people who live in the country that was invaded on false pretenses, and later says confidently he would do it all again.  You might even extend some blame to the president who followed that one for not prosecuting them both for torture.  Mostly because torture is certainly going to be authorized by a future president, once that still-to-be-electorally-determined one sees you can get away with it.

But I digress.  This is about people who are so insane about their religion that their Bible tells them that if somebody makes fun of their god, that's a death sentence.  No decent, respectable religion or holy book would say that, but that's what they hear.  In their heads.

So that's not a world the rest of us really want to live in, but the weapons we use to fight for and maintain our freedom aren't going to be made and purchased from Lockheed Martin.  (Thank goodness.)  Our guns and bombs are pens and keyboards.

And we're going to keep on firing them.

"Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon: laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug, push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

-- Mark Twain

Thanks to the Lewisville Texan Journal for one of the toons above, and for being less dramatic and more succinct than me.