Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Bearing responsibility

You can't have missed the story of a British teacher who's in trouble for letting her class name a teddybear Mohammed.

It raises a couple of issues. The first is that the children themselves chose to name the bear Mohammed but escaped punishment. Why? Are they deemed not to have the mens rea to have committed such an act? If not, then why should the teacher have to take the responsibility on their behalf? Is her only crime here cultural ignorance? Or rather, ignorance of extremism?

One thing that has always amazed me about the Muslim extremists is their insecurity when it comes to the prophet. Why feel the need to stick up for someone like him? Don't you have a god to do that sort of thing? And why shouldn't his name be used in such a way? People name their children Mohammed; why shouldn't a child name a teddy bear Mohammed? I think it's missing the point, perhaps wilfully so, to claim it is 'making an image of the prophet'; it's just giving an inanimate object, albeit one with eyes, a nose and a mouth, a name - that's the top and bottom of it, and we really shouldn't think the children wanted the bear to be Mohammed himself. Just to have the same name.

As ever, it's the innocence of children that gets trampled by the herd of religious nuts. The kids surely saw nothing wrong in naming the bear, much as someone might name a child; perhaps they were, in a formative way, thinking about the naming process for a child when they become adults. Children don't see a minefield of upsetting the prophet or upsetting their religion; names are just names, and mimicking behaviour is harmless to them. The kids didn't see why it was wrong.

I don't really venture over to Sky News, knowing who owns it, but I dipped a toe in earlier - and I might come back after being pleasantly surprised to see this little nugget uncovered by their reporter:

There is no specific, or explicit ban in the Koran on images of Allah or the Prophet Mohammed - be they carved, painted or drawn. However, chapter 42, verse 11 of the Koran does say: "[Allah is] the originator of the heavens and the earth... [there is] nothing like a likeness of Him."

Now that's interesting, isn't it? It's not even in the Koran, just in an
extreme interpretation of it. Nice work from Sky to go to the original source material rather than just interviewing a wingnut and asking their views - no wonder, with that sort of journalism, that Rupert Murdoch wants to squash their independence and make them more like Fox.

One thing that Richard Dawkins, love him or hate him (and you'll no doubt have guessed my stance by the title of the blog) makes a very good point about is the religionisation of children. He has made a very powerful case for we adults not to label children as Christian or Muslim or Jewish children, but children of Christian parents; children of Muslim parents; children of Jewish parents. It's a distinction that is very important, and right. This story itself is pretty good evidence that children aren't born religious and can exist to a young age without being imprisoned by the tenets of their culture and superstition.

So when the BBC drone says

One Muslim teacher at the independent school for Christian and Muslim children, who has a child in Ms Gibbons' class, said she had not found the project offensive.

That's just plain wrong, I'm afraid. The children are no more Christian or Muslim than I am. The children are just children: they may learn about Mohammed the prophet or Jesus Christ in their religious studies, just as hopefully they will learn about biology and chemistry in their science classes. But they are not Muslims and Christians. Not yet. One day they may decide to be, as is their right and their free choice, one hopes, but not yet.

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