“The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought has become impossible.” – Salman Rushdie

For the most part we need our politics and religions to grow up.

I believe you can set an emotional age on a religion and political affiliation loosely based on how much of a fundamentalist you have to be to involve yourself.

Take Islam, the Latter Day Saints and Scientology

An ancient religion, a religion from the 19th century and a religion from the 20th century.

And how long they have existed has nothing to do with how old they act.

The Latter Day Saints around a decade ago made a satire comedy show about themselves and performed it to a worldwide audience at the International Edinburgh Arts Festival.

Whereas with Islam in some countries leaving the religion is a death sentence and of course, the fatwa demanding the death of Salman Rushdi is as mature as the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Scientology is well known for how it reacts towards people who leave and speak out against abuse. Also their attempts to maintain the ‘secret’ that they are an alien religion in the name of the internet is laughable.

They all act cultish in some respect but so does every religion and military… put it this way when folk is dressing up in costumes (sometimes called uniforms) and parading around about their own self-importance you’re dealing with an emotional age of about 10. So religions and armies attract a lot of emotionally immature people and the most immature tend to end up in charge of things.

Which is fine until you have a man with machine guns in a comic office (Charlie Hebdo) or when you have Scientology defending an accused rapist by attacking his victims (Danny Masterson). This is not the acts of individual fanatics, this comes as a direct order from the top.

Latter Day Saints do have some ‘you can not leave’ vibe to their community but the leadership can embrace where they are at fault in society’s eyes and make fun of themselves out of it. I think that is key, they take themselves very seriously but they don’t need the world to. Which shows some degree of emotional maturity.

The Nazi’s and right of right in politics such speak very loudly about how insecure they oviously are. By the time you get to Antifa again it is just 10 year thuhgs but it is grown ups doing it.