This cartoon is hilarious until you realize such theocratic legal systems actually exist in the modern world — and that evangelical Christians with every waking breath are laboring to create such a system right here in America.
Indeed, religious edicts such as Christianity’s foundational Ten Commandments are the law of the land today in places like Muslim-majority Saudi Arabia, whose government is founded on and resolutely follows the injunctions of the Islamic holy book, the Quran.
In our own country, the United States of America, Christian Right fundamentalists believe all Americans should be required to follow biblical laws regarding how to think and behave, many mandating sexual repression. Fortunately, our Founding Fathers created our nation as a secular republic with a “wall of separation” between church and state.
Not so in Saudi Arabia, where the five daily prayer times mandated by the prophet Mohammad in the Quran are enforced by the mutawah, informal religious police agents operating under the government’s official Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The actual police enforce closure of all businesses during prayer times, barking out commands from loudspeakers on their patrol cars as they drive up and down streets.
No kidding.
So, while taking the Lord’s name in vain may or coveting your neighbor’s John Deere riding mower may not be illegal at the moment in America, rest assured, evangelicals are trying mightily to make it happen.
Oh, wait, blasphemy still is illegal in some U.S. states.
Cartoon/Atheist Alliance of America
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See full Kirkus review, HERE. Find “3,001 Arabian Days” on Amazon, HERE