As ever, Ches gets it right, as does Fr Hunwicke.
We must call out the actions of the swinish* terrorists in France for the cowardly, unmanly and wicked barbarities that they are.
But I shan’t be calling myself “Charlie”: the editors of that journal used their right to free speech to revoltingly slander the beliefs of their fellow citizens; their killers certainly had no right to take their lives and deserve the uttermost condemnation, but we should be wary of affording martyrs’ palms to members of a corrupt elite for whom the Faith is just another joke.
* Please note that this is an idiom: most pigs of my acquaintance have been better than the “Moslems” who murdered people in France.
Catholicism Pure & Simple 
“to revoltingly slander the beliefs of their fellow citizens” But you believe that Islam is the devil’s way of distracting people away from God?
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No, Adrian, Islam is the Devil’s attempt to turn good people to Satan.
God is more powerful than Satan, which is why He leads good people to Himself even if they are inclined to devil-founded religions like Islam and atheism; this is why one finds many good and virtuous Mahometans and the odd good atheist.
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But I shan’t be calling myself “Charlie” …
I think it’s hard for those who are outside France or French Culture to really understand this rather strange satirical journal, but even so — I was in two minds myself.
I don’t like the paper, and this dislike has existed since well before my Baptism — but even so, I cannot recall an issue, not even any of their most objectionably hateful ones, devoid of something well worth reading on its inside pages — and I mean reading, not chortling about uncomfortably.
Much of the strangeness of Charlie-Hebdo is due to the fact that it’s the result of a truce between two teams and two editorial approaches — the in-your-face toilet humour of the ex-Hara Kiri crowd (the Brits here could try and visualise this as being what one might expect if the authors of Viz comic were to start publishing a weekly political commentary magazine using the same sort of humour) ; and a far more thoughtful French intellectual satire, as if the worst, or more satirical, or less strictly journalistic bits of Private Eye were excerpted from that publication and dumped side by side with the abovementioned toilet humour, alongside the occasional more serious piece.
The Economist who was murdered last week in that attack was a weekly contributor to the journal, and his chronicle was nearly always thoughtful, well-written, and instructive.
Of course, the outright religious hatred of some other contents published in Charlie-Hebdo can only be reviled.
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I would not be calling myself Charlie myself — had I not come up with the idea of using the Arabic letter nün in the slogan — so : “Je sنis Charlie” — so then expressing the slogan in a manner more correctly condemnatory of ALL Al Qaeda and ISIS -provoked hate crimes.
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Why doesn’t God destroy Satan then?
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Are you asking God to deprive us of Free Will ?
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No. Only Satan.
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You haven’t thought it through — Satan is not evil through his nature, which is angelic, but through his misuse of his own God-given Free Will ; whereas our Free Will — ours and the angels’ — is limited by God only by the impossibilities inherent to the Laws of Creation and by our abilities to choose to sacrifice that Free Will to God, via our Religion and our moral conduct.
True, God can also choose to intervene directly through our own actions, including our words, through His Providence — but Providence can be no more straightforwardly coercive upon Satan’s Free Will than it is on ours ; else God would be exactly as the Islamists imagine Him to be, and the Incarnation of His Christ would have been totally unnecessary to His Creation.
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If Satan is not evil through his nature, why does he misuse his ‘free will’ as he does?
Choosing to be good and to follow God is as much an employment of ‘free will’ as behaving badly. Isn’t it in our self interest to follow God?
And, if Satan has been causing so much trouble for so long a time, I can’t see an argument against God destroying him.
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why does he misuse his ‘free will’ as he does?
Ask him, not me …
I can’t see an argument against God destroying him
Do you want God to become a tyrant, and to decide everyone’s actions in their place ?
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No, only Satan – that would hardly be tyrannical.
You mean to say you want Satan to continue causing unimaginable turmoil and suffering? For ever?
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Only God can see the future — only God can see forever.
Or do you consider your own judgment in these cosmic affairs to be superior to the Judgment of the Creator ?
Why you cannot simply put your trust in God is beyond me — but your judgment of Him ; against Him, even ; is ungodly pure & simple.
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What next ?
I dunno — why did God not rid us of Adolf Hitler in his crib ?
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Second-guessing God is the ultimate non-starter — His Understanding is inconceivable to us.
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Another way of putting it — are you seriously suggesting that God should disobey His own Commandment : Thou Shalt Not Kill ?
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I am indeed. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?
If a human caused as much suffering to innocents as Satan, would you not want him destroyed? – and that’s just a matter of a few years, rather than over thousands and thousands.
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If a human … would you not want him destroyed?
No ; this is because I am a Christian.
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So you’d allow for the untold suffering of millions of innocent people caused by one man, because you are a Christian? Are you pulling my leg?
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There is a depressing air of hysteria settling into this conversation (not to mention that it’s already tripped over into proving Godwin’s law).
God has spent the last few thousand years of salvation history comprehensively demonstrating to humanity that we are free from Satan (going so far as to making a covenant with us in His own blood): all we have to do to stop Satan is to stop listening to him.
All of this wickedness, all of these deaths that you are decrying, Adrian, are perpetrated by men – Satan didn’t pull a single trigger or throw a single grenade, men and women listening to his siren call to exalt themselves did all of that.
God can’t stop us listening to Satan, because He would deprive us of our free will by so doing, and He does not need to destroy Satan, He just needs us to stop letting our own fears and petty vanities from giving Satan material to work with (and let’s face it, we don’t need Satan to do evil, we can manage that trick on our own).
The whole message of Christianity is that God has given us the tools and shown us the way to find salvation, but it’s up to us (and each of us) to use those tools and follow the message of the Lord.
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Thank you Raven — yet another example of your fine ability, on those occasions where I may be expressing myself at non-peak efficiency, to step in and write clearly and succinctly the very heart of my own thinking.
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Well, that’s enough of this “being Charlie” gig at my end.
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Thanks, The Raven. That kind of makes sense, I think.
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