Stronger, Shorter, Clearer v Weaker, Longer, Vaguer

Totalitarian blasphemy laws are perhaps a European tradition. If one denied the divinity of Christ, what else would one not go on to deny? Once we do not insist upon his divinity then we would end up depraved and declining, just like we are now, being told by the Muslims that Christianity (which is faith-heavy and schismatic) could be improved by, well, Islam (which is faith-lite and unifying) ....

Up to 1813, it was a crime to deny the trinity in public.

While we are appalled by the Muslims and their penchant for beheading as a form of execution, Christians got up to much worse when they were in charge: hanging, drawing and quartering as well as burning at the stake.

Beheading, being swiftly over, was comparatively humane. However, in England this form of humanity was reserved only for its aristocracy. Commoners would be hanged to die of slow strangulation to prolong the crowd's pleasure. The last beheading in England was in 1747.

The need for blasphemy laws in Christianity was simply because that while people were happy enough to believe in God, they really could not bring themselves to believe that Jesus is a 3-in-1 deity.

But if one believed in a unitarian God, the Church authorities thought, then one is not much different to being a Jew or a Muslim, whom Christians loathe and fear.

Unitarian Christians - those who thought like Jews and Muslims that Christ was a man and not divine - were persecuted as badly as Jews and Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition.

Arabs and Jews are a Semitic people and anti-Semitism is peculiar to European Christians. It is not so much a race thing as an ideological thing. "We must be different to the people we oppress and despise" was always the "Christian" position.

It continues to this day: but under a different guise: one hates the people whom one has wronged. There were the Crusades of course, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and, most recently, the robbing of Peter to pay Paul that occurred when the State of Israel was established.