An accident?

A map of churches that were vandalized in France in 2018

Co-blogger CBD reports in the Ace of Spades blog,

According to the French police, 875 of France's 42,258 churches were vandalized in 2018. And who is being blamed? "Militant Secularism."

I didn't make that up!

Until last evening I was unaware that there was a powerful movement of secularists ready to do violence to combat the rampant spread of religion through France. Of course, the pesky little fact that the number of religious Frenchmen is shrinking rapidly, and has been for years, is conveniently ignored, as is the fact that France is already a carefully secular country, where even marriages are separated into two distinct events...the civil and the religious.

Maybe there is a deep vein of hatred for organized religion in France. Anything is possible, except of course Islamic terrorists starting the fire! The immediate rush to claim that it was an accident when the fire was still smoldering seems to me more of the same cowardly insistence that Islam is a "Religion of peace," and blaming Muslims for the terrorist acts committed by their coreligionists is Islamophobic and awful and oh so un-Western.

Do I think Notre Dame was torched? I have no idea, but in the current geopolitical climate, in which attacks on Western religious and cultural icons are an important part of the playbook of militant Islam, one would think that an investigation that does not include a priori assumptions is a good thing.

Read more here.