Go to youtube and you can find plenty of footage of the old debates over the Life of Brian. It was, of course, a very controversial film, seemingly lampooning the life of Christ. It caused great offence to many, although it is one of my all-time favourite films. It was great to see it referenced at the London olympic closing ceremony. Yet events yesterday made me wonder: what’s the difference between Life Of Brian and the cartoons of Mohammed which appeared in Charlie Hebdo? Why does one result in debate, and the other in such cold blooded murder?

The second such questions are asked, of course, a truly monumental can of worms opens up. I was thinking about this last night: what to one person is satire, to another may be islamophobia. If I see a thug from the BNP, UKIP or the Front National making jokes about Islam, I take umbrage; but if I see it on the pages of a satirical magazine, might I take it differently? What if the situation was flipped, and a journal in the middle east chose to make fun of christianity? How might I react? On one level, I might not care – religion is all bollocks anyway. Yet part of me would probably see it as an external culture making fun of mine, and get angry, whether I believed or not.

What matters, then, is not just what is said but who is speaking. It was a group of white, middle-class Oxbridge graduates who made Life of Brian; they can probably be loosely termed Christian. Had that film been made by non-christians, however, would it have been so funny? If not, what is the difference? It seems one group of people are allowed to say certain things, while another group cannot.

That strikes me as odd. Yesterday I laid out my position on religion, beginning too to outline the complexities in trying to speak about it from the outside; but, perhaps because it was the one i’m most familiar with, I kept my criticisms to christianity: surely as an atheist I should be equally hostile to all religions. Surely they are all just as silly. Why, then, do I not feel I have the right to criticise Islam or Hinduism? Perhaps it’s because I don’t feel I can speak about something I know very little about, but it is also because I don’t want to seem xenophobic. And there lies the rub.

Part of me wants to say that it is high time someone made an islamic version of the life of brian; part of me strongly supports Charlie Hebdo; part of me wants to be as critical of islam as I am of christianity. Part of me wants to tell the thugs who perpetrated yesterday’s crimes to grow up, and grow a sense of humour. Yet I still don’t feel I can: I am gagged through a sense of respect, a sense that I don’t have the right. I fear that the second I do so, I become akin to the xenophobes I loathe. Yet if one has the right to criticise one religion, shouldn’t you criticise them all. Charlie Hebdo decided it had that right, that duty, and sadly paid a terrible price for it. Rather than the rather comic debates in the seventies between the Pythons and the clergy, yesterday we saw slaughter, the most extreme, barbaric and grotesque example of a person being denied the right to voice an opinion.