Until a few years ago, the Catholic Church hadn't officially apologised for what it had done to Galileo Galilei. This Italian man had proved that the world was hardly the centre of the universe, as the Church then postulated. He was made to recant his views under duress. We all know that story and a few others connected to a church which knew how to make you believe even the unbelievable. Since then the church has moved on and hardly imprisons or tortures anyone for his - or, sometimes, her - fallacious ideas. 

Malta, which a few years ago almost imprisoned someone for daring to write what was deemed pornographic, has also moved on. However, it still retains silly laws which, in theory, should forbid us all from poking fun at the Catholic Church or its leaders or at any other recognised religion.

At the risk of sounding blasphemous, let me present a scenario where a couple of Martians land on Malta and I have to explain our basic religious tenets to them. We believe in a God who is threefold but actually one. The father in heaven sent a part of him in the form of a dove, which came down to earth and impregnated a young woman who gave birth but remained a virgin. By now their eyes, if not their whole brain, would surely pop.

Hold on to your eyes I'd say, there is more. The heavenly union produced a son who actually walked on the sea and turned water into the best wine in Palestine. He raised people from the dead. Then he died and he himself rose again from the dead and in the meantime many are the saints who appear in two places and heal the sick. And we believers all regularly receive a host which is God's son's real body and blood.

At this point, I have no doubt that my Martian friends would have left their eyes behind and ran back to their spacecraft, either escaping in a hysterical fit or abducting me and performing a lobotomy to stop me from further mental delusions and anguish.

This of course is a loose - and cheap - rendering of our official religion. I cannot imagine the credentials for the ones which are not official but need to be recognised. Just as an aside, which authority decides what a recognised religion is?

For saying the above I could, according to Maltese law, be fined or even jailed. Back in the day I'd have been flogged, moved to some church dungeon and left to rot. Or tortured till I recanted - and promised I would never say anything of the sort to anyone, let alone visitors from other planets.

Now, as agreed, we have moved on. But have we really moved on to what Charlie Hebdo represents?

Let's conveniently set aside the blasphemy laws and imagine they do not exist-now wouldn't that be a wonderful dream come true? Who in Malta would dare be so open as to publish or write stuff that is abusive or even half as abusive as what Charlie Hebdo did and is still doing?

Imagine publishing a cartoon which has the Bishop or former Archbishop in something like a drunken naked frenzy. Even if such journalists or cartoonists would not be jailed they would be so vilified, so sidetracked that only exile on Mars might make life bearable for them. We, or a few of us who still feel they are part of the Church Militant, would perhaps not murder the perpetrators but they would definitely not defend their right to say all they wanted in any vile way they wished.

This fear of being ostracised makes us - yes me too - the worst censors of all. When we self-censor because we fear the consequences of becoming social outcasts, we are much worse than those censors of old who would, with painstaking diligence, erase any form of nakedness in all mainstream publications.

What would happen to anyone who openly derides our church and political leaders is beyond imagination. Even mentioning a most noticeable Prime Minister's wig some years back was deemed wrong - or at least most daring and over the top.

I believe that whoever wants to say anything about anyone is free to do so, as long as the law is not infringed. Any ifs and buts, even coming from the Pontiff, point to the wrong idea of freedom and religious tolerance or intolerance.

We need to really test the waters - not by making an effort to be controversial but by really looking in the mirror and asking how tolerant we are and how easy it will be to have a satirical paper in Malta which pokes fun at anyone and anything in any decent, or perceived to be indecent, way possible.