Fiction authors nervously including disclaimers that they're not insulting religions

Cafe Society
1

I just got a novel by the Canadian author Jan Lars Jensen, Shiva 3000. The tagline: “The million gods of the Hindu pantheon walk the earth.” Shiva 3000 was published in 1999. Looks like a theme similar to and anticipating Neil Gaiman’s much more famous novel American Gods, which was published in 2001.

On the back of the title page, I noticed this disclaimer and felt slightly disconcerted by it—

Does anybody else catch a sinister whiff in the background of a certain novel with the initials S.V. by a certain S.R.? Did Neil Gaiman write a similar disclaimer?

Or am I making too much of this, and Jensen isn’t scared of violent fundie backlash, he just really is a respectful dude?

Or is it a Canadian thing?

2

This is somewhat tangential, but a friend of mine who teaches high school just told me that there was a big upset among the Christian students in the class when she had them read Inherit the Wind.
There’s something out there to offend everyone, and someone out there to be offended, at all times.