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marginallymanic
Cabinet Minister
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 12:24 pm Post subject: Blasphemy |
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Asma Fatima is the Second Secretary of the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, D.C. She was on the panel with me at the U.S. Congress's human rights caucus meeting yesterday.
Though I disagreed with every word she said, including "and" and "the", I'm very glad that she was there, because she spoke on behalf of her government and, given that she is a diplomat, she spoke startlingly plainly. 400 years ago it was quipped that diplomats are honest men who lie abroad for their country. I don't think that Fatima got the memo, for she spoke freely about her country's goals, and those of other countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and indeed the dozens of Muslim countries at the United Nations.
She wants Western countries to ban critical comments about Islam -- and she mentioned the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in particular. It was well pointed out by others on the panel that Western defamation law deals with the vindication of improperly besmirched reputations using the truth, as determined by courts of law -- but when it comes to clashing religions, the truth of any faith is in the heart of the beholder. The only legal system that would hold the Koran to be "the truth", and subordinate every other faith beneath the Koranic truth, would be a sharia legal system, such as that in Saudi Arabia. In other words, she wants to replace our secular legal systems with a Muslim legal system. I appreciated the honesty.
Western defamation law is also about vindication of an individual's reputation -- the individual must be indentified; he must have suffered measurable damage. Defamation is not about hurt feelings -- it is about the unjustified destruction of one's reputation in the eyes of another. It has nothing to do with tender feelings, though that was the grievance cited most often by Fatima.
Fatima's demands for an end to the "defamation" of "Islam" was undone masterfully by two of my fellow panellists. The first was Zia Meral, of Turkey, who pointed out that the real "hurt" we ought to be looking at was not Fatima's hurt feelings, but the real physical hurt suffered by Islam's dissidents and he described, in gruesome detail, how non-Muslims -- and worse, apostates -- are dealt with in Muslim countries from Sudan to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia. I will not recount the horrific details.
http://ezralevant.com/
Disclaimer. IMO all religions are nuts, Islam is just nuttier than Christianity. Having said that, I respect some Christians as I respect some Muslims.
I support the separation of church and state from all churches. No church or church member should be allowed to legislate based solely on religious conviction, without taking into account the likes of me who don't want to be governed by canon law or sharia
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marginallymanic
Cabinet Minister
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| Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:17 pm Post subject: |
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This from the USA, where they are embroiled in something similar
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When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society?
These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he got death threats, attempts to have him fired from his university position, and general abuse while the correspondents were simultaneously affirming the niceness of Catholics. Meanwhile, the Catholic Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, appears not to have learned anything about sexual abuse by priests, claiming that it's OK so long as it's serious love on the part of the priest. We'd protest about this when the Pope arrives, but there's a $5500 fine for doing so.
What in the hell is going on?
To answer this, one needs, I think, to see what the benefits of being a member of a religion are, in order to see what is at stake. A religious adherent can appeal to coreligionists for aid and succor as it used to be called. This is a classic case of reciprocal altruism, in which the religion acts as an honest advertisement of commitment, or "costly signaling", which is why religions require acceptance by their adherents of absurd ideas, like the "fact" that the communion wafer is literally the flesh of Jesus [see this pdf].
So when these costly signals are challenged, the reactions get heated. There's a lot at stake here - the unity of the entire community and the reciprocal altruism that it provides (not to mention the return on investment that each individual hopes to get on the effort already made - losing status by defecting from your community is not helpful, and so a kind of gambler's ruin occurs). Obviously one must forcibly protect this.
But that's the internal view; what about the external? Why should I, a non-Catholic (or, if we consider other acts of "desecration" like the smearing of pig fat on Jewish synagogues and Islamic Mosques, non-Jew and non-Muslim), give any consideration to the concerns of adherents in a secular society? More to the point, what protection should the state provide them?
First point is this: a nonbeliever cannot commit blasphemy. To blaspheme, one must be within the set of belief and ritual contrasts of the faith community. Smearing pig fat is merely unhygienic behaviour to me, and throwing wafers on the ground is merely littering (and temporary littering at that, as it will be eaten by birds and ants pretty quickly. As sins go, that act of desecration is quite ecofriendly). This means, so far as I can tell, that a secular state cannot enforce anti-blasphemy provisions, as to do so forcibly includes nonbelievers in the faith community, which automatically means the state is not a secular state. It also means that pretty quickly the state becomes a one-religion state, but that's another matter.
So protection against desecration cannot be justified on grounds of blasphemy. What about offense? Clearly a society that lacks all respect for others will shortly fail to be a society; and it is good manners not to offend someone unnecessarily. The very term "polite" indicates this, as it literally means the rules of the city (polis). In a multi-moré society if you do not avoid constantly insulting people you will cause social disruption. But a state cannot legislate that standard either; such rules evolve rapidly and without regard to the special interests of all groups. The best one can do is have laws of disruptive behaviour and leave it to a current judge to determine if the behaviour is beyond the pale or not. When I was a kid, the term "bloody" was a very dirty word. Now it's merely quaint.
So while I might think that the original wafer thief's actions were disrespectful, in no way are they actions that should permit the kinds of reactions he, and Myers, have garnered. Sure, I think Paul's reaction to religion is often over the top, but he has that right. If he doesn't, or if that right is removed from him, the next step is for Protestants to remove the Catholic's right to protest, and then for the Baptists to remove the Episcopalian's right to protest, and eventually we get another Thirty Years War.
So if the cost-benefit analysis is done from a global perspective, for society as a whole as well as from a Veil of Ignorance about which religion will always be on top, it serves not only the irreligious freethinker's interests, but also that of all religions, not to enforce or permit the enforcement of religious standards on the non-religious. And I have a question for those Catholics who are outraged: is Jesus such that being eaten also by ants and birds, who presumably are part of His Plan, is going to diminish Him? Surely it begins and ends with the thief and his moral standing? In which case, why the trouble? Or were Pink Floyd right when they sang
Far away, across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
calls the faithful to their knees
to hear the softly spoken magic spell? |
http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/07/desecration_blasphemy_in_publi.php
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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:48 pm Post subject: |
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If you are interested in the background to this, it is at
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 11:18 am Post subject: |
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Jeremy Patrick
Last month, after a long debate, England abolished the ancient common law offence of blasphemous libel.
Historically, the crime of blasphemy was committed whenever "contemptuous," "reviling," or "scurrilous" statements were made about God, Jesus Christ or the Church of England.
The offence had been the basis for hundreds of prosecutions throughout the 18th and 19th centuries before falling into a period of dormancy after 1922.
Surprisingly, however, the offence was suddenly resurrected as the basis of a successful private prosecution against a gay newspaper in 1977.
Subsequent private prosecutions against Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses in the late 1980s and against the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera just last year were unsuccessful but equally disturbing to modern proponents of free speech.
What most Canadians (even most lawyers) don't realize is that our own Criminal Code also prohibits blasphemous libel and sets a penalty of up to two years in prison.
The statute doesn't define what constitutes a blasphemous libel. Instead, it only notes that statements made in "good faith and conveyed in decent language" are exempted.
Although the last known government prosecution was in the 1930s, the law was invoked in private prosecutions at least as late as 1979.
Why should we worry about a law that hasn't been used in decades? Dusty old laws can often be perfectly innocuous and even humorous – like the purported Kentucky law that says you have to remove your hat if you come across a cow on the road.
However, obscure, little-known statutes like the blasphemy offence can also serve as a dangerous extension of police or prosecutorial discretion, creating a greater opportunity for threats of enforcement that lead to self-censorship by cautious publishers.
And unfortunately, dead laws don't always stay dead when prosecutors are desperate: a statute prohibiting the spreading of "false news" was inserted into the first Criminal Code in 1892, used once in 1907, again 63 years later in 1970, and for the third and final reported time in a high profile conviction (overturned on appeal) of Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel in the late 1980s.
The Charter, of course, provides strong guarantees of freedom of expression and religion. If the blasphemy law were to be invoked again, it's likely a court would strike it down.
Even this should be of limited consolation. The cost and time to mount an effective Charter defence is not insignificant, nor is it perfectly clear that an enterprising Crown attorney couldn't analogize the crime of blasphemous libel to constitutionally valid laws prohibiting anti-religious hate speech.
Of more practical concern, however, is that the existence of the crime of blasphemy in Canadian law could make it harder for the Canadian government to criticize repressive blasphemy prosecutions in countries where free speech is given short shrift.
For example, according to the March 6 edition of the Los Angeles Times:
"A funny thing happened in November when Britain launched a righteous protest over Sudan's arrest of a British schoolteacher accused of insulting Islam by letting her students name a class teddy bear Muhammad. But it didn't take long for someone to point out that Downing Street was standing on diplomatic quicksand: Britain itself has a law making blasphemy a crime."
Even if the risk of appearing hypocritical is small, the ongoing existence of a criminal prohibition on blasphemy in the Criminal Code directly conflicts with Canada's public- and self-image as a pluralist, multicultural democracy with a strong commitment to freedom of speech and religion.
The prohibition is simply a sad reminder of a time when disagreeing with mainstream religion and using "uncouth" speech was enough to merit a prison sentence. We should be disappointed that Parliament has let it remain on the statute books for as long as it has.
Jeremy Patrick is a PhD student at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and has written on blasphemous libel. He welcomes feedback at jhaeman@hotmail.com.
Toronto Star July6, 2008
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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2008 4:35 am Post subject: |
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Blasphemy heads for oblivion in Ireland
MORE bad news for the Catholic Church in Ireland, which has suffered a number of setbacks in this increasingly sceptical country: the offence of blasphemy is likely to be dropped from the Irish Constitution.
According to the Irish Independent, the joint committee on the Constitution said last Friday that changes to the Constitution in the areas of freedom of expression and blasphemy are required, and should be voted on in a future referendum.
Committee chairman, Sean Ardagh, said the Constitution should be amended along the lines of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights in order to ensure greater emphasis on the freedom of speech.
Said Ardagh:
The committee is of the view that amendment is not immediately necessary but recommends that change be made when an appropriate opportunity presents.
He added that changes could be made alongside another referendum vote. However, he stressed there was no urgent requirement to make the changes.
A constitutional reference, which deems the publication or utterance of “blasphemous, seditious or indecent matters” as an offence punishable in accordance with the law, should also be deleted, according to the report.
However, the committee noted that recent incidents highlighted that religious offence is still something which can cause genuine distress. It cited the performance of Tommy Tiernan on the ‘Late Late Show’ and his now infamous ‘Lamb of God’ routine in which Tiernan joked, in typically surreal style, that the Lamb of God was an actual lamb bounding around a field full of his own self-importance because he was chosen by God.
Tiernan remembers it vividly:
The front page of the Evening Herald in Dublin had a headline that the show was going to be sued for blasphemy — it was great.
The committee also referred to accusations of blasphemy directed at Jerry Springer: the Opera in in the UK, and the publication of controversial cartoons in Denmark.
Notwithstanding this, it is the committee’s view that the specific reference to blasphemy should be deleted from the Constitution.
Meanwhile, New Zealand rationalists are urging the Government to follow Britain’s example and take blasphemy off the law books.
The New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists says the charge gives religious doctrine special protection that other ideas and beliefs do not have.
The group says the crime is a threat to freedom of speech.
http://www.freethinker.co.uk/2008/07/13/blasphemy-heads-for-oblivion-in-ireland/
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