Quote: (12-24-2017 08:12 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:
Quote: (12-24-2017 05:44 PM)Sherman Wrote:
In the 5th Century B.C., Anaxagoras was prosecuted for impiety for saying the moon and sun were not divinities. So, yes, they were that simplistic.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philo...anaxagoras
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anaxagoras
Even today, there are religions and nations where you can get in DEEP SHIT for pointing out that this religions stuff, it all sounds a bit silly really.
In other news, we now take as topics for serious discussion quotes from a guy who hasn't been a day sober since he was 18 years old and who makes money off making fun of people and institutions.
Thomas Aquinas summed up the
theological situation on blasphemy fairly simply:
“[if] we compare murder and blasphemy as regards the objects of those sins, it is clear that blasphemy, which is a sin committed directly against God, is more grave than murder, which is a sin against one's neighbor. On the other hand, if we compare them in respect of the harm wrought by them, murder is the graver sin, for murder does more harm to one's neighbor, than blasphemy does to God.”
If you're talking about the
legal position of blasphemy, you are dealing with a state that is not completely secular. That was certainly the position of the Jewish people at the time Leviticus was written, that being the Jewish legal text in which capital punishment was imposed for blasphemy. Jesus, on the other hand, simply forgave the sin of blasphemy (Matthew 9).
The last time anyone was prosecuted under English law for blasphemy was 1977, in which the heinous offender received a 500 pound fine and a suspended sentence, and the publisher a thousand pound sentence. That case was
Mary Whitehouse v. Lemon. Whitehouse herself was a figure of fun to the Baby Boomers who she prosecuted, but when you look at her life she was a staunch conservative who was fighting a lot of the very same battles we are now fighting in the West: against degenerate behaviour. Lemon, in an underground paper called
Gay News, had published a poem in it envisioning Christ as homosexual.)
The reason for that dwindling number of blasphemy prosecutions, if you read Geoffrey Robertson's book
The Justice Game, (or
try this interview where he more or less paraphrases that chapter) was because it had come to be recognised that most religions didn't require the criminal sanctions of the state to stand on their own two feet; hence, blasphemy as a criminal offence actually doesn't exist.
Indeed it
didn't exist as a crime in
2013, when Gervais made the Twitter remark that is the source of this quote. The criminal offence of blasphemy had been abolished in 2008, five years earlier. Ricky should've kept up with his law report updates, perhaps.
The reason blasphemy comes up in Geoffrey Robertson's book was essentially because, in blasphemy's dying secular throes in the UK, Islam attempted to revive it for the purposes of drawing Salman Rushdie out of hiding. (The interview I've linked to goes into some detail about it.) By writing
The Satanic Verses, Rushdie drew down a fatwa on himself from Iran and the "moderate, peaceful" Muslims in the UK decided to bring on a private prosecution for blasphemy against him, in order to bring about a summons to answer a criminal court charge and force Rushdie into the open. It should be pretty obvious why they wanted to do this: basically, in order to carry out the fatwa, to assassinate him either on the way to or from court or by virtue of the fact a person answering a criminal charge generally has to provide their address of residence.
The Court of Appeal which eventually heard the claim neatly sidestepped the issue of whether Rushdie had committed blasphemy in
The Satanic Verses by pointing out that the UK's
secular crime of blasphemy as written only contemplated blasphemy against Christianity in general and the Church of England in particular (since Catholics had been prosecuted and convicted of blasphemy in the past). Rushdie avoided prosecution for blasphemy, and the whole sordid episode convinced Parliament to abolish the crime once and for all in order to prevent it coming up again.
This, too, is consistent with most Christian jurisdictions around the world, and the co-evolutionary spiral that the West has been in with Christianity for a good four hundred years or more. Islam, as usual, has decided to hang onto the whole thing and, amongst its other idiocies, also has capital punishment for blasphemy (that indeed being the death mark handed to Salman Rushdie and which is still in existence, since the Ayatollah Khomeini's successor continued it.)
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm