Someone being disrespectful isn’t even close the being the government’s business. You can be as disrespectful as you want, burn a Koran every day if you please, and the government should not (or be able to) do anything about it.
Most religions try to impede the rights even of nonmembers of that religion. That is disrespectful as well. Burn any book or other goods you want, if you want to protest any of my convictions. TuX-puppets, books about string theory, the FSM, my national flag, I don’t give a shit as long as you own those things and you don’t physically harm others.
So is calling for death to dissenters and unbelievers. Actual murder of them is morally abhorrent. That god and that prophet are no more special than the thousands of others remembered and forgotten.
This is why my workplace uses Teams. Teams sucks. If the bosses had to compare which product to buy (rather than going with a bundle), there’s no way Teams would be chosen. I hope.
There cannot be topics forbidden to be made fun of in a free society. If we cannot make fun of Muslims and Islam in any way without causing religious riots and violence then current form Islam has no place in a free society. The difference between Islam and the other monotheistic abrahamic religions is that the older two of the three have had enough time to go through cycles of reformation and ideological modernization, making them somewhat compatible with a modern pluralist society. Islam still insists a bunch of fables from when the book was written are literally true and valid today, and not just apocryphal advice on how to be a decent person.
And before someone brings up the inevitable American evangelicals as comparison, they are equally incompatible. Luckily that scourge is largely confined to the United States and not my problem.
Topics can be forbidden while still allowing for a free society. It’s called the paradox of tolerance and is why Germany bans the free speech of Nazis. The thing about satire of Islam is that the events that get a big reaction like this are not “making fun of Muslims and Islam” but flat-out hate speech. Look at real political cartoonists like Eli Valley and Stan Kelly to see that you can joke about and even be kind of mean to people without calling them pedophiles or burning sacred books. You say that Islam hasn’t had time to become compatible with modern society. What a ridiculous statement contradicted by your own exception. The rise of American Christian fascism as well as the arch-conservative Christians in modern-day Uganda prove that time has nothing to do with how strict a religion is. This is further contradicted by Islamic society being much more progressive in the Medieval era compared to Christian society despite being younger. The fact is, you just hate Muslims.
Thank you for enlightening me to my inner workings! It is always a revelation to have an internet armchair psychologist give you a diagnosis.
For that matter, I am german myself and thus have a “passing” familiarity with the legal situation surrounding nazism. I am specifically referring to Christianity in the west, with an exception to America due to their own regression in that regard. You are of course right that certain re emerging right wing parties are sometimes tied to conservative Christianity like in Poland, but that doesn’t somehow negate the danger of allowing a new and radically violent religion to take hold and carve out space in a free society.
Also, your paradox of tolerance is not actually a paradox, people just like to parrot that to not be made to change something.
Tolerance is a social contract that says I accept you to live and be free as you are or want to be in this society, as long as you treat me with the same respect. Islam does not subscribe to this notion, there is no room for acceptance of LGBTQ people, the equal rights and opportunities of women, not even for non-Muslim beliefs (infidels) or atheists (apostates).
Which in turn means Islam is not covered by the social contract of tolerance.
reuters.com
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