The problem I have is that a bunch of people are acting like, because Alice got murdered, it’s retroactively okay for her to have vandalized Bob’s car
But in this case, the car didn’t exist – nothing real got vandalized, just imaginary things. That’s what’s great about blasphemy and why we need more and more of it.
Okay. Alice told Bob he was a cuntwaffle and Bob shot her. That doesn’t mean that you ought to go around calling people cuntwaffles.
But it’s a component of identity isn’t it? You attack something closely held as a unifying factor of a community - be it their Gods, their laws (look at free speech or gun control in the US) or their cultural practices, and this can easily be understood as (or actually be) an attack upon the members of that community - particularly if that community is one which is already discriminated against.
One only has to look at history very superficially to see how attacking Gods has been used as a justification for attacking, destroying or enslaving people for gain.
I agree very much with your point here - I can see that victim-blaming is a risk, but again it’s predicated upon a failure to differentiate between explaining and excusing. If the rapist in your scenario, or someone who encouraged the rape, is later set on fire in retaliation, most people would accept ‘it happened because of what they did’, but in the old ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ sense it is no more just than the crime he committed or egged on. That is to say, the analysis would be true, but not a justification.
It’s very interesting to read your personal perspective on it and the vast majority of members of all three major Abrahamic religions would be quite happy, I’m sure, to interpret their edicts in a way that avoided stoning you to death. One characteristic of almost all religions is that there’s a volume of content so large that most ‘rules’ are subject to interpretation.
How dare you! Calling people cuntwaffles is a reasonable, nay, noble pursuit, particularly if the cuntwaffles in question have guns!
They may choose to interpret their holy texts to make themselves comfortable in an era so far removed from the time of its writing. I’m pretty glad that nobody throws rocks at me for being an atheist apostate and blasphemer.
But their books still state in no uncertain terms that I must be killed. In the cases of the Torah and the Qur’an, the only way to interpret the passages about killing apostates and blasphemers can’t be interpreted in a non-violent way without either distorting the idea being conveyed beyond recognition, or just cherry picking and saying it doesn’t apply anymore.
Even in the New Testament, Hebrews 10:26-29 says that I deserve to be killed because of my apostasy. Although it doesn’t outright say that the righteous should kill apostates, it does go along the lines (I’m paraphrasing) “people were put to death on the word of 2 or 3 witnesses for breaking the law of Moses, and blaspheming against the holy spirit itself is far worse than that.”
So… while I don’t think it’s likely that I’m going to be stoned to death, at least not where I live (we have at least two separate cases of secular bloggers getting hacked to death with machetes in Bangladesh this year so far.), there are many people politely ignoring, for the time being, the commands of a book they simultaneously believe is inerrant and correct and a guide that must be followed.
That’s disconcerting to say the least.
No, it would be more like critiquing The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien and having rabid fan boys kill the critics because they feel so strongly about how great they are. The insult to the fans is only in their minds. Logically only Frodo and JRR should be annoyed, except one is fictional and other dead, just like Allah and Mohammed.
Really? It seems much, much more the inverse. Slavery was defended on the grounds that it was in the Bible (and so Jehova was cool with it), and that Black people were supposedly “children of Ham”, cursed by their sinful ancestry in the Bible.
Maybe Trudeau is cleverly trolling precisely everyone who might take the bait,
that bait being any criticism of Hebdo that can generate a response of “They’re totally justifying the Hebdo murders/murderers with this criticism of Hebdo’s work/means/ends.”
Gary Trudeau is an embittered old git (since birth) who confuses cynicism with insight and acts like many a Boomer - Liberal when it suits him, but Conservative when it doesn’t.
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