Unless there is a religion out there which has evolved in complete isolation from all human societies, I do seriously doubt that there is a single one that has not adopted ideas from others, with modification. The word I should probably have disagreed with is “Imperialistic” - that only really relates to the state religions of empires that care about such things, and that’s pretty much the Abrahamic religions being grafted onto, for instance, (a) the Roman State religion (Christianity), (b) traditional tribal Arab cultural practices and animism (e.g. Wahabism) or (c) the Tsarist system of government to produce Soviet socialism - Marxism is basically a Jewish schism in my view.
This isn’t just a quibble about words - I do think it’s a significant point that there are almost certainly no “pure” religions nowadays, and they share variations on a very few basic ideas, but for reasons related to the human desire to dominate other people, authority figures in these religions amplify the importance of the variations.
It’s proportional. If I say “$diety is weak, and imaginary,” there is no guilt. If I was a believer, then blaspheming against $deity ought to feel bad.
Yup. Lightning is traditional in several religions. It also takes care of the problem of deciding guilt or innocence.
Unfortunately, blasphemy is still a real issue, and the popular method of determining guilt is “accusation by a government that doesn’t like your political positions”.
I don’t think so. My experience is that many, many people who grow up in cultures overrun by Abrahamic religions tend to assume that this reflects all religions, traditions, and belief systems everywhere. It often results in a sort of “naive atheism” which is a proxy reaction against what they were taught was a “universal” system. For example, one commonly encounters bait about the existence/nonexistence of “God” - but seldom about any specific gods by name. An unnamed, monotheistic deity one must have faith in and be subservient to is practically the trademark of Abrahamic religions, and not really applicable to anyone else.
(Apologies to any Christians, Jews, or Muslims here if you don’t like being lumped into the category, but I am focusing on a few similarities and knowingly avoiding the nuanced differences)
It’s a cultural thing. To much of the world, religion mainly == ritual rather than faith. And humans are very ritualistic regardless of whether their moral compass is Jesus, Spider-Man, Guanyin, or the idealized public persona of a verifiable human such as Bernie Sanders or Mark Frauenfelder who you don’t personally know. Making coffee, earning money, voting, and dressing stylishly are still rituals which depend far more upon the metaphysics of social consensus than they do anything objectively provable. Most controversy about this still boils down to another version of “…but our rituals are truly better than yours because ours are based upon metaphysics which are more real than yours.”
It is a question that we should at least get used to people asking. Although I personally believe that the answer is “there is no such thing, thus no punishment”. Not everyone agrees with that answer. I guess the philosophical rift here is whether we believe that the question is going to be more or less relevant in the near future.
Blasphemy’s still illegal in Ireland? Yow. I remember the last blasphemy case in Delaware - sometime around 1968 or 1970, the law hadn’t been used for a long time, but somebody got accused of it because they’d cussed near a cop. The court declared the law unconstitutional, and also declared whipping, which was the statutory punishment for it, to be unconstitutional, getting 1st Amendment and 8th Amendment points in one simple case.
Abrahamic religions aren’t at all the only ones that have rules about blasphemy or equivalent. Roman state religion insisted you worship the emperor or else. Even those uber-tolerant Hindus go rioting against unbelievers, especially if they’re accused of being cow-eaters, especially now that Modi and his party in charge. And somehow blasphemy is often committed by people you didn’t like anyway! How convenient of the god/gods to arrange that!
The General State Laws for the Prussian States from 1794 granted religious freedom to all citizens. The Prussian criminal code of 1851 threatens up to three year in prison to those convicted of blasphemy or “mocking the Christian churches”, but convictions appear to have been very rare.
In France, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen removed the notion of blasphemy from French law; it was temporarily reintroduced during the Bourbon Restoration, which reinstated the death sentence for blasphemy in the he Anti-Sacrilege Act, which was in place from 1825 to 1830, but never executed. Maybe this is where this notion comes from, as this law prescribed a sentence of cutting of the offender’s hand, followed by decapitation.
Britain eliminated the death sentence on blasphemy from the Common Law in 1677.
Up to a year in jail - if you live in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, or Wyoming that is, where they still have blasphemy laws on the books.
Be fair. Facebook has the guts to follow profit everywhere, and then obtain it by debasing themselves in all ways necessary. That kind of commitment isn’t for the faint-hearted you know.
Which specific thing in my post were you disagreeing with? Or was it the entire post? I can’t work out from what you wrote how it bears on what I was writing.
