What is the right punishment for blasphemy?

boing
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Doesn’t that proposal(while undoubtedly preferable to the ‘death by angry mob’ convention) seem like a massively exploitable gift to trolls and griefers?

Just think of all the Twitter assholes who whine like petulant children when something threatens to get in the way of their god-given right to free speech and a captive audience.

Now imagine that the same sort of jerkass has the ability to have you hauled in and forced to suffer his company just by alleging that you hurt his little feelings. That could get real ugly, real fast.

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In Europe at least, such (re)normalisation is a serious problem. On the subject of “respect for religious authority”, strong alliances have been forged between different bodies which put at risk freedoms established only relatively recently. As an atheist living in such a country (and raised in a very different, less liberal one), that is a more immediate threat to me than the state of things in distant countries - for all the paranoia about imported extremist violence, I’m statistically more likely to suffer the consequences of encountering a local bigot rather than a foreign one.

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108

I think it’s more likely s/he’s a grad student, who got distracted with other things, and we’re just in the petri dish neglected.

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109

Attendance for the supposed blasphemer should, I think, be optional. Really there should be no commitment on anyone, not actually being paid to do so, to have to understand the point of view of idiots.

I think that is not only an overly broad sweeping statement, it is seriously flawed in its application to the Abrahamic religions. What you are writing about here is what the Abrahamic religions have turned into, not what they were ab initio.
Going back to the original point about cultural fusion and supersession - Judaism evolved out of at least three religions in combination. The traces are there to see in Genesis - the Elohim, who may refer to the later watcher-legend and created the Heavens and the Earth, appearing only as a plural noun; the Jahwists and the Adonists. The Yahwists and the Adonists seem to have had different cult mountains. Ba’al, the Lord, is the anonymous deity who hangs around the OT, periodically being a nuisance; but Rimmon makes an appearance and doesn’t get a bad press. It was a world of localised or tribal deities, and it was their combination that resulted in monotheism. I do wonder, though I lack the resources to investigate properly, as to the extent to which it was Eastern ideas like that of Brahma which reached the Hebrew world and helped crystallise things.

The Jewish relationship with their deity is not precisely that of subservience, whereas that of Islam is (it means submission, after all.) But in any case this is an “educated” idea, not the religion of the masses. It is an idea that arose out of religions which were already synthetic and built on architectonics of earlier religions. Why the Abrahamic religions went down this route - of extremely rigid definitions of behaviour and belief - whereas, say, Buddhism generally did not - is an interesting question but, I think, unrelated to the main point - that all our present religions are synthetic and none of them can in any meaningful sense be traced back to a single revelation. Even “Scientology” has adopted Abrahamic ideas onto its science fiction framework, such as purification and the core of instructed believers. Lenin-Marxism involves the notion of the ekklesia, the called-out elect, in the form of the Party as well as the laos, the people from whom the ekklesia will make their appearance as a result of revelation, and the conflict, so obvious in the OT, between the prophets and the sinful bourgeoisie. Marx was a brilliant economist but if he had lived fifty years later and been aware of the growing field of higher criticism, he might have formulated his political idea differently.

Someone who unwittingly swallowed the Abrahamic conceit of precise, eternal doctrine may not want to see things from the point of view that, in understanding religions per se, this is not really important. This idea seems to me to be one of the cornerstones of the scientific revolution - there are eternal laws and they can be found out. But it doesn’t have much impact on a typical religious believer - as you say later in your post.

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The vast majority of those petulant children would not be able to convince police officers they were reporting the crime to that they were serious at all. The vast majority of those that could would not be able to maintain the illusion long enough to convince a judge that blasphemy was genuinely committed.

If there first thing we ask ourselves about a proposal is: But what if perfect-liar, master manipulator psychopaths decide to use this, how much harm could they do? And the answer we come up with is, “Waste a couple hours of my time” then I don’t think it’s time to go into a panic. If we could convince even one of these incredibly dangerous (possibly fictional) people to spend their time doing that instead of say murdering people or swindling billions, then I’d say that’s a feature rather than a bug.

But I think you are probably underestimating the difference between the society we live in an one where what I suggested would be remotely possible.

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Are you saying that the context of such discussion matters or that approaching it at all is too dangerous or…

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His wife is a Catholic. I suspect she persuaded him to convert so he could get forgiven and she didn’t have to spend eternity in Heaven looking down in him in Hell. (One of the more unpleasant speculations of the fathers of the Church.)

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An art grant.

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Sorry, I meant the inherent contradictions in any rational discussion of the irrational. I had my tongue in my cheek.

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I’m saying the discussion should be considered closed and re-opening it at all is very dangerous indeed. Religious or anti-religious views (whether personally-held or publicly expressed) should not result in punishment per se in modern society, period. We are still trying to develop a viable way to maintain that principle while punishing violent hatred towards minorities who define themselves primarily through religion, but the principle itself is what all our other freedoms are built on.

The debate we should be having in certain contexts is “how can we get more rigid and traditionalist societies to recognise this fact”.

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How should believers punish it is a question for believers. How should the state remind believers that “the people” have given the state a monopoly on violence, and that blasphemy is not a claim with legal status - is a trickier question.

We really are not all that far away from the old superstitions, legally. A couple generations -at best-.

I see a slippery slope in normalizing any form of ganging up to punch down at an individual.

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117

It seems like there are two very different questions intertwined on this one: The question of what, if anything, to do about government actions we disapprove of; but which enjoy strong local support; and the question of what government actions can or can’t be justified by strong popular support.

As far as ‘doing something about it’ goes; it’s not terribly hard to argue that enthusiastic intervention is a bad plan. Even if you can do it without stacking up truly egregious corpse piles; collapsing cooperative-puppet-governments have a nasty habit of being replaced by the worst of the people you were hedging against in the first place(looking at you, US/Iranian interactions). Doesn’t mean you have to be nice to a government you don’t like; or refrain from using whatever carrots and sticks are at your practical disposal to encourage them; but the historical record on ‘go in and civilize them, whether they like it or not’ is poor(we couldn’t even manage it in the south, after the civil war; only example I can think of that went well enough to point to is, possibly, post WWII Japan).

As far as ‘just what does a popular mandate justify’ goes, though, it seems to be fairly well accepted that, unless you think ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a compliment, the usual position is that certain measures simply aren’t on the ballot. Given the tendency of blasphemy laws to evolve(if they don’t start as) into tools for squishing unpopular minorities with various degrees of force; they among the especially unsympathetic flavors of majoritarian legislation. Oh, great, defend the popular people’s freedom from being offended at the cost of the liberties and/or lives of the ones who are already on the bottom of the totem pole; what could possibly go wrong?

Again, implementation is tricky; even jurisdictions with fairly stable, competent, judicial systems often struggle to keep oppressive majoritarianism at bay; and lots of jurisdictions aren’t nearly that lucky; but while this has to be acknowledged when deciding how to respond, it doesn’t make majoritarian legislation any more pleasant.

To draw on an American example; I’d say that ‘yup, when it can be managed, military imposition can beat local democracy when it comes to majoritarian excess.’ Sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, and seizing the local security forces from the governor, was not a triumph of democracy(and only does’t really qualify as ‘military government’ because nobody was dumb enough to try overt resistance to the army, so the uglier features of an occupation could largely be skipped); but the interests of the black population of Arkansas certainly couldn’t be left to the tender, loving, care, of the locals.

Obviously, sending in the troops to fix Pakistan or something would be a markedly worse plan; but while strong local support for something imposes practical limits on your ability to just bayonet it away, I’m not sure that it is ethically relevant.

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118

The right punishment is none at all. Do I win a prize?

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119

Make them Pope!

Thrust apound them the responsibilities for starting a new sect.

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To the best of my knowledge and considerable research, the last man to be tried and convicted of blasphemy under US law was Universalist minister Abner Kneeland. His blasphemies included pantheism and outspoken support for women’s rights, the latter being the thing that really got him in trouble.

Wikipedia cites the 2007 “New Encyclopedia of Unbelief” in a claim that Charles Lee Smith in 1928 was convicted, jailed and fined for violating a Little Rock, Arkansas city ordinance forbidding blasphemy, though it also says all blasphemy charges were eventually dismissed on appeal or converted to charges of distributing scurrilous literature. I have not been able to substantiate any of that, and I do not have a copy of the book.

I have also several times run across unsubstantiated claims that one “Reverend Mocker” was convicted of blasphemy during the American Civil Rights movement, but successfully fled to Mexico. The particularly appropriate name, and the absence of any court records, make this claim seem unlikely to me.

The Abrahamic scriptures are (as usual) very inconsistent about humans taking on enforcement of divine law. On the one hand, Deuteronomy says “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste” and this remonstrance is repeatedly referenced in later scripture including the New Testament (“for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”) Yet there’s also the story of the heresy of Peor (Numbers 25) in that, Yahweh explicitly condones and rewards a racist double murder (committed by stealth!) in his name; providing Jews with a rationale to punish both blasphemy and “race mixing” pretty harshly. For Catholics, a similar rationale is provided by various Popes, who speak in God’s name and with his authority, and have been pretty down on heresy and blasphemy.

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121

Stop bringing me up.

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122

Is it my fate to annoy everybody this week? Time for some serious time out, I think.

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123

How bout a hug instead.

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124

Have you come to grips with spending eternity in heck?

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125

Death by BrainFreeze!

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