Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “plate,” came with an email note saying: “‘Anti-blasphemy extremism’ is a thing”, and giving this link.from the National Secular Society. (Click below as well.
And a brief summary of increasingly extreme responses to perceived blasphemy.
A new report has warned UK ‘anti-blasphemy activism’ is becoming “increasingly radicalised” and being promoted by charities.
The report, published by the Commission for Countering Extremism, says responses to perceived acts of ‘blasphemy’ in the UK are “more organised than ever” and some of the most prominent voices involved have links to “violent anti-blasphemy extremists” in Pakistan.
The report also highlights the link between UK religious charities and anti-blasphemy extremism. The National Secular Society has consistently warned the charitable purpose of ‘the advancement of religion’ facilitates the promotion of extremism by charities. In September it referred Islamic Centre Leicester to the Commission after a sermon recorded at the centre suggested ‘blasphemers’ should be executed.
Warning that responses to perceived acts of blasphemy are now “more organised than ever”, the report identifies major “blasphemy flashpoints” linked to a “new generation” of activists working to “make blasphemy a key issue of concern for British Muslims”.
. . . and the cartoon, in which Mo admits that Allah isn’t omnipotent because he can’t stop blasphemy:
It could be that God does not want to do anything about it, not yet at least. Maybe he wants to watch how we deal with the issue. Maybe he is doing something about it and people, with their finite minds, can’t see it. Religion is all about making stuff up. After all, that is its great strength 🙂
Anaxagoras got into trouble for saying bad things about the sun. I think he suggested that the sun might be a big burning rock. He had Pericles on his side, so he got off lightly.
What exactly (if at all) is considered blasphemous by the Vatican?
I know a few Muslims who no longer believe. I hope they don’t get into trouble. Apostasy is frowned upon in Islam.
In a significant number of Islamic-majority countries, being an apostate (viz : one who has left their religion of community) is a capital offence. To say nothing of extra-judicial killings.
You will note : I have included the restrictions on the nationalities to whom it applies.
There are, TTBOMK, no restrictions. So, apostates changing planes in, for example, Riyadh are potentially liable to the death penalty.
Check the laws applying in your lay-over countries when planning your travel. Double-check the appropriate laws when arranging other people’s travel.
I once dropped a colleague “in it” by organising a flight home changing in Addis Ababa. Fortunately, nobody in Ethiopia checks databases on foreign homosexuals at 03:00. But that was luck, not planning – not an acceptable procedure.
Whether “apostasy” can be applied as a charge to someone who has never professed any sort of religious faith, to any religion, is a fine legal point that I will let someone else challenge from the execution wing of the prison. I’ll just literally “route around” the problem. Good luck surviving the trip to the prison. And getting fed in prison.
“Blasphemy” means phony religious entitlement to perceived victim status.
I think the last word balloons should be about how the creator would not punish these people bc he is all-merciful and forgiving.
Your stand-up routine needs some polish. Or, failing that, Czech?
Surely blasphemy itself is blasphemous? If said god is omnipotent he/she should not be insulted by something a mere human has said? Blasphemy implies that god is impotent.
Wasn’t it established in a recent post here that god/jesus *could* get it up? Therefore, not impotent.
OK, if that doesn’t qualify as blasphemy, let me know, and I’ll try again.
“The National Secular Society has consistently warned the charitable purpose of ‘the advancement of religion’ facilitates the promotion of extremism by charities.”
People with grey hair and good memory know the other big lie:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480
In the 1980’s the Christian right essentially began a program following the template of Charles Houston,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_Houston
It had been initiated by Pat Robertson,
https://aclj.org/aclj/the-legacy-of-pat-robertson
But, as the Politico link explains, the original motivation had not been moral authority — it had been an attempt to protect a 501-c exemption in the tax code in the face of the Civil Rights Act.
Fake news? No. I had been aware of these events from my young adulthood just as I had watched Niel Armstrong in my childhood. I learned a great deal about that section of the IRS code because of the consequences of the confirmation hearings for Judge Bork.
Try to explain history to young people who never had respectable news agencies because of information technology and advertising strategies.
Don’t even get me started about the how the fight against “colonialism” was advertised at Munich in 1972.
Is there a reason that line breaks in the edit section do not appear?
I changed browsers to rewrite a comment because I thought it was a simple rendering problem.
Too much middleware in these interfaces.
Which line-break character did you use? CR, LF, CR-LF, LF-CR, or some demon from the upper reaches of Unicode which Apple have decided to use as a “line break”? (This sort of rot often, but not exclusively, originates in Apple. Or at least, is popularised by them.)
Consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Issues_with_different_newline_formats and the following section , which may help you clarify your issue. Unfortunately, it has never been as simple a question as it sound like – as anyone who learned to type on a machine that had different key-bindings for “carriage return” and “line-feed”, which are two distinct actions. (The printer control codes I’m abbreviating as “CR” and “LF” above.)
Until tracking down that link, I never considered that Wiki might have (because it’s needed) an entire Help page on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Line-break_handling (which links to further pages on the topic).
Unfortunately, the standard-issue can-of-worms-opening-tool is not normally supplied with a worm-recanning-tool. An omission we’ve all regretted on occasions.
Thank you. I will look at the links.
However, my only Internet access is from a mobile phone. So, the interfaces rule. That is why I simply stated that there is too much middleware.
I have run into this elsewhere– one browser generates an unreadable comment and another does not. And, I lost an information technology career because of Federal Reserve Bank interest rate hikes many years ago. To be honest, anything remotely related to print control languages seems to have evil demons lurking about. lol.
Thanks.
Print control languages? Slobbering demons from the Unseen Dimensions?
You sound like a potential recruit for Charlie Stross and the Laundry Files.
Hail, and I mean this most sincerely, Bob, Saviour of the Universe?!
As others have said, blasphemy is a victimless crime.
Unlike being necklaced for blasphemy.
I’ve had my fill of the “anti” prefix. Pick a word that conveys the meaning you intended and stick with it.
+1, Debi.