So I am just curious about you guys opinion on blasphemy laws. Since Richard Dawkins once called blasphemy a victimless crime. Also I wanna know if your country where you live has blasphemy laws.
blasphemy? BLASPHEMY! here in Australia i can talk shit about the bible and those paedophile priests can't do shit
In the Netherlands the conservative-liberal government introduced blasphemy laws in the 1930's after a communist newspaper said some offending crap about God, Christ, and Christianity! And we still have those laws today!
Seriously? We still have those? Wait, was that the SGP who did that? Those bastards...and for anyone who doesn't know who they are (which I assume is pretty much everyone who isn't Dutch, or maybe the Belgians on the forums know about them), they used to disallow women from joining the party, because they of course should be too busy in the kitchen making food and giving birth for God and all.
Blasphemy laws don't even exist in the Vatican these days. Pretty sure it's almost exclusively Pakistan and a few other quasi-theocratic states that endorse them. With the exception of the Netherlands, apparently.
Now that I think about it, if we have those laws, how the hell did Wilders not get jailed or something? Kinda sounds like some random unenforced law. I know of this website where there were all kinds of stupid laws, like "don't throw a drunk moose out of a helicopter", "it's forbidden to start a car when someone's lying under it", "if there are more than 5 native Americans on your land, you're allowed to open fire on them", and my personal favourite which I found out about after a guy in Iceland commented on my epic sunglasses "it's forbidden to have the Icelandic flag on accessories"...at least, that's what I understood from what he was telling me (I was wearing sunglasses with the Icelandic flag on the glasses. They're pretty epic, I must say)
Hm...these guys just don't make sense...oh well, they usually don't get a hell of a lot of votes anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
They were against the law, 'cause of the definition of God according to the new law. According to the Catholics the virgin Mary is also God in some kinda way.
Here's a wikipedia article that lists various nation's laws on blasphemy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law I was surprised by some of them. Apparently in Israel you can get one year imprisonment for "publishing a publication that is liable crudely to offend the religious faith or sentiment of others". The situation in Pakistan concerning their blasphemy laws is pretty alarming. "In November 2010, Asia Bibi was sentenced to death by hanging on a charge of blasphemy; the case that has yet to be upheld by the Lahore High Court has sparked international reactions. Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was shot dead by his security guard for supporting Asia Bibi. Salman Taseer had visited Asia Bibi in Jail and had held a press conference with her. He had told media that Asia Bibi will be released soon and the President of Pakistan will soon annul her death sentence. This triggered mass protests in Pakistan with many imams of local mosques claiming that Salman Taseer had defied Mohammed and should be sentenced to death for it."
It seems like most of the stuff about Blasphemy laws is just to prevent racism in a religious context.
Lots of laws are like our DNA sequence, the majority of them are just not in use anymore. The vast amount of our genetic code is actually used and turned off. Laws are the same, when they go out of popularity, people simply stop enforcing them even to the extent of forgetting that they exist. I'm sure that every once in a while, an old law turns up that is today, socially unenforcible. I am equally sure that it is cheaper just to make a law to allow courts to suspend the punishments of entirely oudated laws rather than go line by line in the law books to delete them. And the lawyers-in-training can always use a laugh. Then again... that may give the courts too much power...
Not quite though it's not far from the truth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA Even more surprising is that 8% is the human genome is viral junk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus
I never said HOW MUCH of it was inactive but, yeah alot of it is outdated features that we got rid of or something over time. And when they accidentally reactivate it sucks. But back on topic... Generally blasphemy laws can be viewed as 'we only like X kind of people in X locations, so we are going to make a law that makes it a pain to live there if you are not part of X kind of people.' If there are any blasphmy laws that are not already put down by the courts where I live, they will probably never turn up. In any case I haven't heard of any where I am.
