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Originally Posted by Letum
He does make some good points.
All religions should be open to criticism and the laws of state should always be higher then the laws of religion. 
However, it is important to make a distinction between offending people and causing hatred.
Offending People:
*note* All of the below is purely hypothetical.
If I drew a 1000m wide picture of the baby Jesus being raped then a lot of people would be offended. That would make me tactless and a git, but I should be allowed to do it and not be scared of people seeking revenge!
If I drew a 1000m wide picture of Mohamed dressed as a woman then a lot of people would be offended. That would make me tactless and a git, but I should be allowed to do it and not be scared of people seeking revenge!
Offending people can make you a tactless git, but it needs to be allowed so that peoples views can be challenged. What ever you say will offend someone in some way anyway!
You can't ban people from being offended either. People should be allowed to be offended as long as they are peacefully offended.
If you just offend a group people then no one will hate the people you are offending because of it.
Causing hatred:
*note* All of the below is purely hypothetical.
If I drew a picture of Jesus killing some Iraqi children alongside some American forces, then a lot of people would be offended. At the same time, some other people might agree with the messages in the image and this might cause them to hate Christians. No one should be allowed to create something that causes hatred in this way.
If I drew a picture of Mohamed as a terrorist (as in a Danish magazine), then a lot of people would be offended. At the same time, some other people might agree with the messages in the image and this might cause them to hate Muslims. No one should be allowed to create something that causes hatred in this way.
If you use slander to cause hatred against a group of people then that hatred can lead to acts of violence against them. |
If that criticism is deserved - so be it.
As usual, it escapes my understanding how one can make a comparison between Muhammad on the one hand, and others like Jesus on the other - the first having caused violance, call for murder, supression, robbery and war for the better part of his lifetime, the other having argued that one shall not practice violance, and demonstrating by his own's life's example that he meant that seriously.
Painting Muhammad with a head like a bomb is not so much a cartoon for me, but a parable, or a graphical metaphor with a lot of truth in it. And seeing how vicious Muhammedans around the globe reacted, while other Muhammedans did not criticise that kind of behavior, and did not question their own community about where the additional cartoons - the really critical ones - emerged from that never had been printed in Denmark (but were added by those who carried them enthusiastically to the Middle East in order to spark some furious hysteria), gave a lot of justification to paint a Muhammedan idol with a destructive device as his head. That is no offending, that is simply the truth.
Should we stop criticising Hitler and the Nazis, because some Neonazis today may feel offended by that, my find it disguisting, and may react angry and with violance and intimidation to that? Should we stop criticising Tamerlan, or Stalin, or whomever slaughterer in history you may think of, because we also do not want to see the Dalai Lama being critised? This is no one-for-one issue, and moral judgements shall not bee conducted on a quantitative basis, but on a qualitative basis only: if you be a nice guys ten times a week, you do not have one criminal deed for free.
Tolerance needs limits, values need hierarchies, not every ethical system is as much of worth as every other ethical system just because it exists. Not everything can be tolerated without giving up oneself's moral values. Islam has understood that from mthe very beginning and thus, never gives ground. The West has forgotten that most essential ingredient of cultural survival - in an infantile attempt to well-mean things for the better. And that's dumb, and that's all it is.