31 January 2006

How, exactly, did Salman Rushdie harm Islam?

Blasphemy is a strange crime. First you create a religious system. In this system you have one or more extremely powerful gods. Then you claim that insulting the god(s) somehow harms these omnipotent beings, and thus those who commit such an offense need to be punished.

I do understand that people get offended when their belief systems are mocked. It's just that freedom from being offended is not a human right.

What about the "harm" that mockery does to a religion? Sorry. I just don't get how, say, this could possibly "harm" Christianity. And I don't think that Islam is so fragile that a few disrespectful drawings of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper pose any threat whatsoever.

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