Neon Genesis

 

 

Neon, I would ask you, do you agree with this rule or not? I don't mind which way you swing on it, but I mean it to point out that laws curtailing Freedom of Speech are in place usually for a genuine reason.

TCPC is a privately owned website that can make up its own rules as to how it should be regulated and I'm fine with privately owned organizations and such making up their own rules. But there's no law that says you couldn't go off and make an offensive neo Nazi site like the infamous Storm Front forums where they could make their own rules if you wanted to. Likewise, you have the freedom in the country to make a website criticizing neo Nazi sites as well and no one can tell you not to. I have a libertarian take on freedom of speech.

I'd highly recommend the Cathedral of Hope podcast, which is the largest progressive LGBT church in America.

Certainly there may be some progressive Christians with a holier than thou attitude, but you find those attitudes in all political and religious movements, so I don't think it's anything unique to this label. For me, the label progressive Christian is describing a form of Christianity that's not bound by dogma and tradition and is open to change and looking to the future. An example of this would be on issues like homosexuality where progressive Christians don't see using the bible as justifiable for discriminating against gays and are open to supporting gay rights that traditional Christians would be opposed to in the name of tradition. As an alternative label, I personally like the label of Christian humanism.

I can quite easily believe that this film exists. Unfortunately, there are hateful, angry people out there who do stupid, ignorant things. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm almost certain I read that one of the masterminds behind thing was the same pastor beind "Burn a Koran Day" - ?

 

It's also possible that the terrorists had something planned for the anniversary of 9/11 - why wouldn't they? Perhaps this idiotic film was a nice bonus for them.

 

It was initially reported that the man behind it was an Egyptian Christian but now it looks like even the man behind the video doesn't even exist either: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/0912/There-may-be-no-anti-Islamic-movie-at-all

The online 14-minute clip of a purportedly anti-Islamic movie that sparked protests at the US embassy in Cairo and and the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya is now looking like it could have been ginned up by someone sitting a basement with cheap dubbing software.

Full credit goes to Sarah Abdurrahman at On the Media and Rosie Grey at Buzzfed who appear to be the first to highlight (there may be others, but they're the ones who caught my eye) the fact that almost every instance of language referring to Islam or Muhammad in the film has been dubbed in. That is, mouths are mouthing but the words you're hearing don't match.

There have already been a bunch of lies associated with the alleged film. A man named "Sam Bacile" was identified as being the writer and producer. He claimed to be an Israeli citizen. The Israelis say they have no record of him. He claimed to have spent $5 million on the movie. The clip online doesn't look like even $100,000 was spent. There is no record of a "Sam Bacile" living in California, and his strange insistence on the fact that he was Jewish and that he had exclusively Jewish funders for his film in an interview with the Associated Press now looks like something of a red flag.

I don't think using this film, as offensive as it is, is a particular good case for banning hate speech. There is much evidence suggesting this film doesn't even exist at all, that the attack was planned months ahead by terrorists marking the anniversary of 9/11, and that this doesn't really have anything to do with an offensive video.

Because a law is misused or perhaps 'tested' against community standards, doesn't mean we shouldn't have such laws. There are plenty of excellent criminal laws out there (think murder, rape, etc) that get abused and misused, sometimes deliberately, sometimes out of misunderstanding. But that's not an argument not to have such laws.

 

 

And there are plenty of laws that are so inherently corrupt or easily open to abuse that they can never be revised to be more humane, like the Texas sodomy laws. I have yet to see an example of a law restricting free speech that was used in a fair and just manner.

 

I also think that Spong is wrong in his analysis of cause and effect. He seems to think that if one would just change theology, one's behavior would change. I think the change is needed in worldview which then motivates the theology and behavior.

While religion is not inherently evil like Dawkins and .co would suggest, I think what people believe about reality does influence how they behave in life. I don't think it's a coindence that the vast majority of the people who deny the real age of the Earth or the existence of evolution also tend to be the same people who also want to ban abortion even in cases of incest and rape and it's not a coincidence that people with higher levels of education also tend to believe strongly in liberal social justice values.

 

 

Seeing homosexuality as a sin or sickness was not only Christians thinking. It wasn't until the middle of the last century that psychologists decided it was not a mental illness. The Bible wasn't the issue for them. Being homophobic doesn't necessarily grow out of the Bible. Many more read the Bible and came to the opposite conclusion.

 

I think your railing against the Bible obscures your argument.

 

Dutch

I'm not railing against the bible. My point is that in today's politically correct society where people get too easily riled up by words anything remotely rude could be construed as hate speech. It's not just my view that the bible has been used to spread hate but Bishop Spong has a whole lecture up on youtube where he discusses the long history of Christians quoting the "sins of scripture" to justify their intolerance:

 

Then you would have been relieved Neon when the case was tossed out and police were ordered to cover his costs of about $11,000. It seems justice can prevail.

There have been other cases over non-religious issues in the UK too. Like there was that man who got sued by homeopathic advocates just for saying he thought homeopathy was a hoax. While he ended up winning the court case, he still lost tons of money from all the pointless court cases.

There are many lines from literature that threaten death. I think people are pretty good at figuring that the quoted text isn't what is carrying the hateful intent to harm another. The Bible in and of itself is text, an inanimate object, just like a gun. It is not the Bible or the gun that speaks hatefully or kills. It is the person holding one that harms another.

 

I wonder if either praying for the president's death or an atheist wishing the president dead would rise to 'hate speech' in the countries that have such laws.

 

Dutch

Most Christians in America don't see the bible as merely literature but they view the bible as the divine Word of God and in many cases, they believe the bible is the literal word of God. Many American Christians see the quoted passage as a real historical fact that was approved of by the god they worship and not just as a fanciful story like a Greek tragedy or whatever. There was a case awhile back in the UK of a Christian who was arrested merely for saying homosexuality was a sin. He didn't hurt anyone physically at all and there was no evidence to my knowledge he had discriminated against anyone but for merely saying he thought homosexuality was a sin he was arrested for speaking about his religious belief. It all made me think of George Orwell and the Thought Police in 1984.

Neon, the Bible isn't to blame for people taking it and twisting it to their personal viewpoints. The Bible is open to a lot of interpretation, and people see what they want to see. Yes, parts of it are bloody and violent - but I don't think it constitutes hate speech. Historical documents offer us glimpses of the past. What was said, done etc in the past does not always carry over into the future. As a Christian, I hate that right-wing evangelists use a Holy book to support their views - but it's their right to do so. The preacher who prayed for the death of Obama was/is likely guilty of hate speech (I don't know the details, as I never heard about it), but to say the Bible is responsible is ridiculous. Scriptures and Holy texts from all different faiths have been used by different people at different times to support their beliefs.

So what's the proper interpretation of Deuteronomy 13?

 

If anyone secretly entices you—even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend—saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’, whom neither you nor your ancestors have known, any of the gods of the peoples that are around you, whether near you or far away from you, from one end of the earth to the other, you must not yield to or heed any such persons. Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them, and afterwards the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Then all Israel shall hear and be afraid, and never again do any such wickedness.

If anyone got up and said something like this today, they would be branded a terrorist but because it's in the bible, it's considered sacred and the word of God by many American Christians who will defend the inerrancy of this passage to the death. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck...

You also have to take into account though that most of these violent riots tend to happen mostly in either middle Eastern countries with poor socio-economic environments and European countries where Muslim communities are largely isolated from the rest of society. While Muslims still unfortunately face a lot of discrimination in the U.S., they seem to be much more integrated into mainstream American society than in some European nations and American Muslims in general tend to be a peaceful bunch. At least you don't seem to see riots as extreme as the U.S. Embassy riots over here as much as you do overseas.

 

I don't know Neon, I think sometimes maybe it's best to silence some people.

Yet hate speech laws don't seem to be helping at all with stopping violent riots.

 

Re - the Bible as "hate speech" - have to disagree. As we have discussed here at length, many times over, the Bible was written in an entirely different time. Society does not exist in a vacuum; the framework changed, and many people's views have therefore changed. Slavery, child marriage, and polygamy are examples of things that were the norm then, but are not now.

But whenever evangelical Christians use hate speech, they almost always are quoting from the bible. Consider the preacher that prayed for Obama's death. He was quoting directly from the Psalms so should quoting the Psalms be banned as hate speech?

One could easily argue that the bible itself is hate speech since there are many passages in the bible that call for death and violence towards heretics and people who don't believe in Yahweh.

That's not a logical fallacy I learned in Philosophy class, glint. These may be discussions the courts have with themselves but it's important for us to address them as well. As with the pro-life movement that wants to criminalize abortion, I don't think people who want to criminalize speech are thinking through the consequences of their advocacy nor have considered how exactly this would play out in the real world when the government puts the law into effect.

It's just that considering how many Republican politician leaders say offensive things on Fox News every week without anyone batting an eye, I don't know how you could execute a hate speech law in the U.S. fairly and justly without arresting at least over half of the GOP politicians and American evangelical preachers. And considering how the U.S. has been handling the Bradley Manning/Julian Assange situation, I would trust them to handle free speech as far as I can throw them. Maybe it works in some more liberal places like Australia but America is too polarized for it to be handled effectively now.

So if we're going to criminalize people for hate speech, what should the punishment for hate speech be? Should people go to jail for it? For how long and what for? Should they have to pay a fine and how much? Should we arrest members of the Tea Party for their racist speech and hate speech against Obama and Democrats? Should Todd Akin go to jail for his offensive speech about women?

I certainly didn't mean it to sound like the people make flippant decisions about what they will accept as acceptable speech, but rather that the community over time moves in a certain direction which sees old laws overturned and new appropriate ones implemented. Gay marriage used to be illegal (talk about a minority suffering tyranny) but more and more of the US's citizens are seeing the laws beginning to change and overturn the old.

 

 

Gay marriage should be legalized whether a majority of Americans support it or not and to invoke an argument from popularity either for or against it would be a logical fallacy. A significant portion of American society also considers abortion to be murder and thinks it should be banned but the courts have ruled in favor of protecting a woman's right to have an abortion regardless of popular opinion. I don't see why free speech shouldn't be held to the same standard that we would hold any other right. Rights are something unalienable that should not be voted away by cultural relativism or popular opinion.

If freedom of speech should be determined by popular vote, then what if you lived in somewhere like Ireland where the majority of Irish people are Catholics and they decided by popular vote to ban any criticism of the Catholic church as hate speech because that would go against what the majority of Ireland's culture would find to be acceptable speech? The problem with letting the people decide on what counts as free speech through popular vote is that the majority often forgets the rights of the minority and it's popularity-based voting like that that often lends itself most easily to abuse. This is why here in the U.S. we have a representative democracy rather than direct democracy and this is why our constitution protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

Again, by what standard are we determining that a particular speech is "hate speech" and who gets to make the decisions? Just recently in the UK a 19 year old teenager was arrested just because he made a Facebook post that said something offensive about the military. Keep in mind that nobody was actually physically harmed by this teenager's actions but he's still being arrested just because he hurt someone's feelings. Recently in the news there was a case of a young Christian girl who was framed by a Muslim cleric who sneaked a burned copy of the Koran into her shopping bags and tried to frame her for blasphemy. This was a young girl in Pakistan under the age of 18 who was going to be arrested for a victimless crime she didn't even commit herself but was framed by a Muslim cleric. In the UK there was another case of an atheist who was arrested in the John Lennon airport for distributing anti-religious tracts. Again, he didn't cause any actual physical harm but was only arrested just because he hurt somebody's feelings. The irony of an atheist being arrested for hurting someone's feelings in an airport named after a rock singer who said he was bigger than Jesus and wrote the anti-religious song Imagine was obviously lost on the UK authorities. I can name countless other examples where people in minority faiths where persecuted by the majority faith of that country in the name of protecting said religion from mere speech. People may have good intentions in supporting hate speech laws but I have yet to see a single example of when a hate speech law was executed in a fair and just manner and wasn't being used to discriminate against a viewpoint.

Here in the U.S. the Supreme Court ruled that the Westboro Baptists have the right under the first amendment to protest at funerals. While I may personally find the speech of the Westboro Baptists to be disgusting and hateful, if the government were to ban them from being able to protest, what we are saying then is that the government has the permission to tell individual citizens when and where they can speak what beliefs the government approves of as being appectable. The freedom to say what you like even if it's not popular was one of the freedoms the Founding Fathers fought for and there's a reason it's the first amendment in the constitution. The freedom to be able to think what we want and say what we want is what enables us to protect our other freedoms. While hate speech should always be combated against, hate speech can't be fought by restricting speech but it must be fought with more speech.

 

 

In Australia we go further than just libel and slander and have laws prohibiting the denigration of others based purely on sex, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

 

I'd like to think that helps with the 'responsibilty' aspect of free speech that Raven touches on.

 

Cheers

Paul

The problem with hate speech laws is that what counts as hate speech is often subjective and these laws have often been shown to be open to easily be abused by the government to suppress dissenting voices. An example is that there was a case in India where a man was arrested just for saying a miracle claim wasn't true because merely saying a miracle wasn't real was somehow offensive and worthy of arrest. A website like The Center for Progressive Christianity could easily be considered "denigrating" to other people's religion because most of us here don't believe in the divinity of Jesus or most of the beliefs considered traditional by most Christians.

 

What a poorly done movie about Islam. I certainly wouldn't pay to see it nor give it much weight except for sick entertainment. However, i could envision someone taking the Old Testament and doing the same to the Jewish/Christian faith and make a laughing stock out of it also using many Leviticus sayings/laws and practices and some stories elsewhere.

There has been some considerable debate as to whether this "movie" actually exists at all and that this was all just used as an excuse by terrorists who had already planned to attack the U.S. Embassy months ago on the anniversary of 9/11.

However, people typically use "socialism" to mean using government muscle to take something owned by one group to give it to a different politically favored group. This, of course, is not "sharing" in any sense of the word, and certainly not what the early Christians did (they didn't need government to tell them either).

Sounds a lot like the GOP to me: http://news.yahoo.co...-231818045.html

President Barack Obama told cheering supporters at a fundraiser in Connecticut on Monday that Mitt Romney's tax plan would raise taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for a tax cut benefiting the very rich: "It's like Robin Hood in reverse. It's Romney Hood." His remarks drew laughter and applause.

Obama pointed to a recent study of Romney's approach by the independent Tax Policy Center that speculated that, to pay for his proposed tax cut on the wealthiest Americans, the former Massachusetts governor would have to end popular measures like the mortgage and child deductions and the Earned Income Tax Credit—which chiefly benefit middle-class and poor Americans.

"He'd ask the middle class to pay more in taxes so that he could give another $250,000 tax cut to people making more than $3 million a year," Obama said.

"They have tried to sell us this trickle-down, tax-cut fairy dust before. And guess what? It does not work. It didn't work then, it won't work now," the president said. "It's not a plan to create jobs, it's not a plan to reduce our deficit, and it is not a plan to move our economy forward."

I took a "Bible Literature" class when I was in high school and while the school gave lip service that this was all just being taught as literature, there was an assumption by everyone in the class, including the teacher, that everything in the bible was literally true and this was real history. Nothing whatsoever was said about the Q gospel, the fact that Paul didn't write half of the letters attributed to him, or any of the problems of historical inaccuracies in the gospels.

One of the first issues that comes to mind with the separation of church and state is prayer in school or other religious views being removed from the school like teaching creationism. On facebook I have seen some saying about the violence in school is because we won't let God in our schools. Most of the people saying they want God brought into schools think it's a great idea as long as it's the Christian concept of God. What if Romney became president and started trying to get the book of Mormon required in the classroom because we need God in our schools? I could see many people who previously wanted religion in the schools start using the separation of church and state as grounds to keep someone else's religion out of schools. Religion has no place in school but altruism does.

 

 

Of course the big lie here is that Christians can pray at school all they want. It's just students and teachers can't force the rest of the class or school to engage in prayer with them but they can pray to themselves, among their friends at the lunch table, or even in those prayer at the pole things all they want. As that old saying goes, "as long as there will be tests at school, there will always be prayer at school."

 

What continues to amaze me are the people who are devout Christians but hold a worldview contrary to that of Jesus. They can embrace personal greed and denigrate altruism while professing Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. I would love to hear a reasoned and reasonable reconciliation.

 

 

George

The explanation I've always heard conservative Christians give is that they believe in the importance of giving to the poor but they think it's better to give to the poor through churches and charities than through the government. But I'm curious to know what organized Christianity's plan is for lowering the price of health care or how they're going to heal people who were turned away from insurance companies for having a per-existing condition? But I've also heard that countries which have a strong social safety net like Sweden tend to be less religious than countries with a poor safety net like the U.S.

In the OP, I asked, "Can one really embrace Jesus' message of caring for the "least of these" and then vote for politicians who support policies that harm "the least of these?"

 

I am reading a book now about Ayn Rand ("Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right"), the intellectual mentor, of the Tea Party and Paul Ryan. She answers my question quite directly. She says, "Christianity is the best kindergarten of communism possible." She was a fervent atheist and anti-communist. So, she saw a clear link between Jesus' message and socialism as a economic system.

 

George

Both Paul Ryan and Joe Biden claim to be devout Catholics and they both claim their Catholic faith inspires their political views yet both Biden and Ryan have radically different worldviews on everything from gay marriage to contraception. If your economic policies should be based solely on your religious faith, who gets to decide which version of Christianity that American economic policies should be based on? Whoever's the most popular? Whatever religious belief the president happens to have? Can Muslims let shariah law dictate American politics or is it only Christianity that can?