International law against "slandering religion"?

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Keep it on topic, please. There are plenty of threads about that issue. Try and exhaust all the possibilities of any issues similar to the Mohammed cartoon fiasco before bringing it to that.

Did you have to ask him THAT? Now he is going to quote reams of rubbish to belabour the point and mislead us altogether. In other words, his political side will expose itself.

i'm sorry, i was trying to use it as a turnaround to illustrate that religion does more slandering than its slandered against.

Later. Exhaust other possibilities first, like inter-religious intolerance for slander.

true, pointing out hypocrisy never works with religion.


i'd say inter-religious tolerance first...it's kinda why i made that topic "religion: why get offended?"

I reject the idea that a law such as this should exist even in the absence of practical difficulties.

I'd say no, resoundingly.

Two main reasons:

1) It would mean that in situations where you had extremists, even terrorists, it would cover them as well - thus international law would be on their side. It horrifies me to even think of how far people would try to stretch it and of course, whether the jury is 11 people or the UN, it has more to do with the particular agenda and angles the jurors have over what's really true or just.

2) If there are real issues they need to be addressed, if there are real slights and disrespects dished out on certain religions they need to defend themselves for themselves - otherwise their credibility and resilience just aren't there; which is an internal problem that they need to solve.

Yeah, I love it. Nothing leads further away from real discussion than forced political correctness either. That whole Jordanian idea scared the hell out of me though, and it says a lot about the supremacist attitude going around in that circle of the world that they'd want to extradite Danish citizens from Denmark for something done in Denmark - its like our DEA pulling the Dutch out of Amsterdam for smoking weed. Its also why it terrifies me when some of our supreme court justices here and there decide to make rulings and reinforce them with selective snippets of law from other countries (and yeah, I have a feeling that Antonin Scalia will be retiring the same way Rehnquist did - he's that needed).

How would such a law be on their side? Take televangelists as in Hagee who characterize Islam as a demonic faith and practice. That would be against such a law. A terrorist who calls people infidels and that they should be killed would also be subjected to this law.

I find your second reason impractical.

My feeling is that most subjective laws need to be stricken from the books. American society has turned into one obsessed with right and negligent with their responsibilities... and the obsession with creating laws instead of education and experience is something beyond my abilities to comprehend. Crimes against a person are legitimate in my mind; theft, rape, murder, etc. But to legislate an insult? Protect one religion at the expense of another? It's silly.


M.

makuranososhi said it perfectly and far more concisely than I did; its subjective. The judgment of what would actually constitute slander would be, of course, subjective to the political mood of the times and the powers that be - which is a VERY VERY bad thing. Right now, and as it has been for a decades, international law has been a law where almost all countries have say. This leads to, as not to be discriminatory on their part, dictatorships at times heading the human rights board even. The UN does things to spite the U.S., it happens all the time, and it happens because on one side - most if its constituent countries, if you count by numbers, aren't democracy and don't believe in democracy. You also have the fact that for many years western European leaders such as Chiraq were quite deliberately trying to stall anything we did, not in mindfulness of us being wrong in an asserstion (17 breaches of resolution, acts of war committed against us where we still sat at the table and said "yeah, lets really try not to bring it to war", regarding a country where the leader's own military let alone the rest of the world believed the guy had chemical weapons still at the very least - until that was disproved).

The result of an organization deciding our fate and what laws we held to, dominated by dictatorships - I doubt I even need to say what that means. In case your wondering though yes, I believe international law would consistently land as anti-Israel, anti-US, anti-Britain, anti-Australia, anti-Iraq if that ends up as a democracy, and I believe that when terrorists did blow themselves or things up in general in any of the above countries the reaction of the international community would be either to ignore that as best they could or otherwise, if they really got brazen, hint to the idea that homicide bombing is a rite of religious expression and that we should be more careful with our words in terms of how we speak up about that matter as well. All these nations would be nations where also, under international law, they'd have to wait until one of their capital cities went up like Hiroshima or Nagasaki quite likely before they could have the go ahead under international law to handle the source of the problem wherever they may be.




Its called speaking out on injustices themselves - strapping on a pair if thats what it takes. Doesn't take violence, the pen's a much better weapon when it comes to ideology and promoting or defending it.

No, because the implications of doing so would be the greatest violation of freedom of speech imaginable, and would lead to dangerous levels of empowerments towards those religions, as legitimate critics would be victims of this law too, don't forget that. Eventually one religion would overpower the rest and be able to exploit this law, and attempt to redefine what constitutes 'slander'. I can see it now, the Spanish Inquisition on a global scale, as some will want to change the 'sander' laws into invoking the death penalty for those who protest their religion. Especially by allowing something like this to happen would literally destroy centuries of human ideological progress and lead us back into the dark ages. Once you impose laws to defend institutions or ideologies of any kind by law from criticism (which could be defined as slander by the institution too you know), being political, social or religion, the people loose the capacity to protest against any unfair system that may develop, and therefore George Orwell's nightmare of "1984" becomes a step closer to reality.

Well, I don't like the idea of going back to the dark ages, so No.

I disagree that saying f**k Mohammed is slander, it is merely expressing an opinion that many members of the "Religion of Peace" may want to kill you for.

It doesn't matter, my point was that such a law would be impossible to enforce because there are always those people who will take offense at everything.

I do agree with this statement. Short of having a noxious dictatorship in place such laws would be unenforceable.