UK Teen Cited For Calling Scientology a "Cult"

An anonymous reader writes "A 15-year-old in the UK is facing prosecution for using the word 'cult' to describe the Church of Scientology at an anti-Scientology demonstration in London earlier this month. According to the City of London police at the scene, the teen was violating the Public Order Act, which 'prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.' There's a video of the teen receiving the summons from the City of London police at the demonstration (starting about 1 minute in), and now he's asking for advice on how to handle the court case."

Comments

Re:Whats the difference?

[Urkki]

Its still hurting us collectively. If there were no "Abrahamic" religions in the so called Western World, what do you think we would have instead? Would be be better of or worse of? IOW, are these religions hurting us or helping us collectively?

I sure hope you don't live under the delusion that people would simply not have religious-type beliefs in absense of current religions... Without religion-type beliefs, there would be no human society. And there's no religious-type belief that can't be turned into hate and attrocities. I'd say religion isn't hurting us any more than, say, oxygen is. But then again, oxygen really does hurt us a lot, essentially burning our bodies from inside, until the body is too degraded to be able to repair itself...

Re:Bizarreness matters too

[sm62704]

You would have made your point far better had you been a little more accurate. The Christian bible says nothing of telepathy, nor that the Christ was a "god fragment". Nor that he is dead; the opposite in fact. The entire religion revolves around this man being tortured to death in order to pay for all the nasty shit YOU have done to other people in your life, then walking out of the tomb alive. The religion of Christanity is a religion based on giving, sharing, being non-judgemental, and forgiving of others' faults. If you see a Christian preacher wearing a five thousand dollar suit, he is one of the "wolves in sheep's clothing" that the man he preaches about warned against.

If you're going to troll Christians, at lest get your facts straight.

And yes, not only are there a lot of Christians at slashdot, a lot of scientests are Christians, Muslims, and Jews as well. Being deliberately offensive is trolling.

Re:Britain 1, USA 0

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

The problem is the violent reactions to any criticism of islam. The west has "responded" by appeasing them. There is of course the problem that the quran itself is an extremely racist book, so equal treatment of religions and outlawing hate speech de-facto means outlawing islam (unless you consider "all non-muslims are lower than animals, you should never trust them, and only killing a bunch of them when you get the chance will help" just another "nice" statement. Then again, by Obama's standards that probably IS a nice statement).

Since a certain prophet did indeed kill his critics (and obviously this was upon command of a certain imaginary friend of his), a certain religion consider's killing it's critics holy, and they have offices in mecca (a city where you can get beheaded for not being a muslim). Google "asma bint marwan". They even left her kids for dead.

However there is no non-discriminatory way to prevent criticism of islam without making criticizing anything that calls itself a religion illegal.

The govt are weasels, so they'll just appease scientology too. Wonder when the vatican will get the hint.