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In Greece, 10 Months In Prison For "Blasphemous" Facebook Page
First time accepted submitter etash writes "A bit more than a year ago a man was arrested in Greece for satirizing a dead monk, after the far-right party golden dawn, petitioned for his arrest. A couple of days ago he was given a ten-month sentence. What actually enraged the religious Greek blogosphere was not the satire. He wrote a fictitious story about a miracle done in the past by this specific monk. The story was then sent to [a religious blog] and then in a matter of days it was copy pasted and presented as true by most of the religious and far-right blogs and news sites. The final act of the dramedy took place when he came out and revealed that the story was not real; he intended to show the absurdity and the lack of reliability of these sites."
Thankfully the Separation of Church and state is still "mostly" intact in the USA. Though Texas and several other States like Louisiana and Missouri are working to change that, and a couple have been bitten in the butt by their attempt to get state funded religious Schools mean that ALL religions get to have them!
One sheep's "blasphemy" is another man's truth.
Government and law should stay the hell out of religious debates.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Stipulations in Freedom of Speech rarely turn out well. Freedom of any and all speech should be a fundamental human right.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison once had this same conversation. Jefferson had proposed that the Constitution protect the right to "speak the truth". Madison pointed out that this was a bad idea, because people in power could dictate what was "true". Jefferson agreed, and freedom of speech was written into the Bill of Rights without qualifications.
...if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
Basically I agree strongly with what you wrote in both philosophy and practice. But I cut Germany some slack here, using the US as the example.
Nazism was a “philosphy” that was harnessed to the state within living memory. As a result there are plenty of remaining artifacts around from old driving licenses or professional certificates (e.g. Opticians) or marriage licenses that are still valid documents (old German driving licenses had no expiration dates) which bear swastikas and other nazi references. There are still old granddads who had fun shooting guns in the war. I know one friend’s dad, drafted at 17 in 1944, who's main memories are crazy russians running through hi farm trying to defect to the west. Plus learning to shoot. But every once in a while he uses an old aphorism from his childhood that's not only disturbing, but doesn't even agree with how he lived his life. I am sure there are living grandparents with stories they learned in school in the 30s and who were happy with those times. So since the wound is still fresh, this is a part of trying to heal it.
Compare that to the US. The civil war ended in 1865 but old southern racists survived well into the 1920s (even reaching the presidency, with Wilson) and the Jim Crow legacy continued into the 1960s and beyond. The reconstruction program which was killed early in the US was the equivalent of the reconstruction of Germany, which, in these laws, continues to this day.
I agree with Brandeis that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants" so feel free speech should be extremely free. But the German's position shouldn't be rejected out of hand.