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Man Sentenced to Death For Blasphemous Facebook Comments In Pakistan (gizmodo.com)
In what is believed to be "the first time the death penalty had been awarded in a case related to social media," a 30-year-old man in Pakistan has been sentenced to death for blasphemy in comments made on Facebook. Gizmodo reports: The prosecutor told The Times of India that Taimoor Raza was arrested "after playing blasphemous and hate speech material on his phone on a bus stop in Bahawalpur, where a counter-terrorism officer arrested him and confiscated his phone." It was the material on Raza's phone that led to his arrest. The Guardian reports that the accused's brother said Raza "indulged in a sectarian debate on Facebook with a person, who we later come to know, was a [counter-terrorism department] official with the name of Muhammad Usman." Raza's defense attorney told The Guardian the initial charges were limited to "insulting remarks on sectarian grounds," which carries a maximum two-year jail sentence, but that "derogatory acts against prophet Muhammad," which carry a death sentence, were added later. According to The Times of India, Raza will be able to appeal the ruling to the Pakistani High Court and the Supreme Court. Facebook said in a statement: "We are deeply saddened and concerned by the death sentence served in Pakistan for a Facebook post. Facebook uses powerful systems to keep people's information secure and tools to keep their accounts safe, and we do not provide any government with direct access to people's data. We will continue to protect our community from unnecessary or overreaching government intervention."
This has less to do with Facebook and more with what happens when you let imaginary friends rule your life.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At what point do we drop the political correctness and accept that Islam in the present day is more violent than other religions? I don't care about the past of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions. Violence committed in the name of the Gods of those religions is generally considered blasphemy. Christians might tell you that you're going to hell and say offensive things to you, but they're thankfully not killing people like the Muslims are.
When do we decide that the Islamic religion of the present day is too violent and insist that it reform or be banned? If religion were generally the problem, we would see Christians committing violent acts the way Muslims are. The fact is, they're not. There is a Christian state, specifically a Catholic one. It's called the Holy See. They don't have a military outside of the Swiss guards, and the Holy See is pretty pacifist in its nature. Contrast that with fundamentalist Islam and you'll see a huge difference. The "religion of peace" isn't peaceful at all. In fact, it's incredibly violent compared to other contemporary religions.
You see the language "Facebook does not provide any government with direct access to people's data" This might even be the literal truth, it doesn't preclude 3rd parties having access to that data and making it available to government(s) though, even if those 3rd parties would not exist were it not for government funding.
This is a good example of why religion should be abolished throughout the world, ANY religion.. Religion has always been about control of the people, nothing more, nothing less. No law should EVER be based on religious stuff, and certainly religion should never be a reason why should be able to discriminate without problems, but if you say the same thing outside religion your bound to get in trouble.. Most wars are in the name of some religion, but all are about power and control..
*THIS* should be raised whenever some politician goes "Government must have access to Facebook/WhatsApp/etc. for security"!
In the UK, the current government has been hysterically running around shouting that Facebook is allowing all sorts of nasty illegal content to be disseminated. While that's certainly true, it bears remembering that one country's "illegal" is another country's "cherished freedom".
If the UK government has the right to access it's citizen's Facebook pages for "illegal" content, then you can guarantee Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia, Russia and all sorts of other ghastly states will demand the same right. And then, through the law of unintended consequences, a lot of people (who the liberal west would consider friends), will either wind up behind bars or six feet under.
If we are willing to give our governments access to our data to "keep us safe", we have to accept that governments we may not like will use the same powers to do harm to their own citizens. This is the moral choice that's not raised by the screaming "think of the children" brigade.
I'm not sure if you've read the New Testament, but it kinda outright says you should be loving everyone even if they hate on you. Perhaps you are confusing it with sections of the Old Testament, which had specific instances of God instructing the Isrealites to go to war and take out other nations (and not permission for them to make that call themselves), or the Law of the Old Testament which had legal punishments that were for the Isrealites to govern themselves, not to use on foreigners. People who claim that Christianity supports killing non-believers (or blasphemers, or whatever) are people who have never actually read the Bible (or grossly misunderstood it on a basic level)