so you're saying that blasphemy laws were designed to minimize vigilantism because the state/police would carry out Gods will instead of fellow citizens?

You mean like Ireland?


Or is the €25,000 fine not what you would consider 'heavy duty'?

"Examples include Greece, Poland, Algeria (prison sentences of varying length, failure of due process in trials, trials in absentia); Indonesia (longer prison sentences); Sudan (corporal punishment); Egypt (torture); Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (capital punishment)."

(from: http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/blasphemy-laws-ireland-1003213-Jul2013/ )

@ Hauta

Essentially, yes. The state wields the stick of God's law so the mob don't have to. And pretty much universally the state is less extreme than the people would be.

@ Ora
That would depend on what blasphemy such a fine would apply to, and how often that law is utilized. I imagine that in modern Ireland that blasphemy laws are not actioned all that often, if at all?

@Oct, I don't see it that way. imo, blasphemy laws are designed to intimidate the religious minority and anyone with a dissenting opinion. They are a tool of the regime.

@Octavious, that law in modern Ireland was written in 2009; but so far as i can tell hasn't yet been tested in court.

The government is considering a referendum to remove the requirement for a blasphemy law from our constitution.

@ Ora
Then I take it the 2009 law replaced a previous blasphemy law, and is on the way to being replaced itself by no law at all. That seems pretty much what I'd expect in a country moving from old school Catholicism to a more relaxed approach to religion.

If blasphemy laws were really about protecting God and old school religion you'd expect to see more of them when that view of religion was under threat, not less.

@ Hauta

You think so? Take Saudi Arabia as an example. It has some very harsh religious laws, but because they are laws you can take actions to not be punished by them. If all such laws in Saudi Arabia vanished tomorrow, would you suddenly feel safer there? Or would you be terrified that exercising your new freedom to blaspheme would get you strung up from the nearest lamppost?

Naturally it is better to have no such laws and a tolerant society, but if I was unfortunate enough to live in an intolerant society I would appreciate the existence of the law to highlight where the lines are and to give me some protection from the local religious authorities imposing their own rule.

That depends on how much you trust the authorities to color within the lines.

"'Then I take it the 2009 law replaced a previous blasphemy law, and is on the way to being replaced itself by no law at all."'

Surprisingly no. In 1999 (in the first case since 1855) the supreme court made a ruling stating that the 1937 constitution had extinguished the common law - which refered to an 'established state' - previous to 1937, this would presumably have meant the (protestant) Church of Ireland. Going on to say: "it is impossible to say of what the offence of blasphemy consists ... In the absence of legislation and in the present uncertain state of the law the Court could not see its way to authorising the institution of a criminal prosecution"."

So oddly, Ireland reintroduce a blasphemy law ten years later as required by the same 1937 constitution. This was less about old school catholicism, and more about a weird legal limbo...

Interesting way of doing things, but ultimately harmless by the sound of it. It does provide you solid enough logic from an Irish perspective at least. It exists as a temporary fix to a minor constitutional quirk, and despite looking a bit odd has caused nobody any problems. God and religion have nothing to do with it, and any implications about them that you see at first glance seem to evaporate upon closer inspection.

In the UK, the Blasphemy Laws have nothing to do with Theology and everything to do with State religion and the Establishment of the Church of England.

Logic doesn't enter into it at any point.

@Oct, the blasphemy laws give the mob the justification it needs in order to enforce vigilante justice. They know that they can do what they want and that the government has already supported suppression of blasphemers. The government will look away as the mob beats up on the religious minorities.

@Deeply Dippy, in ireland we had the exact same law until 2009, except no established state religion for it to apply to :)

@orathaic, that only works if you believe that God is more concerned to enforce blasphemy laws than laws against murder, theft, etc, etc, etc. God obviously doesn't smite people who do bad things and reward people who do good things, so we need laws. And a god who is more worried about people who call him names than people who commit crimes against humans is an asshole anyway and really not worth our time.

Blasphemy laws are very deeply rooted in civilization. Most (maybe all) civilizations accepted that there were gods who had the capacity to benefit or harm the people, and that part of the government's job was to keep those gods happy. Blasphemy laws are ultimately a way to let the gods know that the nation as a whole is NOT behind the guy who's calling them names, and so the gods shouldn't smite them. The Romans were particularly focused on making sure that their leaders kept the gods happy, and so it was natural for the Emperors to attempt to enforce similar laws in relationship to the Christian God.

See Pastorlan, you going and taking this seriously will result in a conversation. Wherein i try to reapectfully disagree with you... Is that what you want?

I mean, yeah, in principle, you're right. But also, if God doesn't care about blasphemy (because blaspheming can't possibly hurt your God) then why have Blasphemy laws?

Well i will give you my shortest answer. Blasphemy can hurt the God idea, the thing which i continue to assert really exists and is named God. The idea of God can ne harmed by Blasphemous ideas being spread. Therefore the idea needs to protect itself... Hence Blasphemy laws.

i hope you don't mind me kinda personifying an idea. It seems odd to give ideas motives, and desires... It is more like, the various ideas of God which didn't protect themselves don't exist anymore. So it looks like all 'god-ideas' (this is a meme, i can use that word, right?) seem to care about preventing Blasphemy...

@'Most (maybe all) civilizations accepted that there were gods who had the capacity to benefit or harm the people'

I would use the word spirits here. Many pre-historic collectives seemed to believe in some kind of animistic world. Where each thing had a spirit or essence, which could be petitioned for help. Worship of spirits of things like the Sun became very important and helped develop into societies with Sun-Gods as their most prominent figure... but i tend to tell a rather different story about the progress from rural shamanistic traditions into urban priestly castes.

Stop me if you've heard it.

@orathaic: I was thinking of "civilization" in the narrower sense of "societies with cities," which is part of what you need to have a government.

It's somewhere between simplistic and wrong to say that blasphemy laws are intended to protect "the God idea." The thread that's equally as strong that blasphemy and other laws should be put into place to protect the nation from divine wrath.

In the world where gods are assumed to have power, the person who curses god is a threat to public well-being and needs to be stopped before he causes the gods to curse the nation.

You're right though that people have also used blasphemy laws as a way to censor opinions they don't agree with. And in this sense you're right...once you think that you need to censor atheism, you have a fundamentally different understanding of gods than people who are convinced that the gods will punish atheists themselves. Getting back to an earlier conversation, that shift is what Nietzsche pointed out when he said "God is dead." But for most of history, the point of blasphemy laws wasn't to protect the gods from people, but rather to protect people from the gods.

@pastorlan, it doesn't matter why the people think it is a good idea, (whether to preserve their own temporal power, or because they actually believe God moght smite them - despite not smiting all the heathens in the next town who worship god differently) - i am making an argument for the evolution of ideas. That if an idea has some form of protection, it will out last an idea which does not.

And if only one 'god idea' can be held in each person's brain at a time, then the ones which die out allow the other ones feetile ground to grow. Now i know this is overly simplistic, i am ignoring lots of specific examples of the cultural importance of a lot of thigs related to religions. Like how Judaism managed to survive thousands of years after the second temple was destroyed... But i'm just saying that on average, all other things being the same, you can assume blasphemy laws would promote the survival of an idea.

@"In the world where gods are assumed to have power, the person who curses god is a threat to public well-being and needs to be stopped before he causes the gods to curse the nation." - that only works if people actually believed the gods would smite you - and yes, people did attribute (and to some extent still do) so-called 'acts of god' to a specific destroyer.

Infact i would argue this is the very basis of religion. That sometimes a drought would hit, and someone has a theory... So you go petition the local river spirit or whatever, and hope that next week or next rainey season or whatever things will be better (maybe after making a sacrifice). And if it doesn't work you sacrifice the guy who made the petition - cause he clearly did it wrong... Until some good weather happens along and you keep doing the thing you think you've proven works.

So to some extent, you seem to have a solid theory. Eventually after some urbanisation and a priestly class has gone full time, they have a pretty good gig. Instead of people coming to them when the rains fail, they tell people how to live, (and largely what animals to sacrifice in the temple) to ensure a successful or happy life. Wars off illness or bad luck... But these priests now have a vested interest in the population listening to them, because they are dependent on the surplus production of othwr workers to eat (even if they are eating the sacrificed remains of some animals - in more modern churches we're looking at sacrificing money to the church, seen in the extreme in some evangelical churches in the US today). Now maybe the early priests worried about competition, and maybe the same mids of circumstances as happened previously helped create new superstitions (like an earthquake hits your city, and now suddenly the preacher is blaming it on the unbelievers from the north...).

But it doesn't matter why the edict to ban blasphemy comes down. It only matter whether it is an effective tool for preserving a particular idea.

When Islam specifically talks about converting other by war, and executing those Muslims who turn their back on their faith, it is an example of using violence to protect the meme. Of course there are many effective strategies to protect your ideas. Judaism may have kept it in the family in a way which maintained the population relatively stable and not spreading too fast or diluting, but kept a very strong bond in those families (i don't know, i'm guessing here).

If christians going on crusades to protect the holy sites in Arabia were doing so for personal power, it doesn't matter. The personal reason don't come into it, the only question is whether it was effective at keeping the idea alive (and the we only have these successful ideas left...).

So pacifism may not be a very good idea, because it can't force others to put down their arms and if attacked it can't defend itself; yet it still has its adherents. It is not a dominant idea... And one culture can have many different, even conflictin ideas. Just as it can have many different religions sharing the same space... Anyway, i think i'm rambling, but it is late and we're talking at cross purposes.

It is possible that we are both taking complimentary descriptions of the same phenominon. Mine is more meta, yours is more practical. I believe there are multiple reasons to justify blasphemy, and they have probably all been used at one time or another. But if/when it is a successful strategy for preserving an idea (and i think it could sometimes backfire) my description of why blasphemy laws exist is an accurate one... (The laws themselves are ideas, made manifest and influencing thelives of their hosts... We think humans are great at manipulating our environment, ideas can change their hosts behaviour, get them into wars, or producing enough food to urbanise into cities... Maybe memes are the most powerful life form on the planet...)

Well I wanted to ask, which particular Omnipotent God did this refer to. There's our own Omnipotent Zultar and rules about offensive posts in the forum. There's the two biggies in the real world.. The God worshipped by Christianity and the God worshipped by the followers of Islam ?
Most of the Christian Churches have eased up on their "real world" punishment of heretics, blasphemers etc ...The good old " auto de fas" are now considered somewhat "passe" by Catholicism, and the Prodistents similarly gave up burning at the stake some while back. Whether Canon laws still retain old and now unused statutes on their books might be an interesting topic. There are, of course, still a minority of extremist zealots who abuse Christianity by claiming that they are Christians, and who try to impose their distorted fallacies upon their societies.

The current theology that most inflicts itself on societies in this area is Islam with it's devotees of "Sharia law", a most ignorant and profoundly stupid bunch of zealots, imho.

Both these purportedly " Christian " minority sects and those multitudinous followers of Islam of more extremist nature all ignore one of Jesus Christ's most significant teachings on the issue of punishing alleged reprobates..."Let the person without sin cast the first stone"

I don't really think you can talk about Islam without recognising the impact of Colonialism and the effect it had on the rise of political Islam. And also witout discussing Indonesia, which doesn't come closer to Greece and Poland in how they treat Blasphemers, then it does to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. (Iran does even get a mention... )

But i point at Indonesia because it is the most populous Muslim majority country. Islam isn't a problem in itself. That doesn't mean we don't have a serious human rights problem from Libya to Egypt, Somalia to Yemen, and Saudi Arabia to Iraq.

@MajorMitchell: in my discussion I wasn't referring to an Omnipotent God at all, which is why I carefully referred to "gods." In my opinion, Jesus thoroughly subverted typical ideas of how gods worked--so thoroughly that a lot of people who call themselves Christians weren't able to wrap their minds around it and mapped the non-subverted ideas about the gods back onto Christian language.

Also, I'm not at all sure that blasphemy laws really are good at defending specific beliefs. Historically blasphemy laws have a spotty success rate. Most successful religious movements were officially illegal at some point. On the other hand, there are examples of religious movements that were successfully stamped out by force.

And @MajorMitchell, Christianity and Islam are worshiping the same god. Even if you look at all the stories as mythology, the "Abrahamic religions" are sharing the same stories and directing worship to the same being.

Islam is not a single, monolithic entity in Indonesia, it's history is one of being generally the most moderate form of Islam, so it's diverse in Indonesia.. A lot of moderates with an extremist fringe.

Pastoralan, Christianity predates Islam by about 500 years. The advantage of being the later theology is that Mohammed had a fair idea about Christianity when he was developing Islam, so it's more about cleverly expropriating than sharing, eg he can relegate Jesus to being a prophet. Plus he designs Islam to have political and military purposes to counter two existing potential threats..the Roman Empire and Christianity ( very popular in Greek communities... of some relevance for example in the racial squabbles in Alexandria.. Greek Christians, Jews of traditional faith, and pagan worshiping Egyptians & Arabs, with the Romans trying to supervise the squabbling groups )
Islam is designed to give the non Romans, non Greeks, non Jews... The Arabs and Egyptians a separate unifying religiously based political and military ideology... Which worked out quite well, even with the schisms that develop within Islam when there's a power fight not long after Mohammed's demise..between those who believe power should be held dynastically within Mohammed's descendent's, and those who disagree with that..the Sunni & Shia split simplified.
So whilst moderate members of Christianity and Islam might agree that they worship the same God, they are both monotheistic religions & have "Abrahamic roots"...I think there are plenty of fundamentalists in both religions who would determinedly disagree with the "we worship the same God" proposition & claim that only the Bible is the true word of God, or that it the Koran is the true word of God and each side be willing to burn the other side's Bible or Koran.
It is worth noting that both the Bible and the Koran, despite purporting to be the word of God repeat the mistaken ideas of human Science of that time & for example neither give humanity a simple "heads up" about cholera and dysentery, or the way fleas & mosquitoes can act as infection vectors for the plague and malaria, which one might have expected from a benevolent & omniscient God.
Perhaps that's worthy of discussion, the way blasphemy laws were used as a tool to repress the advance of Science, and it should be expanded to discussion including laws about heresy as much as blasphemy.
Laws designed to protect orthodoxy & their effectiveness ?

@MajorMitchell: in a world with the Internet, there is no excuse for making a statement like "I think there are plenty." You could do enough research in 15 minutes to get an actual answer to this question. What you'll find is that from the beginning Muslims recognized that Jews and Christians worshiped God in a way that other people did not, which is the basis for allowing Christians and Jews to live in Muslim societies. You would also learn that Roman Catholicism explicitly recognizes that Muslims worship God and that Orthodox Christians were praying to Allah long before Mohammed was born.

Two key points about Muslim and Christian fundamentalists: first, both of them are part of completely modern movements that were born in the 19th century and are aggressively modern. Second, they also claim that other people who share their religion don't really worship God. The ISIS/Al Qaeda justification for killing Muslims is that the people they're killing aren't real Muslims. Similarly, Christian fundamentalists have tried to narrow the scope of "true Christianity" to exclude people who don't agree with them. So it's kind of meaningless that they exclude each other, when they are also excluding people who share their religion according to any reasonable definition of the term.

Since you're mentioning certain groups, it seems worth noting that the Bah'ai were founded in an Islamic society (Persia/Ottoman Empire), recognise Mohammed as a prophet, along with Moses, Jesus, And the other character from the book, but also the Buddah, and Krishna, and several others that the believe all had revelations from the one true god (not to mention the prophet they follow, whose name i can't spell, Bahá'u'álla? )

Sort of a cumulative revelation. With humans at different times being able to comprehend different revelation.

Muslims may have a problem with this hecause they explicitally claim that Mohamed was the final prophet. Which contributes to the persecution of Bah'ai people... (Who are now all over the world...)

Well Pastoralan, the founder of Islam certainly took and used a lot from early Christianity & the traditional Jewish religious culture.
Monotheism, in a world where most, perhaps all other religious cultures had a multiplicity of Gods, deities and spirits.
I'm not sure that I agree with the proposition that fundamentalism is a "modern day phenomenon"
The Greek Christians who burnt the library at Alexandria and killed Hypatia as well as seeking to suppress the paganism of the Egyptian religious culture were hardly a tolerant crowd.
The Jesuits were a hard core extremist group within the Catholic Church..nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.. Lol
The Puritans in England under Cromwell were a rather rigidly minded crowd as well, and they had been around since the rule of Elizabeth 1st..in fact she put a lot of effort into successfully fighting the Puritan elements within her own Parliaments who wanted to opress Catholics in most extreme ways.