Criticising religion should be exempt from harassment laws, say MPs

“The Freedom of Expression (Religion or Belief System) Bill would make clear that the provision of the Public Order Act does not apply in the case of “discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents”.”

While I agree with what they want I can not seeing it having a chance of coming to fruition

Criticising organised religion should be fair game. And while we’re at it, let’s remove tax exemption.

there should be no exceptions in law related to religion, there can be no blasphemy law when one religion things another is blasphemous.

where does that end?

no one has the right not to be offended, no group has the right to silence those critical of it

i think a lot of redditors would agree if this sort of law was enforced against critisim of Christianity. Imaging facing fines for calling God “skydaddy” or other reddit norms. But they wont because reddit.

Since when has criticizing anything at all been harassment.

Harassment and criticism are not the same thing.

Criticism of religion should be treated in the same way as criticism of the government or public officials. If a government official would consider a particular form of criticism unacceptable such as hate speech, incitement, or personal attacks then it shouldn’t be considered acceptable when directed at religious beliefs or communities either. There should be a consistent standard. If we demand civility and responsibility in political discourse, the same should apply to religious discourse.

I ain’t even religious, but I’ve never seen this rhetoric where you cannot criticise a religion. If you’re not being hateful or insulting to other people religion, I’ve found most people are very open to a discussion about their religion. That is people who actually practice and not just say they’re so and so religion in name.

Criticising religion should be a sacrosanct human right.

It absolutely should…

There’s no more appropriate target for mockery than religion.

If some religion calls dogs “dirty”/haram, I’d like to be free to openly criticise it. I don’t want to live in society where hating on dogs is acceptable, for example. I don’t want this to spread in any Western community to accommodate some religious group’s sensitivities. I want my dog to eat, shit, play and enjoy life freely without a fear of being called “haram” by a certain religion. All in all, I want to be free to exercise my right to hate religions that hate dogs.

So it should be.

And those that decide to defend that religion by violence should be jailed no exception.

You can criticise religion, but harassing people should be illegal.

Instead of introducing a specific exemption the interpretation of one offence in one piece of legislation, we should just remove all references to offensive or causing offence or likely to offend from all applicable existing laws. That’s the thing that’s often used against people, particularly in prosecutions for things said online. Harassment has never really been the issue since that’s pretty well defined and needs to be targeted, repeated behaviour against a person. You already can’t harass an idea – legally, that’s a non-concept.

Are we still talking about this? The guy was arrested for acting like a prick, starting a fire and yelling and swearing in a public place. And he got a slap in the wrist punishment.

If instead he’s gone and shouted fuck Erdogan and the AKP and burnt a Turkish flag he’d probably still been attacked by the embassy guys and probably still been arrested for acting like a prick.

Religion is only very tangentially related to why he was charged, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth about it when no one has any plans to bring back blasphemy laws is getting tiresome.