RE: 25,000 Muslims March in England to call for laws to Silence Critics of Islam.
May 6, 2013 at 12:38 pm
IMO, there is a difference between censoring speech, and reminding people that speech has consequences. If you are an inveterate racist who cannot keep his opinions to himself, you will probably lose friends and potentially employment. But the government won't lock you up for it. Advocating harm to others may be restricted depending on the circumstances, though I wonder how many imams have been locked up for declaring a fatwah on others or making veiled threats or just referring to people or governments as SATAN. Because that all sounds like hate speech to me, but I'm guessing that none of those 25,000 marchers want that particular speech to be curtailed.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
