(January 18, 2015 at 7:20 pm)Drich Wrote: The way I started this thread was an assault on France for hypocritically flying the banner of free speech when in fact they seem to only value it when it is against religion. i wanted to see how deep this all went. If support of France's decision to jail those speaking out against the goverment in the name of religion was bothering anyone, or if they felt it justified in jailing those who supported their religion over the state.
This is a very slippery slope. Once people start down this path I dont know how we will ever recover from it.
Your continued re-defining of terms in order to always be the martyr is so tiring.
In my opinion, France should never jail someone over words. This is, however, comparing America's free speech laws to France's, which are less widespread. I agree that all countries should protect free speech fully, but the fact is they don't.
But to say that they only value free speech when it is against religion is blatantly dishonest, and I think you know it, but will never admit it. They didn't value free speech when it went against the state's interest, or at the very least they set a threshold of intolerant speech that could be punished by law, but to say that the only free speech that is protected in France is anti-religious speech is just dense. But, then, why would I expect anything different from you?
For starters, France's free speech laws don't protect hate speech. Those are the LAWS of that country. I maintain that those laws shouldn't exist, but I don't live there so I don't get a say. The comic in question had been charged 38 times before for violating those pre-existing laws, this was just the latest incidence, timed by the comic purposefully. Nevertheless, you break the laws---whether you disagree with them or not---you risk going to jail.
So France's laws are hypocritical. But their enacting and upholding those laws is not.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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