Blasphemy ban a non starter

Some in the Muslim world want an international treaty to protect religious symbols and beliefs from mockery, a ban on blasphemy. For openers, that would run counter to our cherished right to free speech. It would also open a huge grey area: what constitutes blasphemy?

All the rhetoric that culminated in the Fort Hood killings could be protected by such a ban, as would the web sites promoting al-Qaida.

I’m sure that those Muslim countries that are pushing this are not thinking about protecting Christianity and Judaism from blasphemy, but once this can of worms is opened, what’s sauce for the goose, as they say, is sauce for the gander. Like it or not, “Allah is great; kill the infidels” would be seen as also unacceptable.

What next, once the standard religious sects of the western big three are protected, will we also have to ban denigrating the various kooky cults that spring up? No one really wanted to mock Jim Jones and his Jonestown experiment before the poison cool-aide incident. What about David Koresch? Those are just the prominent names that pop out of a very long list.

Taking this one step further, what about those of us who are atheists, a group of people who have only been able to come out of the closest in recent decades and who are still shunned by a large segment of society. Those of us who equate even conventional religion with kooky cults would likely be victims of witch hunts, jailed and persecuted just as we were for centuries.

Whether you are non-religious, conventionally religious, nominally religious or orthodox, to be kept from observing that the emperor has no clothes means the emperor, in all his guises, can run amok and naked through civilized society.

The politically correct among us may well fall for this blasphemy ban, thinking that we can’t criticize another culture’s beliefs, no matter what form they take. My view on that can be illustrated by what some friends have been sending me: strange lines that confused me until it was explained that they were from a game called Clue, something I’m not familiar with. However, whether you play that game or not, you should already know that the first step to understanding the complexity of anything is to start getting clues to people’s motives. Every clue warns me to reject this notion in any of its forms.