Ask Lemmy

Prohibiting satire of religion is a form of blasphemy law, and blasphemy laws shouldn't exist.

As in everything in life, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

If you don't like the satire of Charlie Hebdo, your right is to not read it. If you don't like a comedian who makes pedo jokes, your right is to not buy their tickets. If you don't like a TV show that shows drug use, your right is to not watch it.

That's it. That's the end of your personal rights on that issue. You do NOT have the right to tell other people what they personally view, watch, read, etc...

If enough people share your view, that publication/comedian/show will either change or go out of business naturally because of lack of subscribers. That's how it works.

I personally find Charlie Hebdo to be racist twits. But that doesn't give me any right to kill them. I have the right to just ignore them.

It was depressing that every newspaper in the developed world didn't print the cartoon :(

Everything is and should be allowed in comedy. Religion is no exception.

I think the people's presumption that they have some right to be free from offense has done way more damage than anything.

I think Charlie Hebdo comics are often in bad taste and more shock value than critic, but that's no legitimate reason to massacre people.

More than the attack on Charlie Hebdo itself, which I can "understand" in the twisted sense of a religious fanatic, it was the overall ruthlessness of the attackers that shocked me. I remember vividly seeing a video of one of the attackers walking up to a wounded police officer and executing him at point-blank range.

"Islamists" are politically far-right - paleoconservatives, theocrats, fascists.

We pull back too much because Islamic nutjobs will get violent because you dared draw a picture that resembled their stupid prophet. By doing that, we are giving them what they want and telling other religious groups that if they get violent enough, we’ll stop to appease them too.

You can mock Jesus, Moses, Krishna and any other religious figure because their followers, at worse, are going to verbally protest, if they do anything at all. But draw fucking Muhammad and people will tell you to knock it off because we don’t want to upset the assholes who will riot and kill people because they can’t handle someone having a differing opinion. Society bends over backwards to not offend Islam out of fear.

In response, we should have doubled down. Make more cartoons, get more vulgar with it…go all in, not stopped to appease them. Some people did for a while immediately after the attack, but not enough and not long enough, imo.

I don't have any issue or opinion or dog in the race with the prophet Muhammed, but those idiots made it important to say "muhammed the prophet is a giant cunt who should be laughed at and get a pie in the face" every now and then just to remind everybody how getting to talk works.

I'm religious, and I think that people should be absolutely free to satirize religion if they want to. What someone else believes isn't my affair, I definitely think my faith has lots of room for improvement from an organizational perspective, and there are plenty of religious ideas I think are toxic and wrong. Why shouldn't we have nuance and differing opinions? Why should anyone have the right to hurt others through their religious practices? We should be criticizing those things and calling them out and trying to make them stop, whether we practice religion or not. I think the treatment of women and queer people by a great deal of religious groups is wrong and should be criticized. I don't think government and religion should be intertwined at all. Just because I practice in a faith doesn't mean my faith is the authority on anything, but universally we should not be hurting others.

It is hard to make satire now when we seem to be living in an age that satirizes itself.