General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: In defense of the need to post blasphemous caricatures [View all]Yorktown
(2,884 posts)... and as most other western nations have a growing diversification of our ethnic backgrounds resulting from more diverse sources of immigration.
While it is generally speaking favoring a richer melting pot, it does create the reimportation of old issues that had been more or less settled. Religious violence is one of them.
By and large, Europeans and the Founding Fathers instituted a freedom of religion with a very clear objective: to avoid at all costs a replication of the horrors of the Thirty Years war which decimated Europe on religious grounds. Aside from Ireland, religious violence more or less disppeared.
What Charlie Hebdo and Garland illustrate is that immigrants from muslim countries who imported with them their belief in islamic jurisprudence have not adhered yet to that ban on religious violence and wish to recreate blasphemy laws.
We might have no laws which make mocking religious beliefs a crime, but there is a growing number of people who wish there was. Publishing blasphemous caricatures is a way to call out for a debate to rally everyone on board of a taboo on religious violence. However 'offensive' a cartoon might be. And people here who think that a "tacit blasphemy law" (i.e. a self imposed restraint from offending religion) will make the risk of a growing religious intolerance are IMHO misguided.