“Weighing in on last week’s terror in France and the debate over freedom of expression it stirred, Pope Francis said … killing ‘in the name of God’ is wrong, but it is also wrong to ‘provoke’ people by belittling their religion. … [He] spoke in support of freedom of expression, [but] said that such freedom must have its limits …. He added, ‘One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith.'”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/14/asia/philippines-pope-francis-visit/index.html
Hogwash. Insulting someone else’s religion is a God-given right. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. We all say things we shouldn’t, at one time or another. But who’s to say we can’t? Who gets to decide what we can say
? Some archbishop sitting in a Vatican cubicle? And how will it be enforced?
There was a time when the Catholic hierarchy decided what people had to believe in religious matters. For example, if they told you the sun orbits the earth, you couldn’t say the earth orbits the sun; if you did, they strapped you to a stake and burned you to death. They sent Crusader armies into non-Christian countries to kill people, rape their wives and daughters, and burn and pillage their cities and towns. This history doesn’t exactly make the pope’s church an exemplary role model for freedom of conscience, belief, or expression.
Take a hike, Fran. The rest of the world is tired of your money-grubbing corporate empire’s attempts to dictate to everyone else. We’re also not overlooking that your predecessors in office cozied up to the Nazis because they found it inconvenient to object to the Nazis slaughtering millions of Jews right under their noses. I would submit the Jews’ inconvenience superseded theirs. Perhaps the precedent of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust made it easier for subsequent Catholic saints to also turn a blind eye to the systematic sexual exploitation of young boys that was allowed to continue unhindered in your American subsidiaries.
You can probably guess I’m not Catholic. I grew up in a Protestant family, and I haven’t forgotten that his ilk tied my predecessors to stakes and let them up for refusing to be Catholics. You think I’m going to let this guy tell me what I can or can’t say? If I want to insult his decrepit cult, I will. That’s my God-given right.
You’ve gotta wonder how much his stance has to do with coddling Muslims, and how much of it is motivated by a desire to silence people from criticizing his own damned religion. Why shouldn’t a Protestant like me criticize him and his Catholic crowd? My tribe’s theology and liturgy is clearly superior to their tribe’s theology and liturgy. We’re not burdened with their disgusting and immoral history of committing atrocities and ignoring other atrocities; at least, not as much, and our atrocities are less self-serving. We haven’t spent the lion’s share of the last two millenia looking for more people to persecute. We just kill them to take their oil, and then we’re done with it. We only force-feed them our notions of democracy, which is different from what the Catholic Church has done over the epochs.
And all of this is before you even get into such sticky questions as who makes the rules restricting free speech, how far these regulations go, who enforces them, by what means they’re enforced, what input (if any) the rest of us have in all this, and so on. Nope, sorry, it doesn’t work and can’t be made to work.
So, if I want to insult the Catholic Church and its CEO, I will; and he can do whatever he likes about it — just don’t expect me to go along with being tied to a stake and lit up. If his fanatical crowd tries that again, I’ll kick their heretic butts all the way to next Sunday and beyond.
So there.