Would Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion be considered hate speech in England? If I stage a reading of it, with the stated goal of demonstrating that all religious belief is highly problematic and liable to abuse from extremists and accordingly some Muslim extremists take umbrage with my efforts - and let's face it, Islamists just love taking umbrage over perceived insults, this is how they wield power - and this leads to some protests from some rankled Muslims which leads to a counter riot from a rabble of soccer roughs and this leads to a Mosque being burned down - as the person who staged the reading am I the guilty party and will I then be threatened with jail time for celebrating one of the greatest intellects England ever produced? From what I've read about the law I think it's possible.
You stifle debate, you stifle free speech - and then you've taken away the whole point of democracy, you've drained it of its life blood, its essence. It's frightening how many people in England seem to be okay with that - frightening more still that apparently the law was passed under Maggie's reign - if England's greatest conservative could sign off on something as pernicious as this, imagine the damage a full bodied liberal could do under threats from the umbrage taking aggrieved?
[turns out the actual 'hate law' people are being charged under today was enacted in 2003 - but the foundation of those prohibitions comes from a 1986 public order law passed by Maggie - doesn't matter - point is when it comes to banning debate and controlling speech at what point have you stepped so thoroughly onto the slippery slope that there's no getting off of it? At what point has your irrational attempt to appease the unreasonable doomed your good intentions to an inevitable ruin? The problem with all these misguided attempts to accommodate the spike in Muslim emigration to the West is that they want to try and treat Christianity and Islam as somehow being cut from the same cloth which of course requires ignoring one absolutely crucial difference, a difference which bespeaks of the huge, possibly insuperable existential gap separating the two: over several hard fought centuries Christianity has been tempered and moderated through an often unwilling exposure to the forces of free reasoning, free speech and free actions - Islam has not been down this road, really hasn't even gone near it and indeed may never go near it since Islam's highly political nature renders it extremely intolerant of and resistant to change - which again marks a rather significant contradistinction separating Islam and Christianity - the latter was always in essence apolitical, was evolved outside of a political motive - which is not to pretend it wasn't used often for political ends - but fact was that until Constantine came along a few hundred years after Christ it really wasn't a particularly good career move to be a Christian, although things were improving which is exactly why Conny found Christ on a bridge... and then let's not forget that the intellectual environment Christianity grew up under was strongly influenced by the hyper rationality of the Greeks, the original free thinkers... hey, but Plotinus went to Persia and neo-Platonism found its way into the musings of some Muslim scholars... sure, but I would say that simply indicates just how important a consideration the apolitical foundation of Christianity is when comparing it to Islam... but the point remains, the historical realities that came to define the two systems were fundamentally different and it's positively nuts to talk as if somehow that is not supposed to matter... worse than nuts, it's delusional and dangerously so... ask yourself a simple question: can they teach Darwin in Turkey? The answer is increasingly no - 150 years after Darwin was FREE to turn the Christian world on its head and then pursue his earth shaking studies amidst much acclaim and controversy, 150 years after this in the most progressive Muslim country in the world you're playing with fire trying to teach Darwinism - in a place like Saudi Arabia it's probably illegal to merely own Origin of Species, never mind teach it - and I'm supposed to sit here and pretend that disturbing fact should not enter into my thinking at all when it comes to forming an opinion regarding the accommodation of Muslim beliefs in the Western world? Seriously? But, you say, some religious types in America reject Darwinism and espouse creationism - to which I answer, sure, they're free to be wrong and I'm free to criticize them, ridicule them, point out how flawed their thinking is without having to look over my shoulder wondering if I'm gonna be charged with a crime, or, alternatively, attacked with a meat cleaver - which is the whole point I'm trying to make here, yes?]
