Really?DP wrote:Limiting my ability to make insulting and disparaging remarks about religion is impinging on my right to express my beliefs as an Atheist.
The conflict in the North was never about religion, it was about power and money, just a petty gang war dressed up in priests robes.born-again-atheist wrote:Really?DP wrote:Limiting my ability to make insulting and disparaging remarks about religion is impinging on my right to express my beliefs as an Atheist.
I would have thought a simple "it denies the individual a right to challenge established tradition - if tradition remains unchallenged there is no progress. If we had refused to challenge tradition Ireland would still be in the grip of crippling religious warfare."
Gawd wrote:»
And those Zumwalts are already useless, they can be taken out with an ICBM.
Out of interest, what is your landlord's view on it? Have you asked him?Animavore wrote:Hey. Chill the mother fucker out.
Don't worry about this law. It's not going to hapen.
Its my island.
Eh?Xamonas Chegwé wrote:Out of interest, what is your landlord's view on it? Have you asked him?Animavore wrote:Hey. Chill the mother fucker out.
Don't worry about this law. It's not going to hapen.
Its my island.
Fucking Dubs.Animavore wrote:Eh?Xamonas Chegwé wrote:Out of interest, what is your landlord's view on it? Have you asked him?Animavore wrote:Hey. Chill the mother fucker out.
Don't worry about this law. It's not going to hapen.
Its my island.
T'is mine.
Gawd wrote:»
And those Zumwalts are already useless, they can be taken out with an ICBM.
Atheist Ireland opposes new blasphemy crime
The Irish Government’s new proposed blasphemy crime combines the oppressive religious thinking of 1950s Catholic Ireland and modern Islamic fundamentalism. This proposal should be opposed for three reasons.
One, it does not protect religious belief. Instead, it encourages outrage and it criminalises free speech. Two, it treats religious beliefs as more valuable than secular beliefs and scientific thinking. Three, we should be removing 1930s religious references from the Irish Constitution, not legislating to enforce them.
The bill’s first test of blasphemy is that religious adherents express outrage. Instead of encouraging outrage, we should be educating people to respond in a more healthy manner than outrage when somebody expresses a belief that they find insulting. More worryingly, this law would encourage the type of orchestrated outrage that Islamic fundamentalists directed against Danish cartoonists.
Many atheists find it insulting that the Christian Bible suggests that women must not teach and must learn in silence, or that effeminate people are unrighteous, or that people should worship a God who threatens to make you eat your own children. But we do not believe that the Bible should be banned, and neither should discussion of the Bible in terms that cause Christians to be outraged.
Blasphemy is not the only anomaly of running a 21st century state with a 1937 Constitution. You cannot become President or be appointed as a Judge unless you take a religious oath under God asking god to direct and sustain you in your work. We should be amending our Constitution to remove these theistic references, not creating new crimes to enforce provisions that were written in the 1930s.
If you live in Ireland, please lobby your local TD, the Justice Minister, and the members of the Oireachtas Justice Committee that is considering this proposal. Contact details here: http://tr.im/k4Mq
):I’ll blaspheme who I want, you God fearing cunt Ahern
Can you believe this shit?
A NEW crime of blasphemous libel is to be proposed by the Minister for Justice in an amendment to the Defamation Bill, which will be discussed by the Oireachtas committee on justice today.
Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, stating: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.”
Fuck right off. While I’m quite happy to accept the fact that some people need the crutch that is religion to get through life, and I’m quite happy to let people believe in whatever they want, this is absurd.
Ireland is a secular state, I really thought we were making progress in that regard. The Catholic Church bum-fucked this country for years. We’ve been witness to a litany of abuse, corruption, crime and very little punishment. They’ve made millions from the people of Ireland down the years. And now we could go to jail and get a fine of up to €100,000 for ‘blasphemy’? Give me strength.
And let’s look at it this way - how can you blaspheme something which does not exist? There is not the slightest shred of evidence that such a being as ‘God’ exists. There are holy books and sacred scrolls but none of them prove the existence of God.
So until such time that there is irrefutable proof that God is real then you cannot blaspheme. Belief and faith in God are no substantiation, or transubstantiation. The fact that millions of people believe in God, or Allah or whatever flavour of the one idea, is no proof that God exists.
This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying you can be fined for libelling Santa Claus or the fucking Tooth Fairy.
Here’s what I think, if there is a God then he’s a fucking cunt. Possibly the biggest cunt that the world has ever seen. Bigger than Gerry Ryan, worse than Cristiano Ronaldo, he makes Hitler look positively fun-loving. How many have died in the name of God? How many have been tortured, raped, mutilated, oppressed? I’d say you could live to 500 and you wouldn’t be able to count that high.
And the number of people whose lives have been made better by this most outrageous of human fictions is far, far less I’d wager.
It is unbelievable to me in this day and age that people with education and learning still believe in God. It’s nonsense. It’s a fairy-tale but the grimmest, bloodiest fairy-tale of them all. I do not believe in God. That is my right. And until somebody gives me proof positive that God exists then you cannot libel or blaspheme him/her/it.
So what if something is offensive to someone’s religion? Don’t read it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t watch it. I find the whole concept of religion offensive. That we in the 21st century still tolerate religions which make women cover themselves from head to toe, that make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, that spread fear and set man against man simply because they choose to believe something different, that shortcircuits people’s brains so they fly planes into buildings for fucking fucks sake, is offensive to me. It’s a shocking sad indictment of the human race. How advanced we are.
We deny people medical treatment on the basis of religion, we deny them the chance to have their diseases cured because working with stem cells goes against their precious sensibilities, it’s madness.
The most uncaring, closed-minded, ignorant people are, in my experience, those who try and live by the teachings of a book written thousands of years ago. Their behaviour totally at odds with what their faith allegedy preaches. Religious fundamentalists are the most dangerous people on this planet.
God is a cunt. In all his guises. ‘His’ word has caused so much pain and misery and suffering in the world, and for what? Seriously, for what? Someone tell me.
So stick your fucking blasphemy clause up your hole, Dermot Ahern and anyone else who tries to make it part of our consitution.
I’ll blaspheme whoever the fuck I want.
Update: And one thing I forgot to mention - doesn’t this government have better fucking things to be doing at the moment?
Unemployment rising, the ESRI report saying that “Ireland was set to experience the sharpest fall in economic growth experienced by an industrialised country since the Great Depression”, banks insolvent, deflation, health cuts, education cuts, and everything else that’s wrong, and they’re wasting time on this?!
The perfect illustration of why FF must be obliterated in the local/european elections, and then in the next general election.
:point: For God's sake, why have blasphemous libel?
ANALYSIS: The proposal to make blasphemous libel an offence would likely criminalise many writers and publishers, writes CAROL COULTER
EVERY SATURDAY a group of young people, their faces hidden by masks or scarves, gathers outside the office of the Church of Scientology in Abbey Street in Dublin with leaflets and placards making serious allegations about the sect.
If the new law prohibiting publishing or uttering blasphemous matter becomes law, as proposed yesterday by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern, they could face fines of up to €100,000 and have their homes raided by members of the Garda Síochána in order to seize the offending material.
For that to happen, a court will have to be satisfied the matter published is “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion”, and that the outrage was intentional. These provisions came unannounced in a proposed amendment to the Defamation Bill, which was before the Oireachtas Committee on Justice yesterday (but was not discussed). The proposal from Ahern does not define “religion”, so there is no reason to imagine the Church of Scientology would not be protected by it from the publication of “abusive or insulting matter”.
What about other religious groupings and faiths? The proposed amendment makes the degree of outrage among adherents of any religion, in response to things said or written about them, a defining factor in determining whether an offence has been committed. We have seen elsewhere in Europe large-scale expressions of outrage by members of the Muslim community in response to films, books and cartoons. Books such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and films and cartoons, such as those published by a Danish newspaper and which offended some Muslims, would almost certainly be criminalised in Ireland by the present proposal.
This is in marked contrast to the state of the law at present. The Constitution qualifies the right to freedom of speech, making it subject to “public order or morality or the authority of the State”, and says the publication of “blasphemous, seditious or indecent material” is punishable. The 1961 Defamation Act prescribed penalties but did not define the offence or any prosecutions.
In 1991, the Law Reform Commission concluded there was no place for an offence of blasphemous libel “in a society which respects freedom of speech”. “The argument in its favour that the publication of blasphemy causes injury to feelings appeared to us to be a tenuous basis on which to restrict freedom of speech,” it said. “The argument that freedom to insult religion would threaten the stability of society by impairing the harmony between groups seemed highly questionable in the absence of any prosecutions.”
In 1999 came the only case taken under this law, Corway -v- Independent Newspapers, where a man complained about a cartoon depicting a plump and comic caricature of a priest, who was holding a host in his right hand and a chalice in his left. He appeared to be offering it to John Bruton, Ruairí Quinn and Proinsias De Rossa, members of the government of the day which had sponsored the divorce referendum. They appeared to be turning away. Corway complained that it was an insult to the Catholic faith.
The Supreme Court, upholding a High Court ruling, pointed out that there was no legislation defining blasphemy and describing the offence of blasphemous libel. “In this state of the law and in the absence of any legislative definition of the constitutional offence of blasphemy, it is impossible to say of what the offence of blasphemy consists,” the Supreme Court concluded.
There the matter rested until the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, under the chairmanship of Seán Ardagh, reported last year, recommending the deletion of references to sedition and blasphemy in the Constitution. While there appears to be no appetite for an amendment to do so, there equally has been no conspicuous clamour to legislate to fill the void identified by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, in the UK, where our blasphemy law has its origins, the law prohibiting blasphemy was repealed in July last year. The present proposal comes in an international context where a campaign seeking to outlaw the “defamation of religion” has been waged for some years, spearheaded by a number of Muslim countries in the United Nations and supported by the Vatican.
Last December, there was a vote on a resolution on “combating defamation of religion” at the UN, which was adopted by 86 votes to 53, with 42 abstentions. The resolution was tabled by Egypt on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Ireland, in common with all other EU countries, voted against.
However, at the Durban Review conference in Geneva last week (reviewing a 2001 UN conference on racism) references to “defamation of religion” were removed from the final document. At the same meeting, the human rights organisation Article 19 launched the Camden Principles, defending freedom of expression combined with the right to equality. They were drawn up with a high-level group of UN officials, representatives from other intergovernmental organisations, NGOs and academic experts.
Explaining Ireland’s vote at the December UN meeting, in response to a question from Green TD Ciarán Cuffe in the Dáil last month, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said: “We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.”
He went on to distinguish between this and discrimination based on religious belief and incitement to hatred, pointing out that Ireland supported a UN resolution on “Elimination of all forms of intolerance and of discrimination based on religion or belief.” Has our policy on the defamation of religion changed since last December and, if so, why?
A couple of things I disagree with:klr wrote:I think you'll like this blog entry (love the name of the blog BTW - "Twenty Major"
http://twentymajor.net/2009/04/29/ill-b ... unt-ahern/
I’ll blaspheme who I want, you God fearing cunt Ahern
Can you believe this shit?
A NEW crime of blasphemous libel is to be proposed by the Minister for Justice in an amendment to the Defamation Bill, which will be discussed by the Oireachtas committee on justice today.
Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, stating: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.”
Fuck right off. While I’m quite happy to accept the fact that some people need the crutch that is religion to get through life, and I’m quite happy to let people believe in whatever they want, this is absurd.
Ireland is a secular state, I really thought we were making progress in that regard. The Catholic Church bum-fucked this country for years. We’ve been witness to a litany of abuse, corruption, crime and very little punishment. They’ve made millions from the people of Ireland down the years. And now we could go to jail and get a fine of up to €100,000 for ‘blasphemy’? Give me strength.
And let’s look at it this way - how can you blaspheme something which does not exist? There is not the slightest shred of evidence that such a being as ‘God’ exists. There are holy books and sacred scrolls but none of them prove the existence of God.
So until such time that there is irrefutable proof that God is real then you cannot blaspheme. Belief and faith in God are no substantiation, or transubstantiation. The fact that millions of people believe in God, or Allah or whatever flavour of the one idea, is no proof that God exists.
This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying you can be fined for libelling Santa Claus or the fucking Tooth Fairy.
Here’s what I think, if there is a God then he’s a fucking cunt. Possibly the biggest cunt that the world has ever seen. Bigger than Gerry Ryan, worse than Cristiano Ronaldo, he makes Hitler look positively fun-loving. How many have died in the name of God? How many have been tortured, raped, mutilated, oppressed? I’d say you could live to 500 and you wouldn’t be able to count that high.
And the number of people whose lives have been made better by this most outrageous of human fictions is far, far less I’d wager.
It is unbelievable to me in this day and age that people with education and learning still believe in God. It’s nonsense. It’s a fairy-tale but the grimmest, bloodiest fairy-tale of them all. I do not believe in God. That is my right. And until somebody gives me proof positive that God exists then you cannot libel or blaspheme him/her/it.
So what if something is offensive to someone’s religion? Don’t read it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t watch it. I find the whole concept of religion offensive. That we in the 21st century still tolerate religions which make women cover themselves from head to toe, that make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, that spread fear and set man against man simply because they choose to believe something different, that shortcircuits people’s brains so they fly planes into buildings for fucking fucks sake, is offensive to me. It’s a shocking sad indictment of the human race. How advanced we are.
We deny people medical treatment on the basis of religion, we deny them the chance to have their diseases cured because working with stem cells goes against their precious sensibilities, it’s madness.
The most uncaring, closed-minded, ignorant people are, in my experience, those who try and live by the teachings of a book written thousands of years ago. Their behaviour totally at odds with what their faith allegedy preaches. Religious fundamentalists are the most dangerous people on this planet.
God is a cunt. In all his guises. ‘His’ word has caused so much pain and misery and suffering in the world, and for what? Seriously, for what? Someone tell me.
So stick your fucking blasphemy clause up your hole, Dermot Ahern and anyone else who tries to make it part of our consitution.
I’ll blaspheme whoever the fuck I want.
Update: And one thing I forgot to mention - doesn’t this government have better fucking things to be doing at the moment?
Unemployment rising, the ESRI report saying that “Ireland was set to experience the sharpest fall in economic growth experienced by an industrialised country since the Great Depression”, banks insolvent, deflation, health cuts, education cuts, and everything else that’s wrong, and they’re wasting time on this?!
The perfect illustration of why FF must be obliterated in the local/european elections, and then in the next general election.
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