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I'm not so sure. I think a lot of them are living in a fantasy world, convinced nothing bad will happen if we default. Add to that the fact that they're obsessed with getting re-elected and therefore having to stick to all kinds of idiotic no-tax pledges they made, and the political gains from not cooperating with Obama, and you have exactly the group that's willing to let the whole country burn to prove a point.

I wonder if this guy is one of those black metal pagan fanatics? They burn churches up there sometimes.

Holy shit, over 80 killed at the youth camp? How did one person manage that? This is total insanity.

I'm raeging at the damn Tea Party for being so stuck in their idiotic dogma that they're actually willing to destroy the country's finances and probably put the recession on steroids just to prove a point to their stupid redneck supporters. And I thought I was cynical enough not to get mad at American politics anymore.

This just blowed up again. Some people from NewsCorp are saying James Murdoch had seen some evidence of hacking which he told Parliament he hadn't seen. This is getting realer and realer by the day.

If you do have laws that speech inciting people to certain behaviors is illegal to produce or distribute, there's not a lot of logical basis for exempting Judeo-Christian religious texts. They contain tons of incitement to violence - not talking about the arguable influence they have on Christian or Muslim conquests and forced conversions and so on, but about good old Leviticus and its numerous admonitions to kill people who do various things that we would consider normal, acceptable behavior.

If the law says the speech can't be produced or distributed, then you have to ban the Bible. If it just says the person distributing it should be fined, you're now punishing every church and synagogue and any bookstore that wants to sell it.

There are plenty of other reductio ad absurdum arguments against banning speech of any kind - because it gets real hard to draw consistent, fully logical distinctions between a person or group calling for violence and an ancient document which people still revere, doing the same. You can argue that Christians don't believe in most of those commands and even Orthodox Jews have religious reasons not to follow them at the present time, but then you also have to exempt any existing anti-incitement laws if, say, somebody is loudly calling for violence and has followers who openly agree with him but don't commit any violent crimes.

There probably are cases where speech can legitimately be made illegal and punished - shouting "fire" in a crowded building is the classic example - but you have to draw the line somewhere, and if you draw it around "incitement to violence" then you have to include the Bible.

Not to mention politicians whipping people up into a nationalist fervor in order to gain support for a war is also incitement to violence.


On negative features of religion...the thing is, a lot of these things that us enlightened progressives consider bad features of religion are not things that most participants in religion find objectionable, aside from people coerced into it in one way or another. Yes you have cult-like communities of fundamentalist Mormons or Ultra-Orthodox Jews that people don't really have the option to leave, but most religions don't force people to conform to them other than by the usual social pressures that groups place on people. And plenty, if not most, participants think those things are OK, which is why they participate. We may think that taking dogmatic beliefs as the absolute truth from authority figures is awful, but some people are happy to have their worldviews shaped that way. We may think it's awful that some religions pressure women to do nothing but stay at home and make babies, but it's only awful if the women in question do not want to do that. And the fact that we think it's better for women to be liberated doesn't give us the ability to know better than a particular woman what she wants. Anyway, whatever problems there are with religion, society should treat religious groups the same way it treats everybody else: make laws against things that we deem to be sufficiently large intrusions on another person's rights, and apply them regardless of who breaks them, and that's it. People who want to influence other people's behavior have plenty of avenues to try and do that without legal coercion such as banning speech or banning certain belief systems.

@freeformschooler: I see problems with it, but I don't see a problem with it being legal.

Quote from: SalmonGod on July 21, 2011, 03:53:36 am

I think some of the strongest messages are delivered by showing the audience something in its raw form.  Try to incorporate a biased perspective, and people put up their defenses.  You'll only reach those who already agree with you.  Strip down some element of reality into its basest components and/or place those components into another formula to see how things interact differently.  People are left to make their own judgments, when presented an idea that is familiar to them in a format that is unfamiliar.

The problem is that people first have to recognize something as wrong. Now, with 50's style racism you can assume that almost everyone will see the problem and you need not give it any special treatment. However, when it comes to literary maltreatment of for example women or disabled persons, that's often not the case and if people don't see it as wrong, describing it in it's raw form is only going to get people to agree with your book instead of with normal morals.

At this point, you're basically saying that anyone who writes about morally bad things and doesn't also make their story a tirade against those things, is essentially promoting them. I'd rather give some credit to the reader's intelligence and not oblige writers to turn their stories into moral lectures or else be branded pro-slavery or pro-rape or what have you.