Nods Respectfully Towards You said:
maninahat said:
You should have read the next bit, where I talk about how empathy trumps rights.
?Your rights end where my feelings begin?
Or, "Your rights have nothing to do with whether you are being an inconsiderate jackass to others."
maninahat said:
Contrariwise, should I ban Christmas holidays or forbid banks from closing on Sundays? You're already living in a society drenched in religious conventions, like it or not.
Why exactly are you trying to say here? No one is being forced to celebrate Christmas (which let?s be honest, it?s just as secular as it is religious at this point) nor is anyone forced to close on Sunday to observe the Sabbath, this is all a case of individual people or companies practicing their freedom of religion.
I was responding to a previous commentor, who was arguing that for a society that accommodated the Islamic rule of not depicting Muhammad would run afoul of people's right to freedom of religion. I'm pointing out that many Western societies already accommodate many Christian customs, and even officially integrate them into public holidays, so their argument was mute.
Here?s the thing though, any moderate Muslim should be able to tolerate having their religious figure being drawn and/or mocked just as most religions do. I?m a Christian myself but do I cry bloody murder every time Jesus or my religion in general is made fun of? Fuck no, it doesn?t affect me personally and I really don?t care about it beyond not finding it all that funny. I?m just wondering, why does Islam get this special treatment? It?s not like there?s anything in official doctrine saying Muhammed can?t be portrayed or mocked, this all stems from different interpretations by various sects and religious officials. The only reason it?s done in the first place is because Islam is pretty much the only religion that would get you killed for doing something as trivial as drawing a picture.
I find this is an interesting argument - that because other religions don't have an equivalent taboo on depicting religious figures, muslims are unreasonable to have such a taboo. It's convenient for those arguing it is daft to have never lived by such a taboo.
That said, even though non-muslims don't have a strict taboo on depicting religious figures, all people have customs that seem arbitrary to outsiders. I'll give you a personal example: my wife is from India, where wedding rings have little (if any) significance. One day, she took off her wedding ring and asked, in all earnestness, whether she could use one of her other, more valuable rings as her wedding band instead. She was surprised to see that I upset by this question. She was actually
annoyed that this could ever bother someone. Being from a society that placed no importance on such things meant she was not equipped to sympathise with the importance that I (like many Westerners) place on them. So the question is, am I an idiot to be placing such an importance on a damn ring? And as an ignorant outsider, just how useful is her perspective in judging my reaction? How can I honestly criticise some muslim taboo, whilst expecting my own esoteric taboos to be respected? I'm not going to argue that one can't criticise other people's customs
at all, just that if we are going to be fair in judging these things, a superficial understanding isn't going to cut it.
maninahat said:
It's the equivalent of me going to my uncle, who has a phobia of balloons, and waving balloons in his face just to prove that I don't have a problem with them myself, that I don't have to do as he asks, and that I have a freedom to take my balloons wherever I like. People would quickly see my triumphant display of personal freedoms as me being a self-centred dickhead.
Not really sure how that scenario is equivalent. No one is going into these people?s homes and shoving these pictures into their faces. A more adequate scenario is if your balloon-phobic uncle started campaigning to have balloons removed from all forms of media or even to ban balloons completely and complain that you?re somehow being insensitive if you don?t comply with his ludicrous demands. If these people have a problem with seeing their prophet being mocked then maybe they should just fucking ignore it. No one is forcing them to read Charlie Hebdo and they probably wouldn?t be reading it in the first place. It?s the same issue with the burning of the American flag which is funny since the same people that would take issue with drawings of Muhammad would probably be completely fine with the practice and maybe even advocate it. The world is filled with things we don't like, doesn't mean we need to start trying to remove everything that upsets our tender sensibilities.
People are shoving the Mohammad drawings in muslims faces though. Newspapers and zines are reproducing them, artists are taking to twitter to re-tweet them, people even pushed to make an annual event of drawing Muhammad - that is very definitely rubbing it in muslim's faces. My uncle, ever the moderate, might have been fine with people keeping their balloons in their own homes and out of his sight, but he probably wouldn't be fine with them tumbling out of his morning's paper.
As a final question, why the hell shouldn't we start trying to remove things that upset our tender sensibilities?
