Blasphemy and weakness.
I was a dreadful teenage girl who used to wind people up. I especially liked to wind up the macho boys. I very quickly learned that they were very easily wound up about things they held dear - their penis, favourite team etc.
I am beginning to feel the same about major religions, especially in the light of this story - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-56524850. “A teacher who showed pupils an "inappropriate" cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad - sparking protests outside a school - has been suspended. The image depicting the founder of Islam was used in a lesson at Batley Grammar School on Monday. Videos posted online show dozens of people standing outside the school on Thursday, with some demanding the teacher be sacked.”
My questions -
If your God is so strong why do you need to defend him?
Why are blasphemy laws needed at all?
Surely we can’t offend God or his prophets. They are either dead, untouchable (in heaven or wherever) or too mighty to touch?
It all feels very patriarchal to me. Once again men having to appear strong by putting others down (in this case a school teacher) because, in fact, they are weak and easily rattled.
I am beginning to feel the same about major religions, especially in the light of this story - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-56524850. “A teacher who showed pupils an "inappropriate" cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad - sparking protests outside a school - has been suspended. The image depicting the founder of Islam was used in a lesson at Batley Grammar School on Monday. Videos posted online show dozens of people standing outside the school on Thursday, with some demanding the teacher be sacked.”
My questions -
If your God is so strong why do you need to defend him?
Why are blasphemy laws needed at all?
Surely we can’t offend God or his prophets. They are either dead, untouchable (in heaven or wherever) or too mighty to touch?
It all feels very patriarchal to me. Once again men having to appear strong by putting others down (in this case a school teacher) because, in fact, they are weak and easily rattled.

Comments
If you are teaching RE you presumably know that it would be massively offensive to show pictures of those cartoons, so why do it when you could talk about the issues around their existence without doing so ?
I think one of the issues about education is that it is compulsory, it is one thing to say - as a society we have the freedom to blaspheme if we want to - and another to expose children to things their families consider blasphemous without any choice in the matter. There may be circumstances where it is justifiable to do so - but I think you need a good reason. I know people will say, well what about teaching about lgbt+ issues to children of families who think it is sinful. But in that case you are telling kids something exists and is lawful, not getting them to participate in it. In the same way you could talk about the cartoons without showing them.
In general my question is still ‘why is blasphemy a thing at all?’
I won't say the teacher wasn't brave to do it, but the power issue is asymmetric. It's much easier for white secularists or nationalists to disseminate insensitive or derogatory material about Muslims than it is for Muslims to do the reverse. Questions of free speech and tolerance are inevitably hollow if you don't take that into account. Shades of Jeremy Clarkson asking why nobody is allowed to say X about Muslims any more.
I'd feel rather differently about someone distributing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Saudi Arabia.
In Scotland, blasphemy laws have just been abolished (having not been used for 175 years). But, in the context of consolidating hate crime laws and extending the protections these offer. I think this is a move that puts blasphemy in the right place, it's a form of hate crime attacking people on the basis of their religious beliefs. And, like most hate crime it's almost always perpetuated by someone in a position of relative privilege and power against a minority and less powerful community.
He’s going to face massive consequences ‘tho. I can’t see him returning to teach at that school. Too much reaction and publicity.
Could he have foreseen this reaction? You’d think so, if he’s teaching on sensitive subjects he needs to be very aware of what is and isn’t sensitive material.
And yes, this is possibly a case of "I'm in authority, so I'm going to use that to make a minority group feel uncomfortable and unable to object to their own discomfort."
So how did that turn out?
Well, it's a long-standing tradition in all cultures that sexual expression is subject to regulations not normally enforced against political or religious speech.
So, to make it more parallel, let's say the teacher shows an image of the Queen shooting heroin(with the understanding that it's not to be taken literally). If it was relevant to a lesson on free speech, I don't think I would wanna kowtow to royalist objections.
Addenda: the fact the teacher is suspended suggests he wasn't teaching to an approved curriculum with approved materials.
Some years ago, Russell Brand and Johnathan Ross left a number of offensive messages on Andrew Sachs's answerphone on live radio, talking about how Mr. Brand had had sex with Mr Sachs's granddaughter. This was widely viewed as offensive.
But why? Georgina Baillie was an adult, entirely capable of making her own choices as to who she should have sex with. She was, at the time, a burlesque performer with a sexually charged act - she wasn't some kind of shrinking violet.
Ms Baillie was quite capable of looking after herself.
These messages were widely viewed as offensive because they upset Andrew and Melody Sachs in a needlessly cruel way. Elderly people do not, as a rule, want to discuss their grandchildren's sex lives in a crude and graphic manner.
(In another parallel to many of the Muslim blasphemy stories we've had recently, the original broadcast of the show didn't attract much comment (the kind of people who listened to Russell Brand on the radio weren't bothered by it) - the public outcry didn't happen until it was reported in the national press.)
Well, "my culture" happens to be that of Canada, where we're under the same Queen as you guys, and with our own contingent of proud monarchists. So yeah, if there was some educational reason for showing the anti-Queen cartoon in a Canadian school, and the Loyalist Association too offense to that, I'd tell 'em to go jerk off into their Earl Grey.
But since you asked about the USA, if a history teacher discussing the Spanish-American War wanted to show his class the Mark Twain flag(you can google that), as part of a discussion about intellectual opinion at the time, I think that would be great. And I would hope there would be at least some Americans who'd agree with me.
I dunno. If some homophobes gunned down the owners of a gay bar, and then the new owners decided to keep the bar going as a gay establishment, I'm not sure I would use the word "idiotic" to describe them.
Because what, then, are you essentially saying? Anyone who doesn't kowtow to the demands of violent extremists is an idiot?
I think punishing dissent is a sign of weakness/fear/macho posturing. See Putin.
Well, first off, I was originally replying to an example of a cartoon showing an onanistic Elizabeth II. The most powerful person in the Commonwealth Realms is a bit of a different case than marginalized racial groups.
That said, for your example, it would really depend on the nature of the anti-FN cartoon, what was portrayed in it etc, PLUS the teachers reasons for showing it. To make it comparable to the what I understand the case in the UK to be...
Suppose the cartoon is by an atheist, and portrays unflattering caricatures of Gitche Manitou, in order to mock the ideas of First Nations religion. Some nutjob fringe ideologues take exception to this, and murder staff members at the magazine that published them. There are also calls for the cartoon to be legally banned.
I would say all this makes the cartoon a legitimate topic for classroom discussion and possibly display. Not so much if a teacher just walks into class one day and says "Hey kidz, look at dis cartoon about how sto0pid deh indianz are! Hyuk hyuk hyuk!"
The nearest Christian equivalent I can think of is obtaining a reserved consecrated host and grinding it into the carpet to demonstrate what might offend Catholics.
So, if there WAS some militantly aniconic Christian sect who started a campaign to ban pictures of Jesus, and also had a militant fringe who killed people for making or showing them, then the schools should automatically forbid the usage of said images in the classroom?
My girl is in year 9. She's recently been looking at 1930s German propaganda posters denigrating Jews, for example. Thanks for the reminder.
I think it'd be a fairly stupid thing do to if a good proportion of the pupils came from said Christian sect.
It's got nothing to do with militants and killings. It's about not unnecessarily causing gross offence.
The prohibition on images of Mohammed is pretty mainstream in modern Islam - we're not just talking about some "sect" here.
I think the use-mention distinction is useful here. I think we'd all agree that it would be quite wrong for a teacher to use, for example, offensive racial epithets to describe people. I think we'd also all agree that, in an appropriate context, it's OK to mention what those offensive epithets are, to discuss their use and why they're offensive, to look at historical uses of them, and so on. The same goes for the racist caricatures that I mentioned. I'm thinking, for example, about a pro-empire cartoon depicting whichever African country was seeking independence as a caricature of a young black man (exaggerated features etc.) who has, in the way of such caricatures, fallen down a well and needs the help of a white British gentleman (probably in morning dress) to climb out of it.
You can spend a long time talking about all the attitudes that are encoded in that one cartoon.
I don't think discussing this in class is racist. Talking about racism isn't racist. But by showing this cartoon in class and discussing it, you're really mentioning, rather than using, the racism. I don't imagine any teacher would assign as homework "now go away and draw your own racist cartoon" - that would be to use racism, and would be obviously offensive.
Whereas @KarlLB's example of desecrating the Most Precious Body in class is actively offensive. Showing a cartoon, or even a photograph, of this having been done in a historical event would merely be mentioning the offense, but actually doing it would be to use the offense. And I'm rather thinking that showing the images of Mohammed is using the offense as well.
The traditional Reformed view is that any image of Jesus is an unacceptable breach of the Second Commandment. But I do not think teachers should therefore be prohibited from showing them.
Is that actually a mainstream and observed prohibition now however? If not it's hardly comparable.
Actually, most of the cartoons I was referring to were British, from the 1920s and early 1930s. Prejudice against Jews was not the exclusive province of the Nazis. But you're right - I think there's a difference between looking at offensive things that were historically mainstream, like these, and reproducing contemporary cartoons from "Stormfront" for example.
Because the use is different. In the historical use, we're asking what the cartoon tells us about widespread attitudes at the time. In a free speech debate, we'd be looking at a bunch of offensive things, and asking "is this offensive enough to be banned?
We could have a debate about where the line between consensual roughhousing and assault was, but we wouldn't do it by kicking people in the head, and asking "how about if I kick you this hard?"
Maybe people's willingness to wind others up says more about them (the winder up) than it does about those being wound up.
Why does anyone feel the need to be so passive aggressive in that way? Never forget that one person's banter is another's bullying. Much is hidden behind verbal assassination with a smile.
I am sure many Free Presbyterians in Scotland and Ulster would still take this prohibition seriously. But if a group of such Free Presbyterian parents wanted a teacher to be sacked for showing images of Jesus I would expect them to be given short shrift.
So the distinction is a question of numbers, then? If a small group takes offense at something, we are less obligated to act on their objections than if a larger group does?
I can sorta see the logic there(eg. the billions of people who would object to hardcore porn shown in a school classroom should have more weight attached to their views than the dozens of people who might think it's a sin for a teacher to sport a mullet). However, that doesn't really jive with the argument, also made on this thread, that the issue is power: If we're concerned about protecting vulnerable and marginalized groups from repression and violence, it should't matter if the overall numbers of those groups are large or small.
Re is it mainstream in Islam to not depict Mohammed, there's been a move in that direction, wasn't always so.
Past provocative depictions, like cartoons, designed to create response are interesting because that's what the arts are for in part. Not that pornography is part of the arts, but it'd be reasonable I think to discuss restrictions with that the same way.
I do think it is also reasonable to depict Mohammed in ways to point out to those who want it banned, that they can't in a pluralistic society with rights to openly discuss issues. The problem is of course, that people can indeed be dicks.
I suspect that the editors who commissioned the original :Danish cartoons" were, in fact, just trying to be dicks: let's make sure those immigrants know their place by running stuff just intended to piss them off.
However, once the cartoons had provoked a violent backlash, with rioting and embassies burned to the ground, you could make the case that the cartoons had then become political issues in and of themselves, and that further reproduction of them could be justified on those grounds. People want to know why the Danish embassy in Syria got torched? Well, the media is just being helpful in showing them the what the controversy was all about.
The question is not whether something would make anyone uncomfortable. The question is whether their discomfort is enough of a reason to prohibit that thing.
The deeper question is how we determine the amount of discomfort that is required for something to be prohibited. It clearly can't be any level of discomfort at all, however mild or however few people feel it, because then virtually everything would be prohibited. I also don't think the opposite pole - that no level of discomfort is ever enough to justify prohibition - is right, though by nature I'm far closer to that end of the debate.
Some here have talked about prohibition being less desirable if the thing causing offence is "necessary", but that just begs the question necessary to whom? Others have talked about power dynamics, as if to suggest that those with less power should be protected from discomfort more than those with more (though when a discomforted group can cause the perceived offender to (probably) lose their entire career simply by shouting about their offence then I'm not sure you can say the power balance favours the offender).
Well, the history of such things is that things that are offensive to the average person of power / status tend not to be shown at all (except in the sort of avant-garde circles where provoking offence is the point of the exercise), whereas things that are very offensive indeed towards low-status minority groups have been common parlance.
But there's also a question of whether the thing found offensive has actual positive use by other groups. In the case of images of Christ, for example, the desire of a group of Free Presbyterians not to see images of Christ would be in direct tension with the desire of groups of other Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, and others) to use such images in worship.
Let's say the class has a debate. The teacher invites the class to weigh up the value of free speech against the value of protecting a minority from one-sided offence. By phrasing the debate like that, the teacher is already telling the non-minority pupils that their minority classmates are making the problem here. If the teacher then introduces the cartoons disregarding the wish of the minority not to be offended and disregarding the possible validation of any racist bullies in the non-minority, is the teacher not prejudging the outcome of the debate? The teacher is performatively disregarding the possible offence and validation of racist attitudes.
If anything should be learned from the murder of Samuel Paty, it's (among other things) not to leap to any conclusions without knowing all the facts.
The campaign against Paty that culminated in his murder was initiated by the father of one of his students. The girl later admitted to the police that she had lied to her parents about what happened in the lesson.
I'm now wondering how Comhairle nan Eilean Siar handle the issue, given their habit of letting the wee wee frees have their way in other areas.
But it isn't a racism issue. Islam isn't a race. It's a religion with diversity of views and extent of adherence.
The issue of accommodating to a religion of world view - how far can it go to imposing on others? The cartoon or picture issue doesn't impose on others if they're not shown like the washing of feet in sinks meant for hands (wudu ritual) in washrooms does.