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What Blasphemy Laws Say About Religions

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Eight-year-old Hindu boy slapped with blasphemy law in Pakistan
(Image by YouTube, Channel: India Matters with Rohit Sharma)
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Aneeqa Ateeq is a 26-year-old woman in Pakistan. She was recently sentenced to death by hanging after she was found guilty of blasphemy against Islam. She allegedly committed cybercrime and blasphemy by "sending blasphemous caricatures of holy prophets, making remarks about 'holy personages' on WhatsApp and using her Facebook account to transmit blasphemous material to other accounts. In doing so, she 'deliberately and intentionally defiles sacred righteous personalities and insulted the religious beliefs of Muslims', according to the charge sheet."

Blasphemy is defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as "something that you say or do that shows you do not respect God or a religion."

When put into practice, blasphemy laws silence any objective open debate about what the religion claims and teaches. It guarantees the clergy their job-security and their power over their fellow human beings. We often hear that blasphemy laws are being misused. Blasphemy laws in and of themselves are wrong and harmful to people and society regardless of how they are used. They should not exist.

The Reason For Blasphemy Laws.

The fact that all of the "revealed" religions have blasphemy rules and laws makes it evident that all of the "revealed" religions* teach nonsense that cannot be rationally defended in a free exchange of ideas, so they must resort to silencing people through violence and threats of Hell. Most people will be silenced from objectively speaking about the teachings of a "revealed" religion which violates our innate God-given reason, through intimidation/fear of being arrested, executed and burning in Hell. This not only helps the "revealed" religion to maintain its place of authority and power, it overall cripples attempts for people and society to make progress. This can be seen in the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity and the ensuing dark ages in Europe.

Christianity was as bad, or possibly worse, than Islam is at using fear, cruelty and violence to enforce its blasphemy laws. The only reason Christianity is not imprisoning, torturing and killing people for blasphemy today is because it had its wings clipped by the European Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the establishment of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. The American Founder and Deist, Thomas Paine, made this evident when he wrote in The Age of Reason:

"Soon after I had published the pamphlet "Common Sense," in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more."

Regarding the nonsense taught and promoted by all of the "revealed" religions, I could list page after page of examples, such as God taking a rib from Adam and using it to make the first woman (Genesis 2:21-22), and a man and a talking donkey having a conversation (Numbers 22:28-30), and dead people coming out of their graves in cemeteries around Jerusalem on a Friday when Jesus allegedly died on a cross, hanging out at their graves until Sunday morning when Jesus, too, came back to life, at which time the zombies went into the city of Jerusalem and "appeared unto many" (Matthew 27:52-53 and here's a page from the World Union of Deists about this biblical nonsense), and talking ants in the Quran (27:18), and a man who had his head cut off struggling to breath (Book of Mormon, Ether 15:30-31).

One of the charges against Aneeqa Ateeq is that she "insulted the religious beliefs of Muslims." (This reminds me of Thomas Paine's important observation, "He who dares not offend cannot be honest.") And the above definition of blasphemy includes not showing respect to a religion. Why would any thinking person who values their gift from God of innate reason and who values truth over falsehoods show respect to religions that not only promote belief in such falsehoods and nonsense as listed above, but who promotes cruelty and religious violence and who portray The Supreme Intelligence/God as an entity we should fear because God can both kill us and burn us in Hell, as the Christian Bible claims Jesus taught (Luke 12:5)??

The solution to the problem of blasphemy laws is simple. We need to do away with the "revealed" religions which have the blasphemy laws by reaching people with the fact that God did not give them the religion they belong to, The Supreme Intelligence/God gave them their innate reason. An important way of doing this is to take this advice from Thomas Paine found in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition. Paine advised:

"Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man."

We will make a much better world through the Deism Revolution in Religion. We will replace ideas such as God being cruel to the point of burning people in Hell for eternity and calls for religious violence with Deistic ideas such as Thomas Paine expressed in The Age of Reason when he wrote, "I detest everything that is cruel." What a sea change in thinking that will bring to our world. Since our actions are based on our thoughts and beliefs, Deistic thinking and beliefs will translate into kind and caring actions on the part of people to one another and to our planet.

*Revealed Religion: An organized system of belief in and worship of God based on the belief that God communicated/communicates with certain individual founders/members of the particular revealed religion. As mentioned above, by believing in any of the revealed religions a believer is not putting their trust in God, but in the person/people making the claim of receiving the divine revelation.

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Bob Johnson is a paralegal and a freelance writer in Florida. He was raised Roman Catholic, but after reading Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, he became a Deist. In 1993 he founded the World Union of Deists and in 1996 he launched the first web (more...)
 
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