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Denmark reinstates blasphemy law, criminalizing the burning of holy books
(www.friendlyatheist.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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We come from such similar mental places but still I have to disagree hard.
There is always a choice.
A rather obvious one here would have been to have the law be formulated against inciting hate and/or violence in general.
It is completely unnecessary to have this law revolve around religious texts just because the concrete reason happens to be connected to religious texts.
Like you said yourself, noone is burning books in the name of Atheism.
I have not yet seen a single argument that could convince me that religious texts are any more worthy of legal protection than other pieces of culture that specific subgroups of society hold dear to their hearts.
How is burning a rainbow flag or even a shirt of a rivaling football club less inciting hatred than burning a Quran?
How about a ban on mass book burning in general? In the US there have been several mass burnings of LGBTQIA+ books, books featuring strong minority characters, and textbooks that actually include depictions of reality. I know we can't ban all book burning in the US due to the First Amendment, but mass burning is not about expression, it is about suppression.
Apologies for my suboptimal choice of words. What I meant was that the danish government had no choice than to somehow change the framework which made those constant provocations legal. I did not mean to say this was the only or best way to do it and I would also have preferred them doing it differently. For example as it is in Germany, where generally any form of public incitement is illegal, instead of particularly protecting religious texts.