Blog On The Motorway

I’ve been thinking about the recent silliness that has erupted in Ireland since their clearly lunatic government decided that free speech is all well and good as long as nobody who believes in God is ever offended by anything, ever.  Lots of groups are wondering how best to respond to the new blasphemy laws, and while I am not Irish, I did have a thought on the best way to counter the massive flaw in their logic.

Almost every religious book has one of those little clauses in it which points out to the user that their God alone is the proper good one, and that choosing to follow any of the other ones would be a really silly idea that would inevitably lead to exclusion from whatever form of afterlife they use to hook you in the first place.

For example, in the Bible, Exodus 34:14 states (in some versions, one would have thought that the infallible word of God would all be the same in any translation but there you go):

 ’for thou shalt worship no other god: for Jehovah, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:’

 The Qu’ran has quite a few similar parts, such as 21:87

 ’And (mention) Dhun Nun (Jonah), when he went off in anger and deemed that We had no power over him, but he cried out in the darkness, saying: There is no God save Thee. Be Thou glorified! I have been a wrong-doer.’

It strikes me that each and every version of this is blasphemy to every other religion going. If the Bible states to worship no other God, isn’t this blasphemy to Muslims? And vice-versa?

The flipside to this is also that the very existence of religions is abhorrent to a large number of people. Does the presence of belief actually make someone more worthy in the eyes of the Irish government? If a Christian offends an atheist (say by telling them they are destined to spending existence in a lake of fire for their wicked heathen ways) nothing happens, vice versa can lead to a 250,000 Euro fine.

Without wanting to start up a religious war (as this historically lead to lots and lots of people being prodded with sharp objects) this is an utterly unenforceable law when looked at logically, and any riposte to the law should be framed as such so as to avoid the appearance of anti-religious rabble rousing. If the crazy people in the Irish government feels that the thoughts of atheists, humanists and free thinkers are so worthless, pointing out that every one of them could also be fined just for having beliefs in the first place might be a good place to start.