2 Votes
RE: No option
The absence of a right to not be offended is an important aspect of our free speech
I actually don’t quite like the phrasing of that. To be honest, they do have a right to be offended — they just don’t have a right to prevent others from causing that offense.
A week or so ago, a high-school classmate of mine posted on her Facebook page, this quote:
Atheism: the belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense.
Like many of the things she posts (she’s a teabagger), I found that offensive. She had every right to post it, and I have every right to take offense at it. It’s a grotesque mis-representation of what Big Bang theory actually claims, and it says a lot more about the ignorance of the typical Christian than it does about atheist beliefs.
But, again, I have the right to take offense — I just don’t have the right to prevent her from posting stupid, offensive things, nor do I have the right to demand anyone else do so.
I responded with the obvious parallel quote:
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Ironically, she took offense, insisting that my (borrowed) characterization of Christianity was unfair and inaccurate.
RE: No option by Occams
You mis-read me. My wording was precise. The important thing is that we do not have a right to not be offended. We have every right to be offended, and to complain about it, but nothing should be done in law to stop it.
Draw a cartoon of Muhammad and publish it, and the lives of everyone involved and many not involved become at risk from extremist Islamics who believe that they have a right to be so upset that they can riot and kill for religious sensitivity reasons. They have no right to be protected from ugly images of their prophet. Public images of Christian icons are probably illegal in their homelands, not for the same reason, but because they are extremely intolerant of the presence of other religions.
We do have racial vilification laws. Strictly, they are wrong in terms of the Constitution, but they make sense for good government, the protection of innocent people, and to accelerate the mental growth of Americans by flushing all that racist shit out of their system. Same for Gays I guess. No problem there, but it is inconsistent. These anomalies create the impression that some groups do have a right to not be offended.
RE: No option by VnutZ
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
I love it.