Politics
University students celebrate blasphemy
This Wednesday, the 30th of September, we at the Campus Atheists and Agnostics of IPFW (Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne) will be having our first Blasphemy Day International celebration. We’re joining other secular groups, including the Center for Inquiry, in protesting the United Nations Human Rights Council’s decision to adopt a non-binding resolution that indicated the Council’s intention to regard blasphemy as a human rights violation. We oppose this and any and all other immoral, medieval restrictions on the freedom to express dissent from religion.
It’s eye-opening to realize just how good we have it in the U.S. Rather than rehash just how hostile some other countries’ legal codes are to the criticism of religion, I’m just going to point you to Wikipedia’s well-sourced Blasphemy Law page, which organizes the damage by country and has links to more detailed pages on several of the nations in the list. As a taste: it’ll get you fined €25,000 in Ireland, imprisoned in Indonesia, and killed in Afghanistan. Even “liberal” little Holland still considers it a crime, though they haven’t successfully prosecuted anyone for it since the sixties.
If you’ll be on IPFW’s campus on Wednesday, drop by our booth on the Science Mall and say hi. We’ll have a Wall of Freedom (yeah, I couldn’t think of a better name) where you can write any pro- or anti-religious statement you want; at our regular discussion meeting the following evening, we’ll discuss what was written, how the day went, and talk about the importance of taking a hard line in protecting the freedoms to speak and to dissent. Hope to see you there, and, if it’s your thing, check out the international campaign’s Facebook page.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by an individual contributor to this blog are not necessarily shared by all members of FreeThought Fort Wayne. That is what makes this organization so interesting. Commenters on the FreeThought Fort Wayne blog are expected to abide by our comment policy. About the author: To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box. Read more from this author
The University students celebrate blasphemy by Butter, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Discussion
7 comments for “University students celebrate blasphemy”
Post a comment
Categories
Our Readers
Ireland ! I can understand third world countries since these types will need a few hundred years more to evolve on this , but Ireland and Holland and the U.N.! Jesus !(sorry)
Wish I can be there , but will try your Facebook am assming you post to the wall there
Will Representative Mark Souder be attending the 2009 Blasphemy Day ceremony at IPFW ??
He might as well: Every time he opens his willfully ignorant, bigoted piehole, he’s blaspheming Islam, and we’re defending his right to do so.
Colbert, or someone on his staff, seems to be subtly celebrating Blasphemy Day by having Richard Dawkins as his guest tonight.
I was very impressed with the turn out. Great work and thanks to everyone in Campus Atheists and Agnostics of IPFW. This was a great way to publicly demonstrate positive values in skepticism like free speech and raising awareness that too much political correctness (banning blasphemy) is dangerous and limits freedom. Nothing is beyond criticism.
Free Speech, and Blasphemy were the buzz on campus yesterday. There were some amazing inspirational quotes, some down right rude ones and yes believers posted their messages about loving Jesus, too. I hope Joel or Chad will post more about it with pictures to give you all an in-depth report soon.
One of my favorite was a Christian who said something like “Jesus rules! Suck my dick.”
I wish I could have been there. I’m begging anyone who will listen: Please do a write-up about it.
Are you sure you punctuated that correctly? Maybe he meant ‘Jesus rules [can] suck my dick.’ i.e. The rules that Jesus made are bad.
