"or"
I don't think this attitude suitable in the diverse community where there are different ethnics or religons. People should care what the other find things unconfortable and should be aware that what you think acceptable is may not so for the others.
Of course if you mean let them do their own things and you do not mean offense or insult them, I thank you for your understanding.
Edit: to clarify what I mean.
Those who push their religious views on others and also use their religion to justify violence are extremely minority, majority of muslims do not do those things. And "bad muslims" always in those media or news because who would read articles about "nice muslim". So you should know what I mean.
And insulting *any* religions is not acceptable and deserve to be punished. As for beheading punishment though, I do not have enough knowledge to comment about it.
Why?
I believe all religions are a bunch of bullshit. Almost all of them regard this belief as a mortal insult. Should I get punished for that?
The only tenable way to treat religions in a liberal democracy is like any other belief. You get full freedom to practice any one you want, or none of them, or even more than one at the same time for all I care, but you don't get any special status or moral authority.
You may believe in no religion, but I don't think you should say that in public. Especially in front of any religius person you say "your religion is bullshit!".
> Should I get punished for that?
Maybe if that as insult to others.
> The only tenable way to treat religions in a liberal democracy is like any other belief. You get full freedom to practice any one you want, or none of them, or even more than one at the same time for all I care, but you don't get any special status or moral authority.
I agree to this point. But you do not automatically have right to insult other's believe.
If you want to protect "good Muslims", you need to accept liberal values that include being able to "insult" a religion without fear of violent attack.
> As for beheading punishment though, I do not have enough knowledge to comment about it.
What the fuck does this even mean? You think there's some conceivable situation where it's justified to react to "being insulted" with a beheading? You can fuck right off with the rest of the extremists.
Sure enough we do not need law about this. But should we actively offending others because we do not agree to them when we can go by beeing nice each other. Even if we do not share what is critism what is insult, I apologize if you feel offended.
> If you want to protect "good Muslims", you need to accept liberal values that include being able to "insult" a religion without fear of violent attack
Even if there is no violence, anyone should not insult others. And anyone who do violence or murder should be punished by law.
≥ You think there's some conceivable situation where it's justified to react to "being insulted" with a beheading?
No, I think there's no conceivable situation where it's justified to react to "being insulted" with a beheading.
> You can fuck right off with the rest of the extremists.
When I ask anyone to be nice to each other is extremist, well sorry.
Of course violence and terrorist is not right regardless of any reason.
As for punishment, I don't mean death punishment. At max should be jail or fine.
What I mean, you shoud consider to stop yourself before you do things that controversial. Or do you keep silence if other people do things that you find offensive? Some other may not keep silence and may resort violence, and it is not limited to islam. Once again, I do not like violence or oppression when we can avoid those by respecting each others and talks nicely when any conflict happens.
Edit: typo and be more clear
So the question needs to be cast in another light, sure. It's a hard problem that isn't solved by calling on an ideology.
Schools should be too ( only partial now)
Not sure if the professor felt existential about it but she said:
“I am showing you this image for a reason. And that is that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture,”
Some cultures are just more violent ( eg. Look at fifa world cup and marocco people through Europe).
Are you denying that they are more violent?
You don't get to decide how somebody else is going to react to something, you only get to decide if you care.
You don't get to tell them to stop believing in Islam because they're in a country where that is a minority belief, you only get to decide if you care about offending them.
In this specific case, the lecturer clearly did care - she warned before the course and shortly before the lecture moved to showing that image. That's the issue here, not whether displaying the image was contentious or not: she showed due diligence and her faculty decided it was insufficient. So what would have been sufficient?
That we can have a debate about, but some BS about "western values" and a strawman argument about "submitting" to "superstitions" is not even worth me caring about, other than to call you out as making a statement completely typical of far right-wing xenophobes and racists. Please don't do that here.
This story is about overbearing administrators infringing on academic freedoms, not Islam vs Western Values. But a lot of people have the Islam v The West hammer, so they’re going to use it in this nail.
>That we can have a debate about, but some BS about "western values" and a strawman argument about "submitting" to "superstitions" is not even worth me caring about, ...
Difficult to have an argument about after the fact. "You are free to leave" seems to be the exact argument that was made, beyond that there is no argument that would have been sufficient. If that's not enough, it is because of superstition, for lack of a better word. And this caused a panic reaction. It would be superstition even if the sides were switched and Feedome of Speech were the deeply held, now insulted believe that would include for example showing religious imagery in class (often forbidden in school charters to create a neutral environment).
From what I read I guess that Freiheit der Lehre (freedom of lecturing) is fairly constrained and lecturers are generally treated not with the same respect as a professor for whom they work. So it is to some a degree a systematic, institutional proble about powerstructures. Not worth the risk can become either you are not worth it, subjectively, or you are btter than that, optimistically speaking. Now I don't have a cromulent quote handy on collectively held believes. Suppose there is no mainstream concensus on that.
What this firing, and events like it, demonstrate is that there is a zero sum game where foundational beliefs are concerned. Here, the game is between liberalism and (this form of) Islam. If the professor isn’t punished, liberalism wins. If the teacher is punished, this Islam wins. You can’t accommodate both. An Achilles’ heel of liberalism is the notion that it can accommodate everyone, that liberalism is some kind of neutral absence of beliefs that can somehow accommodate fundamental differences and become the basis of a universal society of Man rooted in nothing. Vulgar consumerism has tried to fill that void, but appetite is no basis for a society, to put it mildly.
For example, somebody, somewhere, could have created a forum for a more socratic method to discuss these images and people's reactions to them to help improve understanding on all sides.
Saying "I'm going to do something offensive, and if you're offended that's your problem because I've told you, and I've told you I don't care about that offence", is about as constructive as a response of "I have been offended, and even though I was warned I was about to be offended and did not take the appropriate measures I was offered to protect myself from that offence, I will complain that I was offended".
Rhetoric (in the philosophical teaching sense), is a hell of a move to double down on when you're dealing with topics where the discussion itself can have real consequences.
It is not a "tired liberal relativist platitude" to suggest that a contributory cause of the issue here was all sides involved stopped caring about consequences to others, and instead all erred towards self preservation while maintaining an insistence that rhetoric will work and dialectism would fail.
Self-preservation might be rational as a mammalian instinct, but in a philosophical setting (and a lecture touching on images of theological subjects surely is such a context), it's that conservatism that is tired and relativist: true liberalism (not libertarianism), was the essential lightning rod that was missing from the conversation.
I'll be sure to ask the gays