Damn, why get into this in the first place anyway? Seems like looking for trouble. I feel sorry for the guy but still, respect the beliefs of the people you are living with.
Change, simply "is". It's not "good" or "bad" in and of itself. We shouldn't be using it as the basis of an argument for or against some particular thing. We should, instead, argue the specific merits of that particular thing.
Killing people for thought crime is "bad", in my opinion, because the person may not have intended to commit any crime. He might have said, "John should not have torn pages from the quran." And at the same time had no intention of an angry mob descending on John's home to burn John and his family to death. But for a lot of crimes, in the legal codes of many places, it's not necessary to prove "intent".
If you want a lack of thought danger, I'm afraid you'd need a world filled with people who don't think at all.
Consider, your kind of thinking is dangerous...
to someone. (Probably millions of someones.)
So is my kind of thinking.
So is everyone else' kind of thinking.
Does this always hold true, no matter what the majority believes?
Does a death sentence for disrespecting seem like a fair punishment?
Should: Society should respect those with different beliefs. Religions should spread by converting their opponents, not by killing them.
Is: He lives in a country that executes people for blasphemy. Regardless of any "shoulds", that is the reality of the country he lives in.
There's a place for saying, on the one hand, that his country shouldn't be like that, and on the other hand, that there's a place for being wise about the environment you live in.
Morally, Pakistan is wrong here. Pakistan should change.
Practically, you live in the environment (including social and political) you live in, and you usually can't change it much except at the margins. If you act like you live in a different environment, that usually bites you in one way or another.
Consider a different situation. Let's say I walk through a bad part of town with $100 bills visibly hanging out of my pocket. I get mugged. The muggers are morally (and legally) wrong for mugging me. But in a world where muggers exist in the bad part of town, that wasn't very smart of me.
Most people only talk about one aspect of this and ignore the other. They focus on the moral "should" (Pakistan should allow freedom of thought, muggers should stop attacking people), or else they focus on the practical wisdom (don't post stuff that's going to get you in trouble, don't walk down the street with visible money on you). Both are simultaneously true.
Pakistan is morally wrong. They should change. And if you live there, things currently are the way they are, and if you ignore that, you will run into problems.
Would you suggest the Ukrainians fight, or give up? 'Cause I expect you'll say they should give up, and especially you would have said this at the moment of the initial invasion, without knowing how the war will go. Would it have been better for them to be "realists" and give up from the start? I don't think so.
Maybe just refrain from saying anything, when all you have to say is "it's no surprise that Pakistan is repressive". It adds nothing to the conversation, except it might be interpreted as victim blaming. We all know it's no surprise.
> Except, I'm pretty sure this reasoning would prevent people like Ghandi or MLK from ever existing, and that's actively harmful.
That is actually a good point. Such people live in such environments, and choose to go against the environment, knowingly paying the price, in order to try to bring about social change. Such people are outside my comments - they know what they're doing, they know what's going to happen, and they do it anyway for good reason. They have my admiration, not my "you should have known better".
There's one more hole in what I said that you haven't mentioned - inconsistent rules. You can know you're in that kind of environment, say something, and get nailed anyway, because the mob or some prosecutor decides that what you said crosses the line, even though they didn't say that for the last N people who did similar things. In that situation, we're just back at "Pakistan is morally wrong" with nothing the person could do to avoid it.