Worldtraveller

Not sure where to post this, but I rely on the wisdom of our esteemed moderators. (How's that for a suck up?)

From this story apparently, in some parts of the world, blasphemy is still a crime.
This falls under "I don't know much about art, but I do know about blasphemy"

To bad they don't have the first amendment in Poland.

-Lane

mongrel

Blasphemy's still a crime in Tasmania, too, and carries a maximum prison sentence of 20+ years(23 I think, but I'm not too sure). But, here it's just one of those archaic laws, that is never enforced(half the population would wind up in prison if it was...), and no-one's gotten around to removing it from the books yet.

Citrusponge

Lol I wanna see this picture
I think here in the UK you can be convicted of blasphemous libel somehow... unfair yes

But
an image of a man's penis attached to a cross
Lol

Boro Nut

I think it's one of those cases that may break the law in principle but would be impossible to gain a conviction on. They could charge him with creating an image of a penis attached to a cross, but it would be all too simple for his defence to prove it was really a cross attached to a penis. Also, If he had the sense to include a foreskin, he could argue that it obvioulsy wasn't Jesus anyway, therefore not blasphemy. Perhaps he's keeping that up his sleeve. I used to, but now I use a jar of vinegar.

Boro Nut

DMB

Unfortunately, in Pakistan the sentence for blasphemy is death. Dr Younis Shaikh is still languishing on death row despite a vigorous international campaign on his behalf. It is still possible to add your voice to this campaign.

Volker.Doormann

Each one can show why he thinks that some things are holy or not by arguments. I cannot see, that actions caused by the only motive of discrediting something should have any meaning. Rather I think it has a meaning if an action has a motive to credit something. Abusing a figure Jesus is in my eyes a discredit in the same way as to discredit a penis. Jesus has left great words, and the penis is respected as holy in all religions, cultures, and families until our present age. There is no need for discrediting anything, but there is a need to respect holy things with credit in general. If this would not be true, then no one could argue from an ethical point of view.

Volker

Arken

Must have been difficult to keep it up there without any arms...

Citrusponge

Allow me to demonstrate, with a banana in place of the penis;

Dargo

I think most Muslim countries still have blasphemy laws, and for the most part they are still enforced. The penalty is death in the more fundamentalist nations and fines and or imprisonment in the rest of them. It doesn't seem to take much to get convicted for blasphemy in the Islamic world. The guy on death row in Pakistan said that Mohamed parents couldn't have been Muslims since the Islamic religion did not exist at that point in history.

DMB

Dargo: Younis Shaikh denies that he said what he was claimed to have said anyway. There have been hundreds of death sentences for blasphemy in Pakistan. Some of them are against xians or members of muslim sects that are not officially recognised as muslim (part of a general intolerance of religious dissent). Amnesty International says that many of the blasphemy trials result from land disputes or personal grudges. It's very similiar to witch trials in the xian past.