Where Imprisonment or Death For Blasphemy Is The Norm

As people continue to feel revulsion over the murders in Paris motivated by Islamic extremism and , in the case of the victims at Charlie Hebdo, sick outrage for perceived blasphemy, many are missing the point that the laws in far too many countries make blasphemy a crime and in some instances, a capital offense.   Such laws make the murders in Paris "justified" in the minds of religious extremists.  Equally disturbing is the fact that a number of the countries enforcing such laws are U.S. allies and/or recipients of large amounts of U.S. aid.  Thus, the U.S. needs to be demanding that such laws be eliminated and those imprisoned for blasphemy be released.  A prime example is the plight of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, age 30 (pictured above), sentenced to 1,000 lashes and ten (10) years in prison.  Why the Hell is America supporting such a foul regime?  In a word, oil.  In short, America is only too ready to prostitute its values.   Al-akhbar.com has details:

US-ally Saudi Arabia flogs liberal activist Raif Badawi in public Friday near a mosque in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, receiving 50 lashes for "insulting Islam," witnesses said.

Badawi, 30, was arrested in June 2012 and charged with offenses ranging from cyber crime to disobeying his father and apostasy, or abandoning his faith.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals ($266,666) and 1,000 lashes last year after prosecutors challenged an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes as being too lenient.

Witnesses said that Badawi was flogged after the weekly Friday prayers near Al-Jafali mosque as a crowd of worshipers looked on.

Badawi was driven to the site in a police car, and taken out of the vehicle as a government employee read out the charges against him to the crowd.

The blogger was made to stand with his back to onlookers as another man began flogging him, witnesses said, adding that Badawi did not make any sound or cry in pain.

The faithful who had emerged from noon prayers watched in silence and were ordered by security forces not to take any pictures on their mobile phones.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said the punishment was "barbaric" and noted its timing after Saudi Arabia condemned Wednesday's deadly attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

"Although Saudi Arabia condemned yesterday's cowardly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it is now preparing to inflict the most barbaric punishment on a citizen who just used his freedom of expression and information," Reporters Without Borders program director Lucie Morillon said Thursday.

Badawi, who has been in jail since 2012, is a "prisoner of conscience", said London-based Amnesty International, demanding his release.

Badawi is the co-founder of the Saudi Liberal Network along with women's rights campaigner Suad al-Shammari, who was arrested last October and also accused of "insulting Islam."

"Flogging and other forms of corporal punishment are prohibited under international law, which prohibits torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," said Amnesty's Philip Luther.

Saudi Arabia's legal code follows a medieval version of Sharia law. Judges are trained as religious scholars and have a broad scope to base verdicts and sentences on their own interpretation of religious texts.

But the problem extends far beyond Saudi Arabia.  Here are highlights from an article in Slate that looks at government sanctioned murder or imprisonment for blasphemy:

The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris this week was uniquely horrific. But in one way, it was not that unusual: Violent acts in response to “blasphemy” are unfortunately pretty common. They’re just usually perpetrated by governments.

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, UCLA law professor Amjad Mahmood Khan argues that Pakistan’s absurdly broad blasphemy laws—under which any “imputation, innuendo, or insinuation” that “directly or indirectly defiles the sacred name of Prophet Muhammad” is outlawed and in some cases punishable by death—have not only led to the arrest of thousands of individuals for crimes as trivial as wearing an Islamic slogan on a T-shirt, but “provide legal cover for terrorists to commit atrocities in the name of protecting Islam’s integrity based on their warped view of the faith.” This includes the mass killings of members of minority sects like the Ahmadis, who are forbidden by law from calling themselves Muslims and frequently charged under blasphemy laws, as well as attacks on Christians. 

Blasphemy laws are harshest and most common in the Muslim world, but aren’t exclusive to it. In the wake of Pussy Riot’s church performance, Russia’s parliament passed a new law mandating jail terms for insults to religion. Nearly a quarter of the world’s countries have blasphemy laws on their books, according to Pew, and one out of 10 bans apostasy. The Charlie Hebdo killings have already prompted some Western governments, notably Ireland and Canada, to announce that they will reconsider the blasphemy laws on their books. But in much of the world, governments, not terrorists, will continue to be the biggest threat to freedom of and from religion.

In the movie "Latter Days" a character asks the Mormon missionaries the following question: "How come if God talks to Joseph Smith, Smith gets to be a prophet, but if God talks to me, I'm a schizophrenic?"   Sadly, the same question applies to the Quran and Muhammad who wrote it based on claimed verbal communications through the angel Gabriel.  Was Muhammad truly a prophet or merely a schizophrenic con man?  I suspect readers know my answer.

Mormon Church Claims DNA Studies Do Not Disprove Book of Mormon

Just as many of the supposed scholars of the Southern Baptist Convention are struggling to get around the inconvenient truth that the human genome project has proven that Adam and Eve never existed as historical individuals (and that, there fore the Fall as described in the Bible did not occur), so to is the Mormon Church struggling with the truth revealed by DNA studies which indicate that the indigenous people of the Americas are the descendants of Hebrews who left Jerusalem around 600 BCE.  Once again we are seeing that knowledge and science are religion's biggest enemies because they destroy the myths on which religious dogma is based.  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the Mormon Church's dilema.  Here are excerpts:

Last week The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posted yet another undated, unsigned document on its official website, this one on the topic of “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies.” The essay addresses issues raised by the fact that there is little to no DNA evidence supporting the Mormon claim that the indigenous people of the Americas are the descendants of Hebrews who left Jerusalem around 600 BCE. This belief was so ingrained that for a very long time, Mormons referred to Native Americans as “Lamanites,” a name that also refers to a people in the Book of Mormon.

I’ve seen discussions arguing that it’s a tacit endorsement of evolution, and also, because it discusses events believed to have happened 10,000 years ago, a tacit repudiation of the Fall and the Flood and other events that supposedly occurred less than 10,000 years ago.

But let’s leave all that aside and instead talk about the nature and ramifications of evidence.

The Church begins by stating that “the primary purpose of the Book of Mormon is more spiritual than historical,” which is true of many religious texts. However, Joseph Smith and the church he founded have also always claimed that the Book of Mormon is a historical record of events that really, truly happened. One wonders why they would’ve insisted so strenuously on this point were it not somehow integral to the book’s importance and usefulness to its readers and authors.

[T]he problem isn’t one field of study, it’s a steady accumulation of evidence that undermines or contradicts the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon—particularly given that Joseph Smith claimed, in a statement the church has made much use of, that “the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”

[T]he mere absence of distress while one reads the Book of Mormon is supposed to be an incontrovertible sign from God that what one is reading is “true.” In fact, it’s supposed to be so reliable that one is encouraged to extrapolate from it: if the words one reads in the Book of Mormon are true, then the entire volume must be true; and Joseph Smith must have been a genuine prophet of God in order to produce it; and the church Joseph Smith created must be, as it claims, “the one and only true and living church on the face of the earth;” and its current leaders must all be, as they claim, appointed by God to lead his church.

[I]t’s not merely DNA studies that “cannot be used decisively to either affirm or reject the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon.” It’s also a feeling as one reads the Book of Mormon of peace, or warmth and arousal in one’s chest. These things are certainly evidence of something—that the text you’re reading resonates with you on some deep level, for instance—but they’re certainly not proof that it’s logically or spiritually sound to accept all the truth claims of the organization that told you said text might make you feel either peaceful or emotionally aroused.

It then asserts that “DNA studies cannot be used decisively to either affirm or reject the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon.”

The Republican Party, Racism and Mormonism

There are many who believed that the Christofascist base of the Republican Party might not support Mitt Romney even though Romney has done everything short of selling his soul - or maybe he has - to win the support of religious extremists in the GOP base.  But perhaps there is something that ties Romney to these religious extremists: racism and the belief that white privilege must be protected.  This could be particularly true in the South where racism has long flourished for many reasons, one of which is that poor whites have always needed someone to look down on in order to fell good about themselves.  In my New Orleans belle grandmother's view, nothing was worse than "white trash."  Well, the white trash used racism against blacks to convince themselves that there were not the lowest of the low.  How does this tie in with Mitt Romney and Mormonism?  What denomination continued open discrimination as Church policy longer than any other?  The Mormon Church, of course.  The Church in which Romney was raised and to which he gives millions of dollars each year.  Which political party had only 2% of its attendees made up of blacks?  The GOP, of course.  Andrew Sullivan looks at this bizarre double standard that would never allow to go unchallenged in a Democrat candidate and asks some hard questions that need to be asked of Romney.  Here are excepts:

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had never attended Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and had decided to attend services, and proselytize for, a black separatist, nationalist church that refused to allow whites to participate in crucial religious services because white people had been condemned by God for their iniquity in the ancient past and had been for ever marked white so black Americans would know instantly to keep their distance.

Imagine further that backing this racist church was not a youthful folly on Obama's part, but a profound commitment - that he went on a mission abroad to convert Christians to a new religion based on black racial supremacy, and has often said that the most important thing in his entire life to this day is a church whose sacred scripture declares white people to be cursed by God for their past sins - and the sign of this curse is their white skin.

A simple question: Do you think this issue would not come up in a general election or a primary?   .  .  .  .  I raise this because it is a fact that Mitt Romney belonged to a white supremacist church for 31 years of his life, went on a mission to convert Christians and Jews and others to this church, which retained white supremacy as a doctrine until 1978 - decades after Brown vs Board of Education, and a decade after the end of the anti-miscegenation laws.

[T]he key question: what did the Romneys do to confront their own church's non-secular position on the inherent spiritual inferiority of blacks? Nothing, so far as I can find. If any reader can find some, please send it to me and I'll post it. And Joseph Smith's admirable early abolitionism was soon trumped by Brigham Young who took the Book of Mormon seriously:

2nd Nephi 5:21 "And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, and they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."

The inherent spiritual-racial iniquity of blacks places them at the very bottom of the pile on earth, and they will achieve salvation only in the hereafter - and then only after every other race has had their turn. Now listen to Romney's response to Russert again:

My faith has always taught me that in the eyes of God every individual merited the fullest degree of happiness in the hereafter and I had no question in my mind that African-Americans and blacks generally would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had.

My italics. There's nothing in Romney's answer that violates the old Mormon doctrine - still there in the Book of Mormon - that for some reason, people with black skin suffer some kind of inherited curse that will only be lifted after everyone else has been saved in the hereafter. 

people still don't see how Mormonism - its utilitarian use of truth, its studied mainstream all-American appeal, its refusal to be completely transparent to outsiders, and its insistence on never having to account for itself - isn't integral to Mitt Romney's personality and beliefs. Romney will no more let outsiders look at his finances than the LDS church will allow non-Mormons inside their Temples after they have been consecrated. 

[I]f you asked a Catholic candidate whether it was wrong for the Church to have treated Jews as cursed and sub-human for so long, I cannot imagine any Catholic politician not saying yes. Unequivocally. Is there a mite of evidence that Mitt Romney ever challenged the white supremacism in his religion and its active racism while it was in existence and he was still a missionary and member for 31 years of his life?Listen again to the last question and answer in the Russert interview:

Russert: But it was wrong for your faith to exclude [African-Americans] for as long as it did?
Romney: I've told you exactly where I stand. My view is that there is no discrimination in the eyes of God and I could not have been more pleased when the decision occurred.

Why could he not just have said "yes"?

You see, Romney is in some ways the PERFECT candidate for white racists, particularly those in the South where viewing others who are different as less than fully human has a long tradition.  Perhaps Romney's Mormonism is the dog whistle that is attracting racist and bigoted whites who cannot tolerate a black president and who find the Mormon Church's historic white supremacist past comforting.  Perhaps even validating.  What do others think?