So you think I should defend that it should be forbidden? I am just asking

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

The first line is obvious.. physical violence. When there is physical violence you have crossed the line.If someone attacks you verbally, you can attack back verbally, defend with arguments, insult..but never attack physically..it is the same difference beween supporting murdering and actually murdering. Any penal Code in the West stablish a clear distinction between both and I think it is a great idea. even when someone provokes you.. it is up to you to cross the line or not.

Attacks on any specific person for specific reasons not attached to any genral religion, race or ideology, etc... is considered libel (if it is moral) here by the judge .. and stablishing it is quite objective.. So there is no line-crossing..just comitting a fault or not.

The great line we are discussing here is what to do with general incitement and general racists remarks...Forbidding them all is just impossible since everybody has always some tendency to denigrate some group or to make even slight generalizations. It is practiacally impossible...there are slight racists remark everywhere.. you can not put everybody in prison... So you have to decide if you put a line and, if you indeed do it, where to put and how to put it

I am not convinced which one is the good one but I do know that whenever there is a line the tendency is to be harsher on the minority and "respect" more the majority. This does not mean that absolute free speech is the solution. I just do not know.

That was all my point.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

I don't mind that any of you are atheists, that's your right to be, but I can only agree when you make jokes about PEOPLE who are misusing religion for political and other purposes. Not the exact religion. I don't see why you would offend me or anybody else's RIGHT to believe.

This is out?

It somehow offends your right to believe, then? How exactly?

I submit that it's quite different human rights that are at stake here. The above cartoon actually threatened to land a German artist in Greek prison in 2005.

He meant it as a piece of religious satire, a playful look at the life of Jesus. But Gerhard Haderer's depiction of Christ as a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis has caused a furore that could potentially land the cartoonist in jail.

Haderer did not even know that his book, The Life of Jesus, had been published in Greece until he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January charged with blasphemy.

Again, I am dismayed that people here make common cause with the most brute and blackguard religious right. You know, the guys at whose behest they murdered Jesus?

I'm not sure whether you really support religious cencorship, but if so, please do the rest of us one little favor: don't call yourself a 'liberal'.

(PS. Quantum Mechanics is some seventy years old.)

The world's northernmost desert wind.