Find out what you criticise. A religion, or religion as such? Religious communities and organisations? The power exercised by religious organisations or institutions? Religious mores? Behaviour of believers? Religious feelings of persons?

Huge differences.

The obligation to maintain that distinction cuts both ways. When religious adherents conflate criticism of religious power structures and authority figures with criticism of their religious community, their religion, or religion in general, then such distinctions get really blurry, really fast.

My very clear impression is that secularists are not the greater offenders against clarity in this distinction.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Katrin:

Find out what you criticise. A religion, or religion as such? Religious communities and organisations? The power exercised by religious organisations or institutions? Religious mores? Behaviour of believers? Religious feelings of persons?

OK... for a few days I was under the false impression that you wanted laws or regulations against hurting people's religious feelings. If we're talking about rules of discussion, I'll try to clarify mine.

Criticising a religion, or religion as such, is out of bounds for me : something I hope I don't do. Religious communities and organisations : I reserve the right to criticise their practices and influence, the way they are organised or funded etc, to the same degree as I would criticize any other constituted body, no more, no less. Religious mores, I reserve the right to criticise, insofar as they impinge on others. Religious feelings of persons are none of my business, and not very interesting to me.

Behaviour of believers, or as I would prefer to call it, religious praxis, is of interest to me, and not exempt from criticism. When religiously-motivated or -justified behaviours are strongly at variance with societal norms, then this will inevitably be a subject for debate. Is it is a legitimate subject for debate? If it has negative effects on people -- outside the religious group, or within it -- then yes.

Random example : in my home country, I remember a controversy concerning Jehovah's Witnesses who refused blood transfusions for their children.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}