If you do have laws that speech inciting people to certain behaviors is illegal to produce or distribute, there's not a lot of logical basis for exempting Judeo-Christian religious texts. They contain tons of incitement to violence - not talking about the arguable influence they have on Christian or Muslim conquests and forced conversions and so on, but about good old Leviticus and its numerous admonitions to kill people who do various things that we would consider normal, acceptable behavior.
If the law says the speech can't be produced or distributed, then you have to ban the Bible. If it just says the person distributing it should be fined, you're now punishing every church and synagogue and any bookstore that wants to sell it.
There are plenty of other reductio ad absurdum arguments against banning speech of any kind - because it gets real hard to draw consistent, fully logical distinctions between a person or group calling for violence and an ancient document which people still revere, doing the same. You can argue that Christians don't believe in most of those commands and even Orthodox Jews have religious reasons not to follow them at the present time, but then you also have to exempt any existing anti-incitement laws if, say, somebody is loudly calling for violence and has followers who openly agree with him but don't commit any violent crimes.
There probably are cases where speech can legitimately be made illegal and punished - shouting "fire" in a crowded building is the classic example - but you have to draw the line somewhere, and if you draw it around "incitement to violence" then you have to include the Bible.
Not to mention politicians whipping people up into a nationalist fervor in order to gain support for a war is also incitement to violence.
On negative features of religion...the thing is, a lot of these things that us enlightened progressives consider bad features of religion are not things that most participants in religion find objectionable, aside from people coerced into it in one way or another. Yes you have cult-like communities of fundamentalist Mormons or Ultra-Orthodox Jews that people don't really have the option to leave, but most religions don't force people to conform to them other than by the usual social pressures that groups place on people. And plenty, if not most, participants think those things are OK, which is why they participate. We may think that taking dogmatic beliefs as the absolute truth from authority figures is awful, but some people are happy to have their worldviews shaped that way. We may think it's awful that some religions pressure women to do nothing but stay at home and make babies, but it's only awful if the women in question do not want to do that. And the fact that we think it's better for women to be liberated doesn't give us the ability to know better than a particular woman what she wants. Anyway, whatever problems there are with religion, society should treat religious groups the same way it treats everybody else: make laws against things that we deem to be sufficiently large intrusions on another person's rights, and apply them regardless of who breaks them, and that's it. People who want to influence other people's behavior have plenty of avenues to try and do that without legal coercion such as banning speech or banning certain belief systems.
@freeformschooler: I see problems with it, but I don't see a problem with it being legal.
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 875648 times)