The Future Of Blasphemy

Author : Austin Dacey
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1441101780
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Future of Blasphemy written by Austin Dacey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the days of Moses, blasphemy was the mortal offence of failing to respect the divine. In an age of human rights, blasphemy is understood as a failure to respect persons, as insult, defamation, or "advocacy of religious hatred." The criminalisation of this personal blasphemy has been advanced at the United Nations and upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, which has asserted a universal "right to respect for religious feelings." The Future of Blasphemy turns respect on its head. Respect demands that we grant each other equal standing in the moral community, not that we never offend. Politically, respect for citizens requires a public discourse that is open to all viewpoints. Going beyond the question of free speech versus religion, The Future of Blasphemy defends an ethical model of blasphemy. Controversies surrounding sacrilege are contests over what counts as sacred, disagreements about what has central, inviolable, and incommensurable value. In such public contestation of the sacred, each of us-secular and religious alike-has equal right to speak on its behalf.

Author : Austin Dacey
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1441192611
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Future of Blasphemy written by Austin Dacey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the days of Moses, blasphemy was the mortal offence of failing to respect the divine. In an age of human rights, blasphemy is understood as a failure to respect persons, as insult, defamation, or "advocacy of religious hatred." The criminalisation of this personal blasphemy has been advanced at the United Nations and upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, which has asserted a universal "right to respect for religious feelings." The Future of Blasphemy turns respect on its head. Respect demands that we grant each other equal standing in the moral community, not that we never offend. Politically, respect for citizens requires a public discourse that is open to all viewpoints. Going beyond the question of free speech versus religion, The Future of Blasphemy defends an ethical model of blasphemy. Controversies surrounding sacrilege are contests over what counts as sacred, disagreements about what has central, inviolable, and incommensurable value. In such public contestation of the sacred, each of us-secular and religious alike-has equal right to speak on its behalf.

Author : Sherman Alexie
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0802194060
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Blasphemy written by Sherman Alexie and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteen new stories and fifteen classics by the National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling author of War Dances. Sherman Alexie’s stature as a writer of stories, poetry, and novels has soared over the course of his twenty-book, twenty-year career. His wide-ranging, acclaimed fiction throughout the last two decades—from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner Award–winning War Dances—have established him as a star in contemporary American literature. A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie showcases his many talents in Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with sixteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers. Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” in which a homeless Indian man quests to win back a family heirloom; “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” a road-trip morality tale; “The Toughest Indian in the World,” about a night shared between a writer and a hitchhiker; and his most recent, “War Dances,” about a man grappling with sudden hearing loss in the wake of his father’s death. Alexie’s new stories are fresh and quintessential, about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, a twenty-four-hour Asian manicure salon, good and bad marriages, and all species of warriors in America today. An indispensable Alexie collection, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrilling page, why Alexie is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story. Praise for Blasphemy “Alexie once again reasserts himself as one the most compelling contemporary practitioners of the short story. In Blasphemy, the author demonstrates his talent on nearly every page. . . . [Alexie] illuminates the lives of his characters in unique, surprising, and, ultimately, hopeful ways.” —Boston Globe “Alexie writes with arresting perception in praise of marriage, in mockery of hypocrisy, and with concern for endangered truths and imperiled nature. He is mischievously and mordantly funny, scathingly forthright, deeply and universally compassionate, and wholly magnetizing. This is a must-have collection.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) “[A] sterling collection of short stories by Alexie, a master of the form. . . . The newer pieces are full of surprises. . . . These pieces show Alexie at his best: as an interpreter and observer, always funny if sometimes angry, and someone, as a cop says of one of his characters, who doesn’t “fit the profile of the neighborhood.”“—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author : Daniel Peterson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000765024
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Islam, Blasphemy, and Human Rights in Indonesia written by Daniel Peterson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the high-profile 2017 blasphemy trial of the former governor of Jakarta, Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama, as its sole case study, this book assesses whether Indonesia’s liberal democratic human rights legal regime can withstand the rise of growing Islamist majoritarian sentiment. Specifically, this book analyses whether a 2010 decision of Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has rendered the liberal democratic human rights guarantees contained in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution ineffective. Key legal documents, including the indictment issued by the North Jakarta Attorney-General and General Prosecutor, the defence’s ‘Notice of Defence’, and the North Jakarta State Court’s convicting judgment, are examined. The book shows how Islamist majoritarians in Indonesia have hijacked human rights discourse by attributing new, inaccurate meanings to key liberal democratic concepts. This has provided them with a human rights law-based justification for the prioritisation of the religious sensibilities and religious orthodoxy of Indonesia’s Muslim majority over the fundamental rights of the country’s religious minorities. While Ahok’s conviction evidences this, the book cautions that matters pertaining to public religion will remain a site of contestation in contemporary Indonesia for the foreseeable future. A groundbreaking study of the Ahok trial, the blasphemy law, and the contentious politics of religious freedom and cultural citizenship in Indonesia, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of religion, Islamic studies, religious studies, law and society, law and development, law reform, constitutionalism, politics, history and social change, and Southeast Asian studies.

Author : Alan Dershowitz
Publisher : Wiley
ISBN 13 : 9780470281680
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Blasphemy written by Alan Dershowitz and published by Wiley. This book was released on 2008-06-16 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence, author Alan Dershowitz proves that no relation exists between the Declaration of Independence’s “Creator and “Nature’s God,” on the one hand, and the Judeo-Christian God of the Old and New Testaments, on the other hand. Learn about the religious right’s goal to Christianize America by using the Declaration of Independence and arguing that this document proves that the United States was founded on Biblical law. Understand everything from the argument to the documentation that Dershowitz uses to disprove this historical distortion.

Author : Shemeem Burney Abbas
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292753071
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws written by Shemeem Burney Abbas and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the guise of Islamic law, the prophet Muhammad’s Islam, and the Qur’an, states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh are using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of speech. Yet the Prophet never tried or executed anyone for blasphemy, nor does the Qur’an authorize the practice. Asserting that blasphemy laws are neither Islamic nor Qur‘anic, Shemeem Burney Abbas traces the evolution of these laws from the Islamic empires that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present-day Taliban. Her pathfinding study on the shari’a and gender demonstrates that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are the inventions of a military state that manipulates discourse in the name of Islam to exclude minorities, women, free thinkers, and even children from the rights of citizenship. Abbas herself was persecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, so she writes from both personal experience and years of scholarly study. Her analysis exposes the questionable motives behind Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which were resurrected during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime of 1977–1988—motives that encompassed gaining geopolitical control of the region, including Afghanistan, in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Abbas argues that these laws created a state-sponsored “infidel” ideology that now affects global security as militant groups such as the Taliban justify violence against all “infidels” who do not subscribe to their interpretation of Islam. She builds a strong case for the suspension of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and for a return to the Prophet’s peaceful vision of social justice.

Author : Javier Villa-Flores
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 9780816525560
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Dangerous Speech written by Javier Villa-Flores and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2006-11-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dangerous Speech is the first systematic treatment of blasphemous speech in colonial Mexico. This engaging social history examines the representation of blasphemy as a sin and a crime, and its repression by the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish colonists viewed blasphemy not only as an insult against God but also as a dangerous misrepresentation of the deity, which could call down his wrath in a ruinous assault on the imperial enterprise. Why then, asks Villa-Flores, did Spaniards dare to blaspheme? Having mined the period’s moral literature—philosophical works as well as royal decrees and Inquisition treatises and trial records in Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives and research libraries—Villa-Flores deftly interweaves images of daily life in colonial Mexico with vivid descriptions of human interactions to illustrate the complexity of a culture profoundly influenced by the Catholic Church. In entertaining and sometimes horrifying vignettes, the reader comes face to face with individuals who used language to assert or manipulate their identities within that repressive society. Villa-Flores offers an innovative interpretation of the social uses of blasphemous speech by focusing on specific groups—conquistadors, Spanish settlers, Spanish women, and slaves of both genders—as a lens to examine race, class, and gender relations in colonial Mexico. He finds that multiple motivations led people to resort to blasphemy through a gamut of practices ranging from catharsis and gender self-fashioning to religious rejection and active resistance. Dangerous Speech is a valuable resource for students and scholars of colonialism, the social history of language, Mexican history, and the changing relations of gender, class, and ethnicity in colonial Latin America.

Author : Jeroen Temperman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108416918
Total Pages : 771 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression written by Jeroen Temperman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 771 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book details the legal ramifications of existing anti-blasphemy laws and debates the legitimacy of such laws in Western liberal democracies.

Author : U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
Publisher : Government Printing Office
ISBN 13 : 9780160942938
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Respecting Rights? written by U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report examines and compares the content of laws prohibiting blasphemy ("blasphemy laws") worldwide through the lens of international and human rights law principles. The laws examined in this study prohibit or criminalize the expression of opinions deemed "blasphemous," or counter to majority views or religious belief systems, and many impose serious, often criminal, penalties. Blasphemy laws are actively enforced in many states throughout the world. Many governments deem repeal not feasible or desirable and justify the prohibition and criminalization of blasphemy as necessary to promote religious harmony. This study seeks to evaluate the language and content of blasphemy laws to understand what aspects of these laws adhere to--or deviate from--international and human rights law principles. A better understanding of the laws' compliance with these principles may assist in the public policy community in developing clear, specifically-tailored recommendations for areas for reform. Related products: Explore ourFaith-Based Education resources collection Discover ourHuman Rights collection

Author : Joss Marsh
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226506913
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Word Crimes written by Joss Marsh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-08-15 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1883 newspaper editor G.W. Foote stood trial three times for blasphemy. Here Joss Marsh reconstructs the forgotten cases of more than 200 working-class "blasphemers" in Victorian England, whose stubborn refusal to silence their "hooligan" voices, along with Foote, helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today. 22 photos.