Pakistani Lawyer Wants Mark Zuckerberg Executed 1318
Earthquake Retrofit sends along a piece from The Register reporting on a nightmare scenario of legal jurisdiction on the Internet: a Pakistani lawyer has filed blasphemy charges, carrying the death penalty, against Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives (and the pseudonomous user who initiated the "Draw Muhammad" contest last month). Pakistani police have apparently opened an investigation, according to this Google translation of a BBC Urdu report."
Re:This should be interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
Unless Facebook is running servers in Pakistan or Zuckerberg has been to Pakistan, he did not commit a crime in Pakistan. The US authorities will note that fact.
Re:It comes down to... (Score:5, Informative)
The crusades were politically motivated and it’s a shame everyone believed the religious excuse that was used to keep people interested in a perpetual bloody conflict.
Re: Sure, why not? (Score:5, Informative)
How about the fact that DoD was so infested with political correctness that it ignored the warning signs regarding a Muslim service member whom later went on a shooting rampage and killed over a dozen innocent people?
There's also Comedy Central's hypocrisy -- they allow South Park (and Jon Stewart to a lesser extent) to rip every other religion to shreds but refuse to allow them to do the same to Islam.
Re:Islam question (Score:5, Informative)
Because the Koran is not just a book of religion with philosophy, it also presents the plans for civil government, laws, and punishments as well. That's the entire Sharia law that you hear about when talking about Muslim countries and the Taliban. It doesn't just apply to Muslims because it is stating the laws that their government should use for everybody under its jurisdiction, believers and non-believers.
Re:Islam question (Score:3, Informative)
But it's pretty hard to find anything directly in Christian theology that suggests Christians are supposed to try to impose these standards on non-Christians.
Don't get out much, do you?
Check out every attempt to create state lotteries, every place where alcohol sales/consumption questions come up, etc., etc...
Anytime there is any suggestion of changing laws to permit something that Christians find "sinful," they will be out in full force attempting to defeat it. In other words, doing their damnedest to impose their standards on everyone.
They just don't, usually, blow themselves (and others) up over the issue.
It's not a new trend, either... seems I heard something about some Crusades that happened a while back.
Re:They would only be hurting themselves (Score:3, Informative)
I am reminded by a trip to the southern US; FL, MS, GA, AL, TX, by my favorite TV team at Top Gear... where they fled for their lives from some AL hick town whilst playing some gags with unpopular slogans on their cars. I can rework the quote to be closer to home:
In Alabama; "We're a backwards shithole, filled with intolerant Bible-thumping hicks. Don't even think about coming here or doing business here."
There now, aren't we just a bit more tolerant of our own backward, Cristian shitheads? Me neither. Fuck all religions! Especially YOURS!
Re:I love moderates (Score:2, Informative)
I hate to bring this up because it's off topic. But Hitler was Catholic. He went to church, was backed by the Vatican and mentions doing Gods work in Mein Kampf. You can't disown him from your belief system because he was a cunt.
All of which is beside the point because this article isn't about "religion is bad" it's about "murderous extremists are bad". The current culture of the middle east just happens to foster a religious culture predisposed to extremism.
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Informative)
Judaism's history was a very violent one, though they were/are not particularly interested in spreading the religion, because it is a racial religion.
No more violent than most of the other tribes/nations of the time. Judaism is unique from Christianity and Islam in that it didn't start solely as a religion, but also as a political unit, complete with a legal system (I don't mean the laws about who you can sleep with and which animals you can eat, but the laws about how much money you owe your neighbor when your ox kills one of his goats) and conflicts with neighboring tribes. With the separation of politics and civil law from religion that we have in Europe and the Americas now, a lot of people forget that Judaism had no such separation 3,000 years ago.
Re:Get in the queue buddy... (Score:2, Informative)
Odd thing about that treaty, when the U.S. used it in this case to get extradition ordered the U.S. hadn't ratified it yet. The U.K. had but not the U.S..
Re:The biggest protector of child molesters (Score:3, Informative)
The Reformation [wikipedia.org] resulted in a new branch of Christianity, toppling the rule that the Vatican had.
While the Roman Catholic Church did have a degree of reformation, its particular flaws are beside the point. The issue is that that a huge segment of Christianity formally went in a different direction.
Re:Depends what you mean. (Score:3, Informative)
the very act of instituting "Churches" runs contrary to the Bible
I'm curious what you mean by this. Many of the letters in the New Testament are written to churches, and it seems that these must have been started or instituted in some way. The Bible even talks about some church organization, with bishops/pastors/elders (the terms are used interchangeably in the Bible) overseeing the spiritual needs of each church and deacons acting as servants of the church. Of course, I'd agree that any organization beyond this goes against what's in the Bible. The Bible definitely goes against building elaborate, word-wide hierarchies, adding to or changing (including ignoring) teachings of the Bible, and a lot of practices that are common in so many churches today.
I apologize if you knew all this already, you certainly do seem knowledgeable. I just wanted to clarify what point you were making.
Re:They would only be hurting themselves (Score:2, Informative)
It's not bowing to pressure, it's ensuring their survival by making damn sure that some lunatic with deep pockets doesn't put a million dollar death sentence bounty on their head. Salman Rushdie still can't come out of hiding to this day...
Sure he can. In fact I can supply a list of his upcoming public appearances if you like.
http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/features/salmanrushdie/appearances.html [randomhouse.com]
He was here in Toronto a couple of weeks back, http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/06/01/rushdie-wiesel-toronto.html [www.cbc.ca]
Re:I love moderates (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to bring this up because it's off topic. But Hitler was Catholic. He went to church, was backed by the Vatican and mentions doing Gods work in Mein Kampf. You can't disown him from your belief system because he was a cunt.
What??? How was this modded informative?? Hitler may have been born Catholic, but he was Catholic in the same way Marx was Jewish--both are religions that are also ethnic identities, because people are inducted into them in childhood. Here are some representative quotes from his later life:
"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"
(Quoted by Albert Speer, architect of the Third Reich)
The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror.
--From Mein Kampf
"We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany."
Re:It's a real risk for Zuckerman (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This should be interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
You can't be extradited from the US for doing something that isn't a crime here.
That said, I really think Zuckerberg needs to man up and go to Pakistan. He wanted to "respect" those ignorant savages by turning off groups critical of them; now he can show just how much respect he has by putting his neck on the chopping block.
Man up, asshole. You lied down with dogs, you can't complain about all the fleas now.
Re:This should be interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Mohammad was a child-raping psychopath and Allah doesn't exist.
There, now CmdrTaco can't go to Dubai.
the inquisition is still in the Catholic Church (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is why the US is "anti"-Islamic-terrorist (Score:5, Informative)
Israel has given up land.
Israel appears to think the current national entity should not be a national entity, but appears to be willing to allow people to live there, in the name of peace.
Hamas, on the other hand, thinks all Israel - the Jewish PEOPLE - be killed. They don't care about the political status of Israel, they hate the Jews.
That's a big difference. One is anti-ethnic-group (genocide), and the other is anti-political-entity (mmmm land dispute, nation dispute, not genocide).
By the way, if Israel doesn't acknowledge the right for Palestine to exist, why do they allow ANY aid into Gaza? On one hand, you have Israel allowing aid (yes, we can argue about how well they are doing that, but they ARE doing it). On the other hand, we have Hamas actively trying to kill all the Jews in Israel. Hmmmmm. Yup, sounds very equal to me, as your one-liner seemed to imply... [/sarcasm]
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Informative)
As an Atheist, I assure you I do not think all religions are equal.
I consider Muslim teaching far worse then Buddhism.
Re:Can't wait for HTML5 (Score:2, Informative)
I was at the Vatican Museum in 1994 and down in a basement they had a exhibit of modern art depicting Christ or the Virgin Mary, my friend and I (both Jews) came across stuff that would be at least as controversial as Piss Christ. One had Christ and the Virgin naked in bed, yet there it was in the Vatican.
That would not fly in Islam in any way shape or form, hell, you won't find a depiction of Mohammad in Mecca, Medina or the Temple Mount.
Re:I love moderates (Score:5, Informative)
How? Religion is created by people.
Most religions are. Judaism and Christianity claim to have been created by God.
I, for one, do not believe that the New Testament speaks only Christ's words and teachings, especially considering that considerable portions were written hundreds of years after his death.
Hundreds of years? The latest possible date for *any* of the books is 150AD. The most likely date places the most recent one (Revelation) as being written in 95AD.
This isn't even considering that Jesus, like Luther centuries later, wasn't necessarily seeking to create a new religion, rather he was attempting to modify the existing Hebrew religion.
Pretty much everything Jesus taught in his day flew directly in the face of what Judaism taught at the time. The leaders of Judaism where his biggest opponents. In fact, his blasphemy by their definition was so horrible as to warrant the worst possible sentence they had at their disposal. Not exactly what anyone would (with any seriousness) call a "modification" of an existing religion.
And there aren't many people who would say that the Hebrews were necessarily a completely peaceful people. From the massacre of the worshipers of the golden calf to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, there was plenty of violence to go around.
That is history prior to Christianity. No where in the New Testament will you violence being condoned for the followers of Christianity to participate in. You do however find lots of support for returning good for evil, and non-retaliation for violence received.
Christianity is not about forcing a world view, religion, beliefs, or anything on anyone else. It's about spreading the good news of the Gospel to everyone so they have the choice to be saved or not.
It's fine if you choose not to believe in Christianity but you should at least research the facts before you make claims when you clearly don't know the subject matter.
Re: I love moderates (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not aware that non-Gnostic Christians acted violently against Gnostic Christians.
See Albigensian Crusade [wikipedia.org] as the most well-known example.
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's pretty simple. If you kill someone, rape someone or commit high treason, then you need to be put down as you have no place in a civilized society.
That attitude means society never has to look at itself to see if it is creating conditions that cause people to kill, rape, or commit treason, let alone do anything about any such conditions.
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Informative)
The Sunni/Shia split happened very early on and really resembles the Orthodox/Catholic split in Christianity a lot more than it does the Reformation.
Re:The biggest protector of child molesters (Score:4, Informative)
Theocracy in Europe was parallel to secular authority. They each had their own courts, own tax system, etc. Yes, there was fighting over who was really in charge, which escalated into open war, but for the average guy on the farm the cvhuch was a government he had better obey. Post-reformation the secular governments had won, and in many places you could even decide to go to a differenct church if you wanted to.
Re:I love moderates (Score:2, Informative)
The Catholic church makes me so angry because it gives true Christianity such a bad name.
Ah... the no true scotsman fallacy... always my favorite.