Workers in Pakistan today reported a massive surge in productivity while school and university assignments became noticeably better informed, following court orders banning Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Wikipedia due to 'sacrilegious content'.
OK, I'm being flippant. The Pakistani courts have banned these sites in response to a nasty-minded campaign calling on people to post cartoons of Muhammad, many of which are spiteful and racist. It seems rather confused - you have to search for these things to be offended by them, so the devout could just not log on, rather than using the courts. Most Pakistani's won't be affected anyway - web access is restricted to a tiny proportion of the population.
I also don't quite understand the ban on drawings of the Prophet - it certainly wasn't always banned in every branch of Islam, and Muhammad isn't God: he was a man.
Why can't we all just get along?
2 comments:
Just to clear that up: Mohammed is a man, man was made in God's image. You cannot portay the human form at all.
Or at least you are not supposed to. Obviously the rules can be bent to allow placards with the faces of homophobic, anti-semitic, woman hating, war-mongering terrorists and despots.
I see. But this hasn't always been the case, and not in every form of Islam. I think we tend to make the mistake of thinking that Islam is monolithic, when it's actually sectarian and influenced by local cultures, like most other religions.
I'm an atheist - all religions are, or have been, homophobic, misogynistic, violent and oppressive (certainly Ian Paisley's brand of Christianity fits every word of your description). They tend to relax in the end, or fade away.
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