Hi Paul

Your twin brother twice removed, only one year older than you, called Fellatio Hornblower Gobbles, sounds totally plausible to me :)

Just like my cousin Iva Payne and maiden Aunt, Sister Gretchen Gruntfuttock.

Not to mention my dear niece, Ophelia Balls.

Cheers Mavs

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Dear Is Mise,

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You wrote :

1. « … Foxy wrote that it is alright to mock religion … »
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No, Is Mise, she did not write that. She wrote : “the rest of us have every right to … mock … these [religious] beliefs … “.

Alright means “satisfactory, acceptable” (OED), whereas right, in this context, means “a just claim or title, whether legal, prescriptive, or moral (OED).

Although Foxy has a just, legal, and moral claim (right) to mock religious belief if she wants to, most religious believers would probably find this to be totally unacceptable (not alright).

She was not affirming that “it is alright to mock religion”. She was simply pointing out that “mocking religious belief” is a fundamental human right of “Freedom of Expression”.
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2. « … religion includes that peculiar to Australian Aboriginals, Christians Jews and Muslims etc.»

Yes, the early British settlers generally considered there was no such thing as Indigenous religion, only superstition. But anthropologists later found that the Aboriginal peoples had a close spiritual connection with the land and a highly developed cosmogenic Dreamtime mythology. A Special Rapporteur of the UN qualified that in 1997 as a religious belief that should be officially recognized and included in all future surveys of religious membership in Australia.

It is interesting to note that historical research has revealed that although large-scale wars were not uncommon among the Aboriginal peoples prior to colonisation there is nothing to indicate that they had anything to do with religious conflict.

As for the monotheistic religions you mention, they ideologically reject all other belief systems as false religions – which partly explains their exceptionally aggressive and intolerant stance in the history of the world. This conception has served to justify the destructive and fanatical action of legions of devotees who consider their religion to be the only true one.

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3. « Is it OK to mock Islam, to mock the Prophet Muhammad? Certainly it’d be unwise.»

Yes, I’m afraid there are too many religious fanatics and mentally disturbed people in the world today for anyone to willingly risk his life by exercising his fundamental human right of Freedom of Expression in mocking Islam or the Prophet Muhammad.

We all have in mind the terrorist attack in Paris against the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo that precisely mocked the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the relatively recent knife attack by an apparently deranged individual on Salman Rushdie whose book, The Satanic Verses, was branded as blasphemous by Ayatollah Khomeini who issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.

Khomeini’s son, Ahmed, later told a New Yorker reporter that Khomeini never read Salman Rushdie’s book :

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ayatollah-khomeini-never-read-salman-rushdies-book

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Dear Banjo,

Thank You so much for once again explaining it so well.
I never said it was all right to mock religion.
We've had - all sorts of people challenging the spiritual
convictions of others, often through humour, satire,
literary ridicule, et cetera. Of course they do this at their
own peril as you pointed out - as we've seen with Salman Rushdie.

Then we have:

" Michael Palin and John Cleese
Did a great job of this with ease
We don't need to see Orion
To enjoy Monty Python's Life of Brian."

William Wordsworth wrote "Idiot Boy" (The)-

"For this Pony there's a rumour
That should he lose his eyes and ears
And should he live a thousand years
He never will be out of humour."

Banjo,
Some fine distinctions, but mocking religion comes near to and often is, hate speech.
I read Rushdie’s book in India in the house of a friend near Juhu beach in Mumbi,
His street ran off the one where, in the book, Rushdie’s characters entered the sea.
However the location didn’t make the book less boring.

P.S. Paul

Lola Lilycrap

Mavs