54 being 69 hurts my brain

It's silly and arbitrary, but it may be very relevant for a good chunk of the US audience lol

I find arguments like this a bit silly. I believe that religion has to be confined to personal life, and religious harm has to be reduced through a socialist government, but religious people killing others is an idealist argument. Religious people didn't just kill because of ideals, but rather because of the material reality that gave rise to their religion. I personally believe that religion, like the state, might wither away through socialism, but just like the state, it's about handling class contradictions and engaging through a historical and materialist lens, else we're just being idealistic ourselves. Not only that, but practically speaking many of our comrades are religious, as long as they agree with us on examining society through diamat and commit to reducing religious harm, I don't care if they pray or not. Let their religious views inspire them towards positive change, and influence their own religious communities through organizing.

If you’re just going to find any religious nutso to make your argument, I don’t think you’re really arguing in good faith.

Jerry Falwell was a significant Baptist pastor who had a large congregation. He founded a college and also was a significant conservative activist. You could say he was problematic, but he was a significant religious leader.

How awesome can a religion be, if it makes you THAT insecure about it. Why someone would base their life on such a fragile foundation is beyond me.

US audience

Oh ah right, you mentioned why B-)

The problem is you're counting on the censors to be reasonable, unbiased and even-handed with these judgments. The reality is, they won't be like that - at least not 100% of the time. They can and will be influenced to slap the label on simply because the powers that be don't like something, and give "blasphemy" as an excuse. Now, all of a sudden, you have a biased ratings system creating new cultural issues and inflaming tensions that didn't exist before.

My opinion on this is simple - if you don't like it, don't watch it. If you have children and you care about monitoring their media diet, review media first before they consume it. That should be the parents' call, not outsourced to a ratings/censorship group that can be influenced. If you're part of a religious group who makes recommendations against certain pieces of media, that's fine if you want to follow your group, but those classifications should not have any bearing on the rest of society outside of that group. And finally, governments should have no business declaring what is and isn't blasphemy - everything is blasphemous to someone, and it could never be fully inclusive to all belief systems.

The rating system was a bad compromise engineered by a right wing pig named Jack Valenti. But the reason for it was that Congress was sniffing around some kind of official government censorship. Jesse Helms having the final say over what movies we could see, would have been much worse.

But there is no censorship of media being suggested here.

Simply a warning at the start of the movie to say “If you don’t like that it could be considered blasphemous, then don’t watch it” same for your kids or whatever.

This may seem a bit different, but it’s the only example I can think of to explain my view. I’m into True Crime podcasts, but often, if the podcast includes crimes against children, there will be special warnings ahead of every episode. Simply because it upsets a lot of people and they don’t want to hear it.

I hold the view that wether you agree or not with another persons views, there is no need to be offensive.

Adding a letter in front of a movie that says “this may be offensive to anyone with the well known religious beliefs” hurts nobody.

I don’t know about him but it doesn’t change what I originally said.

Billions of people are religious, if they were all so problematic, the world would not function as it does now.

The reality is most people are quietly following their religion alone at home. Some crazy guy is gonna be louder and more on TV, but that doesn’t mean he represents all.

It’s really funny when you look at “leftist” Americans for example. They say they didn’t vote for Trump so don’t judge them for his actions, but they ignore that no religious people got to vote for any of those radical and loud few in a position of power either.

You dismissed a highly ranked and influential religious leader because you didn't agree with the take. This isn't a crank, but someone who had a large congregation and was influential in one of the larger religious organizations in the USA. It goes back to my argument of defining blasphemy. If a major pastor says something is is blasphemous, did that require a warning?

I am not in USA. I don’t know about him, and nobody I know knows of him. He isn’t Jesus. He is nobody as far as I know, and religious text does not talk about whatever rich man in a rich country is trending at the moment.

It may seem problematic to you specifically that someone around you is popular and spreading hate, but if you look a bit further around the world, he isn’t anything. Most religious people overall don’t know about him, especially when you consider that there are many religions besides Christianity too.

So only Jesus can define blasphemy?

D - death
S - sunsnu
K - the klan
R - Elon would like to a bit too much
/ >18 - trump would like to a bit too much