PANTHER -> Site news -> Musings on Dr Rowan Williams' lecture on religious offence (Part One)
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 11 December 2010, 02:46 PM
  Fisking is the exact word.  While it is fitting for an Archbishop in a Church that believes God is Love to think the best of everyone, Dr Williams' refusal to face squarely the capacity of religion for evil  and that its opponents are on the side of the good guys is flatly dishonest. _________________________________________________________________________________________________  Essentially, I think, Dr Williams attempts to square the circle by presenting religious belief as good and religious believers as innocents who need to be protected from those  non-believers who claim their right to abuse and blaspheme in isolation from both societal realities and moral imperatives.  It's a very, very intelligent attempt so to do, but it fails (of course) on its underlying proposition.  While Dr Williams is correct in saying that some insult is childish, like scrawling on the Mona Lisa,  this debate would not be taking place in this society if all religious people were sweet and kind and good and they would not be insulted and abused if they were all sweet and kind and good.  The operative word there is 'all'.  Those religious people who are sweet and kind and good get caught in the cross-fire, like civilians injured in a war.   Certainly Dr Williams makes the point that some beliefs are  repugnant to, at odds with liberal society, but he does not examine what that means. This is a post in two parts because the software cannot cope with single posts the length this one would be Archbishop's lecture - Religious Hatred and Religious Offence
Tuesday 29 January 2008 The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams presented the James Callaghan Memorial lecture entitled "Religious Hatred and Religious Offence". In his lecture Dr Williams outlined the problems with the present blasphemy laws, and also looks at the problems that society could face without any protection from religious offence. The question of whether and how a society should defend religious belief against attack, 'defamation' or abuse has become more and more current in recent years and even months. 
***Indeed
The creation of a criminal offence under British law of incitement to religious hatred provoked bitter and sustained controversy; anxiety was expressed on the one hand by committed secularists who feared some kind of limitation on the freedom to criticise or satirise religious belief in general, and on the other by Christians who were apprehensive that the legislation might be used to restrain the preaching of Christianity as unequivocally true and to prohibit any public statement that questioned the validity of other faiths.  ***Religious people too opposed the Bill on the grounds of limitation of the freedom to criticize or satirize  Both suspected, not without reason, that the main motor of the legislation was a wish to respond to the frequently expressed complaint that existing blasphemy laws in the United Kingdom did not adequately protect all non-Christian faiths.
***One in particular And while this is in fact a debateable (sic) reading of the blasphemy laws in the light of what the courts have said in the twentieth century,
***I missed the bits where the courts protected non-Christian faiths under the blasphemy act.
there was undoubtedly a strong perception
***Among whom?
that Muslims suffered relative disadvantage
***That one in particular
and an equally strong political resolve to minimise the sense of exclusion felt by many British Muslims in this regard. 
***Then why not extend the blasphemy law to non-Christian faiths? But this reinforced the anxieties of those who believed that disproportionate attention was being given to a hyper-sensitive minority: surely – it was argued – those whose beliefs were at odds with those of the majority in a basically liberal society could not claim immunity from public criticism.
***It was.  The debate revived many of the themes that had been around in 1989 and 1990 in the wake of the tumult over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and the fatwa of the Ayatollah Khomeini against the author.  It was further complicated by the publication in Denmark of cartoons that were widely seen as insulting to Islam and by the very different decisions taken by publishers internationally as to whether they should be reproduced.  This fierce conflict renewed the unease (to put it no more strongly) about free expression being 'held hostage' by the sensitivities of a particular group in such a way that the basis of liberal society could be compromised.
***Which appears underneath it all, Archbishop, to be what you are advocating.  We shall see. And the application of blasphemy laws in other contexts did nothing to help.  A succession of cases in rural Pakistan involving the use of blasphemy laws to intimidate local Christian communities drew international attention a couple of years ago when local tensions overflowed into rioting and violence against Christian minorities; and towards the end of last year, the imprisonment of a British woman in Sudan under local blasphemy laws on what was generally recognised as a preposterous charge provided further ammunition to those who were most concerned about the possibilities of abuse and moral/legal blackmail in laws to do with religious sensitivities.  Last week's story from Afghanistan of a death sentence being passed on a journalist deemed to have offended Islam again added fuel to the fire.
***Not a lot of reassurance there that Muslims would be parsimonious in their application of any blasphemy law applying to them. The announcement in January of a consultation on the abolition of the offence of blasphemy in English law was a predictable step towards a rationalising of the existing legal position;
****That was always the alternative, yes.  Negating the case for the RHB so far here presented but it leaves open a number of questions about the nature and the significance of offence to religious belief and the ground for legal restraint ***A religion is a set of propositions about the world and the people in it.  Ground between the upper and lower mill-stones of reality, these may be the most awful nonsense, contain some element of truth, be true.  As some kind of a Marxist who inhabits libertarian circles of the Net, 'some kind of', being believing that there are valid elements in Marxist thought, I regularly come across those to whom the whole of Marxism represents ultimate evil.  I do not swoon and seek out a solicitor.  Before Dr Williams moves on to the 'Muslims are the new Jews' argument,  that is not the parallel.  The parallel is with Marxism.  What one might call 'Marxophobia' has the same roots in reality as 'Islamophobia', those being the conduct of Marxist nations and Marxists: the observable.  – as also the broader and vexing question of what a society might properly expect morally speaking of its citizens in regard to religious belief and practice. 
***What is vexing?  You have a religion?  Practise it.  Do not attempt to inflict its tenets on those who do not share it.  If it demands you do so, for instance by burning heretics, then you may not practise that element thereof.  That is vexing.  Indeed someone once commented British society demands Muslims stop being Muslims. So far as inflicting the wilder tenets of Islam on society as a whole goes, that is true.  It is the price of living in a plural society.  It is of course not only some Muslims who fail to grok. I think what is actually meant is what morally speaking society might properly expect of unbelievers. In what follows, I shall concentrate on this borderland between the legal and the moral, in the hope of clarifying a little the social meanings of anti-religious language or behaviour.  I do so in the consciousness that we have just marked marking Holocaust Memorial Day: there is a sense in which the foundational form of religious hatred and religious offence in our culture has been and remains anti-Semitism.  Its history in Europe shows how the slippage can occur from abusive words and images to assumptions about the dangers posed by a community stigmatised as perpetual outsiders to actions designed to remove them for good.  The lethal mixture of a Christian tradition of anti-Jewish polemic and routine humiliation – interspersed with murderous outbreaks of popular violence – and a post-Christian, pseudo-scientific philosophy of race illustrates how religious hatred can be generated by both intra-religious and secular forces; one of the most demanding aspects of trying to make sense of this set of problems around religious offence is the clarifying of where the border lies between criticism and contempt and between contempt and violence.  The history of anti-Semitism does not suggest that we shall find a comfortingly clear answer.
***Or possibly it is irrelevant. As Dr Williams rightly remarks, there were two strands, racial and religious.  In both cases these were realities that existed only in the heads of the anti-Semites.  Someone whose position is that, because some Jews were gung-ho for the execution of another Jew, all Jews are responsible for that execution is of course raving mad.   The objections to some Muslims are rooted in the observable realities of life in Islamic states and their words and deeds in this country. Therefore...No distinction is made between valid criticism and invalid or fact and delusion.  Criticism of, contempt for Jews or any other sub-section of the species on the basis of delusion must be distinguished from criticism of, contempt for some Muslims or any other sub-section of a heterogenous group of the species on the basis they uphold, for instance, the beating of a disobedient wife.  As a Christian priest, Dr Williams must presumably hold all contempt wrong.  Others of us do not.  It would be interesting to learn Dr Williams' view of the Nazis.  Clearly they are abhorrent in this life but are they damned or forgiven in the next?  I despise Nick Griffin.  That doesn't mean I'm about to physically assault him.  I despise little Anjem.  I'm not about to physically assault him, either.  The words of both voice not just an insult but a threat to me, my family, everything that matters to me. The borders here seem to me on the contrary comfortingly clear.  In the abominable but fortunately extremely unlikely event that either gained political power, he would carry out his threats, use force against me and my family.  It would then be necessary to retaliate with force. These may be more appropriate areas for reflection than worrying that we secularists and atheists are at risk of becoming the new Nazis. But to return to the broader issue: as David Nash has pointed out in his recent and comprehensive, if rather disjointed, survey (Blasphemy in the Christian World.  A History, esp, pp.25-34), recent discussion has been pulled in sharply contradictory directions.  The liberal concern for the rights of minorities has been in tension with the liberal commitment to free speech.  Nash quotes David Lawton, who wrote a study of blasphemy in 1993, saying in 2002 that 'laws intended to protect minorities would curtail freedom in the name of multiculturalism' (Nash, p.34).  And what has been in evidence recently has been a hardening of attitudes on both sides of the debate, with more and more aggressive statements of the overwhelming claims of universal and non-negotiable liberties and more and more heated and sometimes violent assertions of the right of religious groups not to be publicly insulted or traduced.  It is a dramatic instance of the way in which a discourse focused on rights can lead us into unmanageable conflicts if it is isolated from other considerations about the foundations of law; but that is something I shall come back to later.  As things stand, the right to religious freedom, that is, to adopt and practice whatever religious system you choose, is axiomatic in all Western conceptions of human rights, and is indeed given a very clearly privileged place in European Human Rights legislation as trumping other considerations in situations of conflicts of right.  But the same principle of freedom to believe what you choose dictates the right to hold and express views critical of or hostile to any or every religious system.
***So kindly remove yourselves from my air-space.  In legal terms, there is also the tangle of issues around how the law recognises 'group rights', the claims of a community rather than just an individual to sustain its own convictions and practices – a much-controverted area, as it raises questions about how we assess the compatibility of a community's practices with the rights otherwise recognised in all citizens.
***On no account mention the word 'women'. A Muslim woman has the same rights as every other woman.  She may choose to obey those Muslims who do not recognize that but they have no right to coerce her.  Broadening the view still further, we need also to acknowledge that the last couple of decades have witnessed a sharp rise in awareness of the potential seriousness of 'offence' in general.  Legislation against racist language and behaviour became a model for identifying varieties of harassment and discrimination in the workplace and in the public arena of comment and discussion; pressure has increased for what might be called an 'isomorphic' approach in law to any act or form of words that could be interpreted as stigmatising others or demeaning their human dignity – hence the 'Single Equality' legislation we have seen developed and debated lately.  Conservative Christian activists (along with some other religious voices) have expressed their concern about how this could impact on any public statement of traditional Christian sexual morality or any policy designed to guarantee that such morality should be observed in overtly Christian institutions; and while some of this argument is frankly alarmist, there is understandable concern among those who are responsible for Anglican and Roman Catholic Church schools, for example, about their freedom to require certain standards of candidates for employment.  Behind some of the worries over the idea of religious offence lie deeper worries about the 'victim culture' – a sense that we are moving into an atmosphere where every citizen is encouraged to see himself or herself as constantly vulnerable to being undermined by others, where dignity has to be constantly secured by the threat of litigation.
****We are. 
But before exploring this further, we should also note the way in which, in the modern period, legislation about blasphemy or religious offence has been defended from the point of view of public order.  This was the position taken by legal authority in declining to prosecute the BBC over the broadcasting of Jerry Springer: the Opera under the blasphemy laws; the criterion of risk to public order was defined as the central issue, and it was determined that such a risk was insufficiently high to justify legal action.  As many have pointed out, the English law of blasphemy has its origins in an era where the criticism of religion was tantamount to a criticism of legal order itself.  Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice in the late seventeenth century, famously declared in 1675 that an attack on religion constituted a threat to 'dissolve all those obligations whereby civil societies are preserved' (see G.D. Nokes, A History of the Crime of Blasphemy, 1928, p.48, Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy, 1990, p.23, and Nash, op.cit., pp.160ff.).  But even when this strong association between religious belief and the very notion of civil obligation had largely disappeared, there remained a clear sense that attack on religious belief could be productive of such a level of public disorder that a prosecution would be justified.
***Translation: Christians would not riot.  Muslims would Last year's decision of the Administrative Court in R v the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court spelled this out carefully, distinguishing between threats to society in general and perceived offence, however serious, to personal beliefs, and concluded, interestingly, that offence was not as such an infringement the right to believe and practice (sic) religious faith. 
***'debateable', 'practice'?  Cantuar, there is someone in your office who cannot spell.  I digress... From all this, it emerges fairly clearly that the existing blasphemy law, in setting the criterion of threat to public disorder very high, makes it impossible to pursue any legal action exclusively on the grounds of perceived offence; and the 2006 legislation which defines the crime of inciting religious hatred attempts to bind offence to criminal intent, the desire to generate active menace towards a group with certain convictions such that their civil liberties might be at risk.  In other words, whatever the anxieties of some, religious offence is not being defined simply as anything that a person or group happens to find offensive.  The abolition of the common law offence of blasphemy, it seems, would not substantially alter the extent of the protection afforded to religious communities and individuals; nor does the new legislation offer an unlimited charter for the hypersensitive.  However, this leaves some serious issues still open.  In what way precisely can we fix the point at which offence affects the civil liberties of religious believers?
***It doesn't. (Pursued below.)  You've just said it doesn't.   How clearly can we distinguish an intention to refute or belittle religious convictions from an intention to threaten people who hold them?
****Very clearly.  Just keep your  beliefs out of lives of people who do not hold them.  If you do not, you may justly consider yourself 'threatened', because you are an aggressor. Does the right to free expression of 'offensive' sentiments have the same moral quality as the right to belief itself?
***Yes.  That is an utterly biased question, Archbishop, grounded in the proposition that what is believed must have virtue.   Julian Rivers notes in a recent (2007) guest editorial for Religion and Human Rights (2:2007, pp.113-118) that the apparently attractive idea of an offence of 'defamation of religion' is less specifically helpful than might at first appear: defamation is indeed what lies behind any legitimation of discriminatory behaviour, but it proves difficult to see it as in itself a violation of human rights, isolated from practices of discrimination, threat or active hostility.  In respect of some of these questions, as far as the law is concerned, we shall have to see how the courts respond; but I shall argue that there are certain considerations, not all that widely discussed, which ought to affect the way the law is seen and, more importantly, ought to pose some questions to too simplistic a liberal approach in this area. Briefly, my points have to do with two aspects of the question.  The first is the way in which discussion of these matters has so often been conducted in complete abstraction from considerations of what is socially desirable or constructive;
****Oh, has it?
What is socially desirable and constructive is that every perspective can be voiced - preferably calmly.  What goes unconsidered is that freedom of speech does not mean others have to listen, may not say, "Shut up!" or "Turn the volume down!", may not refuse to listen.  These are interactions between equals.  To use coercion to silence someone, whether physical force, the threat of physical force or the law, is the ultimate expression of lack of the 'respect' people so often twitter about, of contempt for the individual supposedly so precious.  If you have something to say, it is important to you.  Whether it is important to anyone else, others will judge.  It may be the biggest load of unpleasant hooey ever uttered.  Nonetheless, you have the right to express your self, your being, what you think, what you feel, what you are. Alternatively, how about cutting out people's tongues?   That people who feel they are being or threatened by being silenced get tetchy about is not addressed.  The level of civility of a debate is not helped by the starting-point of one of the participants being 'if you don't shut up, we'll have to make you'. the second, related to the first in obvious ways, is the isolation of the discussion from the realities of cultural and political power in various contexts in our world. On the first, Richard Webster, in his immensely intelligent and independent essay on the Rushdie affair, observes that absolute freedom of speech is not in fact either a possible or a desirable state of political affairs.  The fact is that 'in the real political world which we all perforce inhabit, words do wound, insults do hurt, and abuse – especially extreme and obscene abuse – does provoke both anger and violence'
(Webster, p.129).
***We weren't talking about personal abuse, at any rate not of anyone alive, but of  insult to ideas.  In this arena it is necessary to be exact, to distinguish between ideas and those who hold them.  Alas, the capacity to hold some ideas marks the holder as off the edge and unpleasantly so.  That is (perhaps) the precise nature of the circle the Archbishop attempts to square. An abstract discussion of free speech, in which, to quote Webster again, no distinction is made 'between the freedom to impart information and the freedom to insult' (ibid.), is in effect a strategy which isolates the would-be 'blasphemer' from the actual historical and interpersonal constraints which secure a reasonable level of civility in human society (after all, we do restrain freedom of speech by laws about libel and slander). 
***But should we?  Such laws protect corruption by protecting power.
So now rudeness is or should be actionable? 
There  are points here which are being evaded.  We're not talking about Buddha or Jesus in the cases you cite of Muslim outrage.  The best that can be said of Mohammed is that he was a general, a thoughtful man, and as a man of his time, like Caesar, he had no problem with slavery.  The worst is very much worse.  The most militant anti-religious are not running around accusing Jesus of inflicting sadistic punishments (his self-styled priests, yes).  This society generally associates non-violence with holiness.  I do not think I have to tell the Archbishop the origin of that.  To the 97% of the nation who do not subscribe to the Islamic revelation Mohammed is the guy who wrote the book.  The book is not a particularly pleasant one so far as it concerns the rest of us.  The people who subscribe to the more unpleasant parts of the Qu'ran (author Mohammed) inflict mental and physical pain and death on other human beings.  That is 'uncivil'.
Are we to refrain from comment because God supposedly commands the mental and physical pain and death of other human beings? There is underlying these words the proposition abuse comes out of thin air.  It does not.   It gets worse.   Muslims did not turn out, "Not in Islam's name!" to protest against the torture and murder of the Islamic Revolution but rather in the name of the perpetrator of those evils. What visibly mobilizes such British Muslims as are mobilized by anything is  not the infliction of physical pain on others, but the infliction of mental pain on themselves.  That is not impressive.  Again, I hardly think I have to inform Cantuar about 'sins of omission', 'we have left undone that which we ought to have done' - or else we don't think we ought to have done it.   There are other aspects, the sex-life of the historical Mohammed, for instance, which was busy.  The man had not taken a vow of chastity.  This society is not impressed by Mohammed.  If others wish to take him as an exemplar, that is their affair, but they should not demand others do the same.  Let us therefore talk about attacks on Jesus.  They cannot hurt Jesus, whether dead or reigning in heaven.  They can and do hurt those who believe in him.  They are meant to hurt those who perpetrate evil in his name, as attacks on Mohammed are meant to hurt those who perpetrate evil in his name.  Rationally, one may say that all such attacks, being aimed at dead people, are futile and should be more carefully targeted: they should be aimed directly at the religious people who propagate contempt and they should not be in any way attenuated. The creation of avoidable resentment, never mind avoidable suffering, does not seem like a positive good for any social unit; and the assertion of an unlimited freedom to create such resentment does little to recommend 'liberal' values and tends rather to strengthen the suspicion that they are a poor basis for social morality and cohesion.
That is not a fair conclusion, but it is equally not a surprising one, given the way the argument has gone
****If your version of your religion is disgusting, I expect you will really 'resent' people going around saying so.  Oh, what a poor basis for social morality is rejection of the disgusting.  It's that circle again.  And see above: if you are being carpet-bombed you may rightly feel resentment, but that is not an argument against taking apart the texts themselves, which may equally cause pain. (and Webster – who is not a religious believer of any kind – offers some extraordinary examples of 'liberal' aggression and ignorant bigotry in his account of the reactions in 1989 and 1990 to the furore over the fatwa against Rushdie). 
****Impossible not to laugh.  Some screaming raving lunatic demands the death of one man for having written a book  and numerous other screaming raving lunatics take to the streets throughout the world to echo that demand - and what a repulsive sight is a screaming mindless baying murdering mob descending on a single individual - no criticism of this repulsive behaviour here offered - and 'liberals' alone  are reproached for having responded  - imperfectly. I see no suggestion in this lecture that those who feel insulted should be expected to respond in a civil manner and indeed the assumption they will not and so pose the threat of civil disorder.  The rest of us must therefore bite our tongues and be sure not to upset the poor dears.  That is a pragmatist's perspective, but I do not think it has much else going for it. What this analysis obliges us to think about is some of the things which much of the classical liberal case for freedom to offend takes uncritically for granted.  It assumes, for example, that any pain caused by offensive language or behaviour is so superficial as not to be significant; if you feel hurt, wounded, by abuse, it is a mark of undue or even immature sensitivity ('Grow up!' 'Get used to it').
******Hmm.  'Sticks and stones may break my bones/But words will never hurt me.'  It is, I think, a fundamental of this society that mental pain is considered insignificant in comparison to physical pain.  There is the belief   humans can cope with their feelings and overcome the urge to break someone's neck. That is rather important as a principle underlying criminal law and the concept of diminished responsibility - really, you do not have to murder someone, you are not compelled.  When looking at the broader picture, that principle, and so individual responsibility is being weakened and to say aggrieved religious persons should not have to get over it very much belongs in the context of a society in which aggrieved any other kind of persons are not expected to get over it.  There is the assumption people are used to the existence around them of people with opposing views, and that people who firmly believe one thing are likely to hold that people who firmly believe its opposite are talking nonsense and pernicious nonsense at that.  There is the assumption people accept the right of others to diametrically opposing views.  Lastly, from a mystical perspective, it is entertaining to hear a clergyman stalwartly uphold the ego, which in other contexts he might well argue is a thing people can do without.  Furthermore, to pick up a regular defence of the admissibility of anti-religious abuse, it is commonly said that since a religious believer chooses to adopt a certain set of beliefs, he or she is responsible for the consequences, which may, as every believer well knows, include strong disagreement or even repugnance from others.  ***While the Bible and Qu'ran, chunks of both of which are defamation, diminution, contempt for large numbers of humans, remain freely available, while that defamation, diminution and contempt are freely expressed, there is a case for suppressing defamation and diminution of and contempt for the defamers, diminishers and despisers?
 
But this assimilation of belief to a plain matter of conscious individual choice does not square with the way in which many believers understand or experience their commitments.
***  To be  human is to be broadly responsible for the content of your mind and if that content leads you to run about Hyde Park yelping 'Death to Rushdie', people are not going to be impressed.  For some – and this is especially true for believers from outside the European or North Atlantic setting – religious belief and practice is a marker of shared identity, accepted not as a matter of individual choice but as a given to which allegiance is due in virtue of the intrinsic claims of the sacred.
***Ah, that old thing.  Hmm.  Here is a snippet of conversation between two people staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.
"Oh you coarse, insensitive and unimaginative brute, you, how can mock the sacred?"
"What's sacred about it?"
"It's my religion.  It's God, man!"
"I don't find that very helpful." There is one definition of sacred that does not include reference to religion and that is sacrosanct, which turns out to mean inviolable.  The other definitions do not include a sense of the inviolable, that which should not be desecrated.  Pantheists do the sacred in a big way, awe, reverence, the numinous, that's our bag.  (Not all pantheists, despite the word, see Nature as the face of God but the face of the universe is quite big enough.)  There is that that shouldn't be defiled because it is perfect, because it embodies love or well-something.  How can I put this?  To bulldoze Canterbury Cathedral would be appalling.  To bulldoze a shack might not seem equivalent but if it is a loved shack, a shack into which someone has put his or her life, it is equally appalling.  Supposing a child spent hours and hours and hours making something for Mum, perhaps a not terribly successful piece of pottery, or a cake sagging rather desperately in the midde, for Mum to mock it when it is made with so much love is awful.  'Darling, it's wonderful, because you made it for me.'  Yep.     Umm, none of this embodies a lack of sensitivity or imagination.  What is being violated in the case of religious abuse?  Hardly God.  Whatever God might be, the consensus, I think, is that a cartoon isn't going to cause it to faint.  The image of Mohammed as the Perfect Man is not one, as above, most people readily subscribe to and in any case, being safely dead, he is beyond violation. There is the insoluble issue - another circle that cannot be squared - that the West does not find anything much it recognizes as holy in Mohammed or in the social policies of Islamic nations (and in our small wired world the twittering that Muslim fascist excess isn't real Islam comes up hard against Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia - aren't they real Islam, either?) and this is not just a Christian paradigm but one born of familiarity with Gandhi or Gautama.  The debate needs to get away from this notion that the - numinous is perhaps the best word, the numinous, that which is untouchable and beyond violation, is violated by abuse of God or religious personages. To urinate on the altar of Westminster Abbey would be gross vandalism or just gross but to say it violates Jesus is daft.  What is being violated by religious abuse is people, their sense of who they are. Now, it is laudable that a good Christian clucks and says this cannot be right, but unfortunately he is wrong.  People can and do and have to get over it because all of us, whatever our views, whatever our characters, have to accept in a free and plural society that some people think our views and characters perverse and perhaps evil because people have diametrically opposed views on everything.  Some people's heroes are other people's villains.  Not everyone is going to like us.  Bound up with this is the assumption that individuals have a fairly sturdy sense of who they are.  Being human, most of us squeak when insulted, whether the insult is to our deepest convictions or to our sense of fashion. Well, I like it.  Further, the more our feathers are ruffled, the less likely or at least the less quickly we are to take on board what has been said, the less inclined to examine it for its truth quotient.  Rationally, abuse is counter-productive.   Being disliked, even being thought evil,  is not an infringement of anyone's civil liberties.  Deeds infringe civil liberties. See above comments about Griffin and Chowdhury.  Non-believers do not similarly pose a threat to believers.  Some believers do, however, pose a threat to non-believers.  I hope the Muslim engineering student who told Professor Colquhoun at UCL that he would be executed when Islam came to power is now famous.  Prof's response was that he hoped he had time to finish his book first.  Translation: nutter.  Once upon a time, most people in this country who had not made an active choice to define themselves as something else defined themselves as CofE.  It didn't necessarily mean regular church-going or indeed familiarity with the 39 articles, but it probably did mean a common knowledge of the hymnal, of the order of service of the BCP, of Jesus' teachings.  If you are born and brought up in a particular frame of reference, that is how you define yourself unless you decide to define yourself differently.  I am not sure it is in itself any big deal.  A citizen of the Soviet Union would have defined himself as a Marxist.  The big deal lies in whether you are free to define yourself otherwise.  We may disagree; but I do not think we have the moral right to assume that this perspective can be simply disregarded.
***Why not? 
Both the dismissal of the possibility of actual mental suffering
***Who is dismissing the possibility of actual mental pain?  The heartbroken guy whose wife has just left him?  Is there a human who has not experienced actual mental hurt?  Its nature, its quality and above all what you do with it are the issues. and the assimilation of belief to a matter of choice reflect a worryingly narrow set of models for the human psyche – ***a model of the human psyche in which people bear no responsibility for their thought is plain worrying.  I don't actually think that's what Dr Williams is saying.  What I do think he is saying is something like due to the supposed intrinsic claims of the sacred - I think that means the need to believe in God - one naturally believes in the dominant religion of one's culture or perhaps more exactly attaches to oneself its name.  You see yourself as a Catholic because  you were brought up as a Catholic, all your family are Catholic, indeed most of your country are Catholic, and you've never felt drawn to atheism. Catholic is the word you use to define your religious sentiments.  You are Catholic.  I am Labour.  I understand perfectly well that - that  the idea is larger than the dogma. Does that express it?  I also understand that as the explanation for the very wide range of views expressed by so-called 'cradle Catholics' and that identification of a label with a particular belief may be dangerously misleading. "But you use artificial contraception. You can't be a Catholic." is a view many Western at least Catholics would find diverting. 
A particular belief has to be a matter of choice for which you and you alone are responsible or else indeed that is a devastating view of the human psyche, a group mind, a diminishing of what it is to be human. 
or, in plainer English, a lack of imagination. Webster hints more than once that such a lack of imagination is an ironic backdrop for the arguments of writers or dramatists defending the right to present religious subjects offensively. 
***This again evades the point that 'religious subjects' may represent pure evil to the would-be offensive one.
But more significantly, he notes that if this sort of argument is taken for granted, it points to a coarsening of general sensibility: in the potent image he takes from some remarks by Anthony Lejeune, we are getting into the habit of 'burning your enemy's flag' – belittling symbols which other human beings have loved and even died for (ibid.,134). 
***As above.  The fact that human beings have loved and died for something doesn't make it good.  We need to be aware of the implicit cruelty and the dehumanising potential of such assumptions.
***And if the religious are the dehumanisers? It is one thing to deny a sacred point of reference for one's own moral or social policies; it is another to refuse to entertain – or imagine – what it might be like for someone else to experience the world differently. 
***But that is precisely what you are doing.  Others may experience a sense of desecration, a sense of obscenity at the conduct of the religious.  Cf Perry de Havilland's 'homicidal rage' on watching a video of a stoning.    Spectres of colonialism, 'Orientalism', and, once again, anti-Semitism are roused when this insensibility to the otherness of the religious other goes unquestioned.
****There is no 'otherness'.  It is a false dichotomy.   The religious exhibit the same gamut of human behaviour as the irreligious.     And behind this is the nagging problem of what happens to a culture in which, systematically, nothing is sacred
***As above.  A culture in which nothing is sacrosanct is not synonymous with one in which religion is sacrosanct. We may have moved on from the confidence of Chief Justice Hale in claiming that civil loyalty of any kind had to be built on religious foundations; but the uncomfortable truth is that a desacralised world is not, as some fondly believe, a world without violence, but a world in which there can be no ultimate agreement about the worth of human or other beings. 
***And  the fondness of the religious for considering female and gay human beings of inferior worth? There may be a strong, even practically unbreakable consensus about the wrongness of torturing prisoners or raping children; but there will be no very clear sense of what, if anything, beyond the dignity of an individual is being 'violated' in such cases.
******This is nonsense, particularly with reference to the contempt the religious themselves display for individual sovereignty, their fondness for assuming rights over, ownership of others. Talking of raping children, how about Catholic child abuse or Muslim child-marriages?  There is perhaps a fantasy here that all religious persons are decent Anglicans. Even the Catholic Catechism, and I cannot off-hand think of any work more immune to the charge it is the work of secularists and atheists, acknowledges (2125) that '"Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of God and of religion."   This is not to make the facile claim that morality needs religion,
****Isn't it?  It may in fact contain a liberal dose of one notion on which we agree, though our terminology is different,  that morality requires, as you would put it Christianity and as I put it love. 
only to note that a morality without the sacred is bound to work differently. 
***History and present both abundantly show religion in itself to be a poor guarantor of morality.  A morality without the heart, without empathy, is no morality at all, only a series of orders.  Whether the sin is real e.g. theft or imaginary, e.g. a female driving a car, there is no love in the laws of Islamic states, as love is absent from the laws of other fascist nations.  But that of course is high on the list of 'things that cannot possibly be said'. 
​PANTHER -> Site news -> Musings on Dr Rowan Williams' lecture on religious offence (Part Two)
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 11 December 2010, 02:47 PM
  And a post-religious morality that has simply lost any imaginative understanding of what the sacred once meant is dangerously impoverished.  Many years ago, I recall a British novelist – again a committedly non-religious person – saying that while she had no belief in God she needed something like a concept of blasphemy to express her sense of a violated order when confronted by gross military extravagance or environmental exploitation. The liberal apologist might reasonably come back at this point to object that, while the point may be well taken about coarsened sensibility or even about the inappropriateness of a simplistic choice model for religious allegiance, the issue about 'hurt' needs very careful handling.  No doubt there were profound and genuine feelings of hurt among white Americans in the South during the Civil Rights campaigns of the sixties: not everyone who accepted the appalling conventions of the day was personally wicked, deserving, so to speak, to have their feelings disregarded; yet without the shock of the campaign, with its cost in terms of personal upset, change would not have occurred.  The same arguments are – painfully close to home - often at work in debates in the Church about the ministry of women or the acceptance of homosexual people.  In arguments about what is true or what is good, the feelings of the other can't determine what is said.  And if I believe that religion in general or some religion in particular is actually deplorable or destructive, I must insist upon my liberty to say so, whether or not it causes pain.  It is, ironically, precisely the argument that many religious people would themselves use in claiming the liberty to state, for example, that abortion or euthanasia is morally unacceptable, even though realising that such a statement would cause real pain to some; it is a liberty not, for some reason, readily acknowledged by some vocal advocates of other kinds of free speech. The appeal to the moral imperatives of truthtelling for the sake of justice is a fair point so far as it goes, but there are still questions being begged; and to see what those questions are will take us on to the issue of power in this context.  The simplest response to the defence in term of the requirements of abstract justice is to recall the difference between critique and abuse: it is one thing to say that someone may be deeply and dangerously wrong, even to say it with anger, and another to say or imply that if someone is wrong it is because they are infantile, wilfully blind or perverse.
***What then?  They are deeply and dangerously wrong because they are emotionally mature and rational?  There are people who are infantile, wilfully blind and perverse. Some are religious.  Others are not.  It is the state of the planet that informs us of their existence.  A polemical strategy that refuses from the start to accept that anyone could have reasons for thinking differently is a poor basis for civil disagreement (in both the wider and narrower sense of the adjective); it is a way of denying the other a hearing.
***Yes, there is the refusal from the start to accept that Rushdie or the cartoonists would have had reason for thinking differently. And this at last brings us to how power is at work in all this.  The classical free speech arguments were largely formulated against a background of resistance to a dominant culture administered by non-accountable authorities: blasphemy functioned as one form of protest against tyranny, and the hagiography of militant anti-religious prophets presents, fairly enough, a picture of brave individuals or small groups standing up to the consolidated power of one or another kind of religious establishment (Nash's book gives ample illustration of this).  The emotional colouring of anti-religious polemic is still rather Voltairean – certainly part of the tribal memory of a courageous and persecuted minority. And that is why the instinctive reaction of most bien-pensant commentators, of the right as much as the left these days, when issues of religious offence are being discussed, is to revert to the tribal memory: religion is a powerful and mostly malign presence, at the very least a presence unwelcome in the public sphere, which needs to be kept in its place so that the hard-won triumphs of Enlightenment are not jeopardised.  But what is harder to cope with is a situation in which this kind of folkloric, David-and-Goliath pattern is not really applicable. 
***Are you sure of that?  Religious persons are trying to inflict their unsubstantiated and unprovable beliefs on the rest of us, who will have no come-back, because these are the Word of God. Yet again, we should remember some of the history of anti-Semitism. 
***No, we shouldn't.  Yet again, it is the not the disgusting fantasies of the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that inspire hostility, it is the disgusting realities of the stoning of women and a mob baying for the blood of one man.  Perhaps Christians too have their 'tribal memory', that of the fate of the religious in Marxist countries.  I really do not think either I or Professor Dawkins is a new Stalin. Some of the passionate polemic against Jewish people in the New Testament reflects a situation in which Christian groups were still small and vulnerable over against an entrenched religio-political establishment; but the language is repeated and intensified when the Church is no longer a minority and when Jews have become more vulnerable than ever.  It is part of the pathology of anti-Semitism (as of other irrational group prejudices) that it needs to work with a myth of an apparent minority which is in fact secretly powerful and omnipresent.  It is the pattern we see in the workings of the Spanish Inquisition, searching everywhere for Jewish converts who might be backsliding; it is the myth of the Elders of Zion and comparable fantasies of plots for world domination; it is the indiscriminate attribution (not only by certain Muslims) of all the evils of the Western world to an indeterminate 'Zionism'.  A rhetoric shaped by particular circumstances has become so embedded that the actualities of power relations in the real world cannot touch it.  There are many instances where the habit of imagining oneself in terms of victimhood has become so entrenched that even one's own power, felt and exercised, does not alter the mythology. Something of this kind is often going on in discussion about anti-religious polemic in the modern Western world.  Many religious believers will respond with wry amusement to the survival of an eighteenth or nineteenth century rhetoric about the malign influence of religion in the state; even a state like ours with a religious establishment is not exactly a theocratic prison house, if the trend of recent legislation is any sign.  But the issue is rather sharper where the religion in question is not the historic religion of the nation.  In recent years – even more than at the time of the Rushdie controversy – many commentators have fallen into the classic 'anti-Semitic' trap: Islam is perceived worldwide as an organised, coherent and omnipresent danger,
***But that's because it says it's one and acts like one, for instance in the assaults of the Islamic nations on the UN. 
It may be worth again recalling that I come from a tradition with a particularly good line in both mass murder and loud support for foreign psychopaths and pretty good at being perceived worldwide as an organised, coherent and omnipresent danger.  It may conceivably be that I am in some way thus freed to recognize something for what it is. Stripped of the religious camouflage this is basically a re-run of the history of British Marxism and the Labour movement.   and Islam as a local reality in the United Kingdom is seen exclusively through that prism. 
***Not exclusively, but there are Muslim elements who are making life difficult for their fellow-Muslims and in fact whose agenda is to define perception of Islam as exclusively through that prism.  Judaism and Christianity visibly and audibly represent the gamut of religious life, from ultra-orthodox to ultra-liberal; you do not have to be brave to be an ultra-liberal Jew or Christian.  Your co-religionists may heap imprecations on you but they are not going to assault or kill you.  Plain fear is an issue within the Muslim community.  Additionally, Muslims may stay quiet because of group loyalty.  We do not on the whole hear from Muslims who puh-lease just want to get on with their lives and be friendly.  The people we hear most from either represent a trans-national movement which is not anything we want here including renowned knight of the realm Sir Iqbal 'Jamaat-i-Islami' Sacranie or acknowledge the existence of that movement and oppose it, like the Quillam Foundation.  If that is the world you inhabit, then something like The Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons becomes a brave assertion of the right to attack the symbols of an oppressive global hegemony. But the local reality is different.  Webster points out how in 1989/90 Muslim groups in the UK took to a relatively militant response to Rushdie
***You regard running around London yelping "Death to Rushdie!" as 'relatively' militant?  Perhaps you were still in Wales, at any rate not Canterbury.  I was in Hyde Park.  as and when it became clear that the literary and political establishment had nothing to say to their sense that their faith had been publicly and damagingly misrepresented and their sensibilities shaken. 
***What, as I recall, was actually said was that it's fiction, for Pete's sake, not a claim  to be the definitive biography.  As to sensibilities, see above, with particular reference to what's supposed to be holy about this guy?   That it was a total non-meeting of minds, I grant.  For groups like those in West Yorkshire who were at the forefront of militant reaction in Britain, the overwhelming feeling that animated  their protests was that they, as a disadvantaged minority with the most limited access to any sort of public voice, were being left at the mercy of a powerful elite
***Poor little victims.  What were the limitations on their access, please?  Who was demanding they be legally silenced or killed?  .determined to tell them what their faith really amounted to and to remind them that they had to get used to being seen – never mind the realities of their social and economic position here – as essentially the representatives of a foreign and threatening power. 
****If you pick up on the ravings of the leader of a totalitarian foreign power, that would not seem an irrational conclusion.  The same is true of the furore over the Danish cartoons: the Muslim community in Denmark is neither large nor militant, yet the cartoon issue was framed as if these products were a sign of courageous defiance towards a hegemonic power ****  I don't think this distinction can be drawn, not least because of the Muslim concept of the world of Islam.  Was it then unfair and unkind to abuse Stalin because most British Marxists wouldn't have dreamed of mass murder?   Islam, the Roman Catholic Church, Marxism, perhaps even the Anglican Communion are all global forces. Suppose we say that all Catholics venerate what the Pope represents and make a couple of reasonable assumptions about Danish society, namely that the main religion is Protestant and that the Catholic minority tend to the liberal.  Would an attack by Danes on Josef 'intrinsic moral disorder' Ratzinger, apparently a dangerous lunatic who thinks homosexuality as a great a threat as climate change, then be out of order because many Danish Catholics also think the old chap needs to retire? Now I recognise the qualifications that have to be entered at once.  Some anti-Muslim images or words (foolish or insulting as they may be) may well exhibit courage in a world where terrorist violence reaches across every national boundary and intimidation is more and more common; no-one will forget in a hurry the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands. ***There is an imperative to indicate we shall not be intimidated. That rationally the person of Mohammed is not the best target I have discussed.  A person such as Khomeini hits the mark.  It is interesting, if futile, to contemplate the reaction of British Muslims to Rushdie's portrayal of an ayatollah, had he left any character who could be regarded as identifying Mohammed out of the book.  There is also the fact that Rushdie himself, born in India, is a citizen of a global world.  He has said somewhere something to the effect that Islam just wasn't like this when 'e were a lad in Bombay.  It may therefore be said that so far as he was attacking Islam, which mad though it may sound is not far, given that the book is permeated by Sufism, his target was global Islam. Likewise we can't overlook the ways in which offence can be deliberately exaggerated for the purposes of fomenting greater violence (as was the case with the Danish cartoons, where some extremist groups circulated far more offensive images than those that had actually been published).  But what if we exercise a little imagination again?  What Webster describes as the insensitivity of an elite means that those who lack access to the subtleties of the English language, to the means of expressing their opinions in a public forum or to any living sense of being participants in their society know only that one of their most overpoweringly significant sources of identity is being held up to public scorn.  This feeling may be the result of misunderstanding or misinformation, it may even be in some cases linked to a failure or reluctance to take the opportunities that exist to move into a more visible role in the nation's life, but it is real enough and part of a general conviction of being marginal and silenced. It is not a good situation for a democratic society to be in.  The belief becomes entrenched among minorities that the majority in this society have decided to understand you and your faith exclusively in their terms. ***Would you say  revulsion at the stoning of women is understanding Islam exclusively in Christian terms?  Because if you would it would be interesting to know how you define evil and whether you think there are absolutes of good and evil.
OK, suppose I say the terms of this society are not local, are not 'ours', but broadly acceptance of the imperatives of reality.  It may seem a strange thing to say of a society that has just been rudely awakened from a collective financial fantasy.  What reality does is rudely awaken not nudge you gently and hope you'll open at least one eye.  This society does not silence scientists because their findings do not accord with an imaginary cosmology or an imaginary human.  It has been rudely awakened and forced to accept that, male and female, black and white, gay and straight, rich and poor, we are all primarily equally human, there are no rights unique to only one sub-section of the species, and no adult has rights over another, may presume the other at his or disposal, presume to define what the other may be, unless the other has been convicted in a court of law.   This took a very long time and there was great resistance to it from the Christian church, taking into account that there were equally Christians working towards it and to cut a long story short that the whole thing originated in the teachings of Jesus.  Nonetheless, it was not legions of militant atheists who resisted the abolition of slavery or votes for women because there weren't any such legions.  Now we are presented with another religion, equally sure of its untenable propositions, equally sure of its unaccountable authority, equally resistant to the imperatives of reality, these being that others are equal and separate, whether those others are atheists or co-religionists.  Everyone has a right to his or her own mind and to make of the world what he or she will.  It is that that enables Muslims to be Muslims in the West, that that demands they have equal rights but vocal sections of the Muslim community reject the possession by others of that right. 
There is the question of connection.  There are elements in Islam who push the line that they have nothing to learn from the rest of us, not just 'the West', cf. the destruction of the Buddhas by the Taliban.  Islam is the truth.  Everyone else is talking nonsense.  To think that the positions taken by different people in this society are nonsense is different from learning what those positions are.  There are cornerstones in this society which make it what it is today.  One is Jesus and the theology and philosophy of love.  One is the Enlightenment, the sovereignty of the individual and the accountability of power. One is Marxism,  the demand for equality, the questioning of wealth and rejection of rule by the rich.  One is science and the open mind, the insistence on investigation, evidence and falsifiability. Their totality is a society in which there are not only atheists, but just about every conceivable concept of God.  Right now these elements aren't fitting together very well but my contention is that  elements of each generally make up the average modern Brit, whatever his or her origins. From Catholic Poles to Jamaican evangelists to atheists of Hindu origin to Sufi Muslims, most people who have come to this country do not have a problem connecting somewhere with its basic elements.  Former citizens of the Republic of India come from the world's largest democracy and perhaps even more importantly from a nation that is religiously plural.     Enter the T-word: theocracy.  If all law is made by God, if the universe is as defined by God - and if in your view that God, though defined as the Compassionate, the Merciful is not notably loving and forgiving - you are going to have enormous problems in this society. You are going to come up against not only do people make our laws, but we decide which people, against a multiplicity of views on if there is a God at all and on the form and nature of him, her or it, should he, she or it exist, you are going to come up against people to whom the universe is open and its discovery a continuing process.  Perhaps Voltaire's remark in Lettres philosophiques catches it. 'Un Français qui arrive à Londres trouve les choses bien changees en philosophie comme dans tout le reste. Il a laisse le monde plein; il le trouve vide.' (I do know which ees are  acuteees but the character set proferred by the software denies the existence of e acute and e grave.  How cruel is that?)  'A Frenchman who arrives in London finds things are very different, in the realm of philosophy as in everything else.  He has left a complete world and found an empty one.' He has left a world in which everything is fixed, unchallengeable, and entered one in which things are in flux, open to question.  It may be at this point simplistic to say that if you come from a closed Muslim society connecting is going to be very difficult for you.  British Muslims are now in their second, third, fourth generations, have English as their first language, degrees from British universities. Dr Williams'  'but they've only just got here.they don't speak English very well, if at all and they're socially and economically disadvantaged' argument doesn't really hold water, or more exactly perhaps it holds the same amount of water as it does applied to any other vertical stratum of society, including the indigenous population with of course the exception of being relatively newly arrived: there is an educated and articulate top layer, some of whom are actively speaking for and fighting for those at the bottom. There is the question, among the top layer as among the bottom, of outright rejection of all the corner-stones, a refusal to connect.  When people talk of the 'Islamization' of the UK what they mean is not that Allah's flag is imminently going to fly over Downing Street,  but rather the ease with which persons of position, such as on the present evidence Cantuar, will abandon all four of the corner-stones to Muslim sensitivities.  If it makes them feel excluded, it's got to go.  Yes, I have read the  next bit, about which more in a moment!  'And the greatest of these is love.' (Not faith.)  It is not only Muslims who fail to impress.  A clergy who will not constantly re-iterate what are supposedly their most fundamental beliefs, that God is love, that one should love God and one's neighbour as oneself, and do unto others as you would be done by because that is not the concept of religion of some Muslims just possibly deserves far more open derision and mockery than it in fact gets This unfortunate business of doing as you would be done by is fundamental to equal rights.  Linked to it is self-awareness.  I do not tear Tertullian's intricately diseased musings on my fundamental nature from the hands of the stranger sort of Catholic priest, demand their removal from bookshops or libraries, throw them in the fire.   It is, I think, only the interference of the law in these matters that has caused religious persons to consider, as was rightly said, that laws designed to protect them or others may infringe their own liberties, in this case to read and disseminate mad filth that is quite equivalent to Nazi ravings.  I am not the first feminist to muse that the only reason they haven't gassed us is because the human race needs us in order to continue.  If you don't want other people to interfere with your reading-matter, don't interfere with theirs.  One might say also that if you don't want negative comment on the full veil, refrain from negative comment on mini-skirts.  In the case of the bitter controversy in the Sikh community over the play Behzti in 2004, it was clear that many deeply intelligent members of the Sikh community in Britain were torn between the belief that the play would cement in the minds of audiences largely ignorant of the Sikh religion a distorting and negative set of images and the gloomy conviction that violent protest against the play would have exactly the same effect (c.f. Nash, pp. 34-6): very much a no-win situation.  Once again, there is the disconnection between the firm claim of an artistic establishment that protest against oppressive systems is justifiable, even imperative (and Behzti had identified a real and too-often buried concern among Sikh women), and the counter-claim that this kind of representation of a religious culture in front of what was likely to be a fairly religiously illiterate audience would be experienced as a straightforward flexing of the muscles by a hostile, alien and resourceful power.  **It was an alternative perspective.  This is not a society in which only one perspective is allowed a voice. If it were, it would be a totalitarian society.  I have not perceived a rise in 'Sikhophobia'.  There is something very basic here again about a plural society, about the majority of the population in fact not defining Islam as supposedly defined by Rushdie, one man, not forgetting the highly sympathetic Muslim characters and the sensitive portrayal of 'Mahound' wrestling with his doubts (have you read it?).  The conduct of large numbers of Muslims, here and elsewhere in the world, on the other hand may be deemed defining.  The members of the Sikh community who understood that violent protest would be completely unhelpful were spot-on.  The damage done to the image of Islam by the Rushdie affair was not done by Rushdie but by his opponents. The British Muslim legal theorist, Maleiha Malik, invariably a voice of sanity and perception in these matters, has written of the way in which tendentious or positively misleading presentations of religion affect both 'insiders' and 'outsiders': 'Reflecting back to an individual a distorted or demeaning image of themselves will influence not only the perception of outsiders, it also impacts on the self-understanding of "insiders"'('Faith and the State of Jurisprudence', pp. 129-49 in Faith in Law.  Essays in Legal Theory, ed. Peter Oliver, Sionaidh Douglas Scott and Victor Tadros, 2000, p.137). ****But some people are not nice.  If they are not told they are not nice, they continue to be not nice.  If they are told they are not nice, they can change themselves. If their religion demands absence of niceness, it is their problem. Abuse as something that can result in internalising a poor self-perception is a familiar matter, not to be taken lightly.  When we read some of the literature of earlier centuries, we are likely to be taken aback by the casual way in which the disabled are mocked and belittled; some of Shakespeare's scenes remind us that a blind or mentally disturbed person could be seen – even by the most humanly sensitive of all artists – as an occasion for cheap laughs.
***I thought the  'rationale' was not that they were highly humorous in themselves but that they were flawed in the eyes of God who had sent their disability to punish them.
We have on the whole come to recognise that insults directed at people with disabilities are unacceptable,
***The Christian churches have, yes
because the people involved are at a disadvantage, may be liable to internalise what is said, and are likely to lack access to at least some of the more obvious means of articulating and defending a position that would be enjoyed by those likely to be making the dismissive or offensive comments. Similarly, we have left behind the era when it was unproblematic to make fun of other races or nationalities. Most would now acknowledge that offensive and belittling ways of talking about individuals or groups or classes of people presuppose that the object of such talk is absent.
***  See any supposedly 'anti-Zionist' screed in the Guardian.  Historically, I do not think slave-owners or male supremacists were hesitant about telling their slaves or female appendages what they were supposed to be.  Disability should not be mocked because, like gender and skin colour, it is not something an individual can do anything about.  The disabled person may indeed be at a physical disadvantage, a mental disadvantage or both with regard to responding.  But that second  point rather presumes they are present. And if they are absent, they have no voice.
****No: they were not absent and it was the absence of a framework of equal rights and freedom of speech that denied them a voice. They may in some way or another have a chance to react but not, within the same conversation, to interact and set out in that context who they actually are. ***We have been discussing art and literature. By definition  these are public.  By definition also no-one has the opportunity to be within the same conversation, to interact. Any book, drawing, play is presented to the world precisely as the work of one person. Take the Qu'ran...Sorry, but this is irresistible, not least because it is a special case.  This is not, we are told, just one solitary pen-pusher but the Word of God.  As such it may be considered defining, in a way no work of any mere mortal may be.  The women of the world have a chance to react but not within the same conversation, and certainly not to set out who we actually are.  That is the problem.  It is the religious who deem others powerless.  God has spoken.  There can be no argument.  People argue anyway. It's a shock. Should no books exist?  That is not to be alarmist, merely logical.  Every book is someone's take on something, paints a picture someone somewhere may consider inexact and perhaps alarmingly or damagingly so.  Out of sheer rabid curiosity I ask how CofE clergy feel about Susan Howatch's novels centred on the fictional cathedral city of Starbridge depicting the Church of England progressing through the C20th.  Returning to the position of fiction, I do not think these novels have formed people's view of the Church of England while the cavortings of clergy over women and gays have.
If you read many books, you get many people's takes on the world.  There are questions here of whether and for whom the written word can define the real world. 
Undoubtedly books have changed the world.  Apart from the two examples too obvious to mention, there is the Communist Manifesto.  The big one is why. The answer I think is that they meshed or appeared to mesh with people's experience of  and knowledge of the real world.  If the capitalist classes had been Christian gentlemen, if there had been no starvation, no exploitation that did not appal the bosses who set instantly to work to rectify it, no gross displays of opulence, no contempt, Marxism would not have taken off, for all the academic argument about the role of capital.  Similarly, of course, the Bible and the Qu'ran in their day seemed plausible, in some ways progressive even, modelled a world that thinking life in those times recognized and approved.
 
So that the moral question raised by some kinds of claim to unbridled free speech is how far it can license the sort of language that assumes the absence or powerlessness of the other.
***A moral question is whether a person has the moral courage to say in the open what he or she says in private.  A book is as I have said by definition in the public arena.  A further moral issue is the right to attack those who assume and exercise power over others, as Mohammed did and through his writing still does.  One may indeed say that Mohammed, being dead, is both absent from the discourse and powerless to reply.  I can think of no advocate of free speech who assumes those he or she is attacking have no access to his or her words and that they have no power to reply, for the devastatingly simply reason that he or she would not then be an advocate of free speech but of the dictum of the dictator which is 'I say what I like and you say what I permit you to say.' It is abundantly true, unfortunately, that Christianity, like some other religious traditions, has itself at times in its history been scandalously bad about this, and has established models of abusive and demeaning talk about 'the other' (Jewish, Muslim, heretical, unbelieving) that are as bad
***Gay, female
 as anything that any contemporary Christian might complain about in the mouth of a militant atheist.  But the moral question remains.
***Except it doesn't, because neither absence nor powerless are in fact assumed. And that is where I want to place the emphasis of this reflection.  The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to religious believers are pretty clear: the intention to limit or damage a believer's freedom to be visible and audible in the public life of a society is plainly an invasion of what a liberal society ought to be guaranteeing; ***What intention?  To say, for instance, that certain sections of the religious communities are raving mad?  But by the definition of madness as divorce from reality they are raving mad.  If you believe Genesis is literally true, if you believe woman was created from Adam's rib, you are in certain aspects severely delusional.  How does one say civilly 'I think you are a total raving nutter'?  Humans are adaptable and clever animals, able to function on more than one level. To be a screaming loony with regard to life, the universe and everything, does not mean you cannot be an excellent accountant and a gem of an employee in public sector finance.  Science is not going to go away because it is upsetting to some people.  People with a view of the world broadly based on the fruits of scientific investigation are not going to be silenced.  That is a return to the mediaeval world.   I am sure you would be shocked to be accused of advocating that, in fact would consider it risible, but what else are you advocating?  An interesting question.  Let me paraphrase.  The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to non-believers are pretty clear: the intention to limit or damage a non-believer's freedom to be visible and audible in the public life of a society is plainly an invasion of what a liberal society ought to be guaranteeing; To return to the fairly sturdy sense of self, to recognize that some people think you are evil, some people think you are mad, is not synonymous with thinking that you therefore are mad or evil.  It is a weak self-image that defines itself by the perceptions of others.  It is not my observation that, whatever mental health problems I may attribute to some religious people, that is one of them.  Indeed there has been agreement that the issue is identity with their religious beliefs.  The Archbishop referred to 'a poor self-perception' in the context of those with disabilities. I can see no particular reason to assume the religious are more prone to poor self-perception than any other able-bodied people capable of a full physical existence.  You do seem, Archbishop, to be advocating a society in which all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.  Let us be clear that offensive language and behaviour is the nature of some manifestations of religion, only it's not called that, it's called the Will of God.  To see a woman in black weighed down with shopping toiling through a London street in midsummer while hubby strides ahead in shorts and sandals is offensive; it is a public display of male supremacism.  It has been described as like seeing Master followed by his black slave in chains.  But decent rational people must keep stumm? and the obvious corollary is that the creation of an offence of incitement to religious hatred is a way of avoiding the civil disorder that threatens when a group comes to feel that it has been unjustly excluded. 
***Sir Iqbal Sacranie?  Muslim MPs, doctors, dentists, lawyers.  I really want to know precisely how this society is 'excluding' Muslims; I play devil's advocate to draw attention to the tragedy of self-exclusion.  If you think the whole of British culture is an evil, you are not going to fit into cultural and artistic circles - perhaps especially if you think homosexuality is an evil too.  On the other side to assume someone with a Muslim name has a profoundly narrow and conservative world-view is pure prejudice.   Unfortunately it is a quality of employers that, whatever the question-mark over a candidate, they will tend to plump for the safe choice.  On the bright side, I see Muslim girls and women in hijab working in fashion, for instance.  They might not themselves wear what's on the hangers but they have no problem with others doing so.  The rest of a Muslim teen in a headscarf may be clad in jeans and a bomber-jacket.  A girl in a black robe might enjoy working in fashion, love the clothes as much as anyone else just not think it appropriate to wear them in public. A gentle religious person of any faith may be welcomed as a source of sanity and stability in workplaces that tend to the hectic.  Certainly there are hectic, anything for the next buck and where's the coke (not with a capital C) work-places.  In these a sane calm atheist would be equally disregarded.  Islam has an image problem, the solution to which actually lies in the diversity of British Muslims identifying themselves as covering all the bases from ultra-orthodox to ultra-liberal.  Thus no particular image would be evoked by the label 'Muslim', as no particular image is evoked by the label 'Jew', at least in terms of theology (the rise in anti-Semitism is outside the scope of these etchings); the label has to be 'orthodox Jew' to evoke a picture of the chaps with beards and long black coats.  Christianity, however, is equally inflicting on itself a similar image problem.  I wonder if Dr Williams remembers the 'Jesus freaks'.  I hesitate to say that Christianity is becoming literally identified with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor but I think I may say there is a marked absence of alternative varieties.  The Archbishop may well raise his eyebrows there, of course.  Any reader can identify profound differences and the Archbishop hardly lacks a public profile but is perhaps too academic to impact in the same way.  Since the old offence of blasphemy – as we have seen – no longer works effectively to do this, there is no real case for its retention.  How adequately the new laws will meet the case remains to be seen; I should only want to suggest that the relative power and political access of a group or person laying charges under this legislation might well be a factor in determining what is rightly actionable.
***Might you? How discriminatory: discuss.  We are equal before law or not.  Our civil liberties have been infringed or are at genuine risk of being infringed or not.  Have you not said: 'the 2006 legislation which defines the crime of inciting religious hatred attempts to bind offence to criminal intent, the desire to generate active menace towards a group with certain convictions such that their civil liberties might be at risk.  In other words, whatever the anxieties of some, religious offence is not being defined simply as anything that a person or group happens to find offensive.  The abolition of the common law offence of blasphemy, it seems, would not substantially alter the extent of the protection afforded to religious communities and individuals; nor does the new legislation offer an unlimited charter for the hypersensitive.'   If you prick rich, articulate people, do they not bleed?  But beyond this is the larger issue of what is actively desirable for a liberal society. We regularly treat discussion about the law as discussion about what we can get away with, in all sorts of contexts, as if the law existed to define a 'lowest common' content for social morality.  But – as most of us equally recognise in some part of our consciences – what is legally permissible is not necessarily thereby made desirable, acceptable or, simply, good.  We may decide, as on the whole we have decided, that religion should not be protected by law over and above the ways we have just been summarising; but that does not close the moral question of what are the appropriate canons for the public discussion of belief.  I have suggested two points to ponder here. ***They are the appropriate canons for the public discussion of unbelief or in other words the appropriate canons for public discussion of anything.  Surely we must all equally be equal before moral law.  The first is to do with the far more general issue of civility in controversy: a coarsening of the style of public debate and a lack of imagination about the experience and self-perception of others, especially those from diverse ethnic and cultural contexts, the arrogant assumption of the absolute 'naturalness' of one's own position ***Religious people say the craziest most hair-raising things as though they were 'natural'.  Such arrogant assumption as there appears to be among secularists and atheists is neither arrogant nor an assumption, being certainty of the rationality of one's own position and of its reality quotient.  Philosophically there are questions of probability and possibility in the discourse wherein a chimp with a typewriter would eventually come up with Hamlet, possibly women were created from Adam's rib,  but in normal life a chimp with a typewriter does not come up with Hamlet and the same degree of certainty applies to my creation from Adam's rib (and my right to the content of my own mind, my certainty that my views may be changed only by me consequent upon persuasion by rational argument, that I damage my humanity if I surrender my being to what someone else tells me I'm allowed to be).  – none of this makes for an intelligent public discourse or for anything like actual debate, as opposed to plain assertion. ***There is no debate where propositions are immovable and diametrically opposed, where reason has no role. This is by no means limited to religious propositions.  I don't suppose Dr Williams has ever tried 'debating' with white supremacists. I have.  There are two immovable and diametrically opposed starting-points.    I've sometimes used the term 'argumentative democracy' to capture what a genuinely plural social discourse might be.  The law cannot and should not prohibit argument, which involves criticism, and even, as I noted earlier, angry criticism at times; but it can in some settings send a signal about what is generally proper in a viable society by stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours that have the effect of silencing argument.  Rather than assuming that it is therefore only a few designated kinds of extreme behaviour that are unacceptable and that everything else is fair game, the legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and (even if unintentionally) cruel styles of speaking and acting. ***I think this has been covered.  But the second point is to do with what can sometimes underlie the thoughtlessness or cruelty.  The assumption of the naturalness of one's own position is regularly associated with an experience of untroubled or uninterrupted access to the dominant discourse and means of communication in one's society.  If I can say what I like, that is because I have the power and status to do so.
**** The world of the feudal overlord who undoubtedly said what he liked because he had the power and status to do so and didn't expect any come-back, not the world of free people in a democracy in the C21st - whose equal freedom of speech is a consequence of come-back.  The assumption of the naturalness of their own position - perhaps your assumption of the naturalness of your own position as a believer - the assumption that no-one may mock - the assumption there is nothing to rightly mock for they represent The Good, these are  the erroneous positions of the believer, certainly exhibition of total contempt for the right of others to their views.  So Ratzinger went away to pray and God duly conveyed to him, after all, he is the Pope, that homosexuality is as great a threat as climate change.  What sort of delirious nonsense is that?  I doubt the Pope thinks he can say what he likes - dissemnate what to others is deranged and vicious drivel - because he has the power and status to do so.  I should assume that he says what he thinks, like the rest of us, because in his view it is something that needs to be said, the world needs to hear a statement of what to him is the fundamental nature of creation.  I should also, by the way, assume, that, whatever else he is, Ratzinger is a man of courage and conscience and that he would articulate the same sentiments were he a country-priest. But that ought to impose the clear duty of considering, when I engage in any kind of debate, the relative position of my opponent or target in terms of their access to this dominant means and style of communication
***As fine a veiled criticism of the Pope as I ever did see?  This is interesting because where the target is a group the Archbishop is suggesting something impossible.  The gays in New York or London or the isolated and permanently scared gay in Hicksville Kentucky?  The government of Saudi Arabia or the isolated and permanently scared Muslim in Hicksville Kentucky?  As a matter of fact, I do not think there is any group without the rich and influential among them.
– the duty which the history of anti-Semitism so clearly shows European Christians neglecting over the centuries.
***This is specious.  Historically European Christians were operating in an unfree society, as were feudal landlords and bloated capitalists.  The Archbishop does not appear to understand 'free society', 'equal rights' . Behind all this is what?  Possibly that finally the poor, the female, the black, the gay did answer back and demanded equal rights, but the Jews did not, and so died. But Muslims, nationally and internationally do answer back and further demand special, superior rights, which annoys a great many people, and so they may die.  But a civil war to uphold the equal rights of all, black and brown, white and tan, gay and straight, male and female, atheist and believer, cannot be likened to a second Holocaust.  I have intimated that I think the law could and should take this into consideration where 'incitement to hatred' is concerned; but it is again primarily a moral question, the requirement in a just society that all should have the same means to speak for themselves.  It can reasonably be argued that a powerful or dominant religious body has every chance of putting its own case, and that one might take with a pinch of salt any claim that it was being silenced by public criticism; but the sound of a prosperous and socially secure voice claiming unlimited freedom both to define and to condemn the beliefs of a minority grates on the ear.  ***Respond to the stated beliefs and condem those that are fascist trash, those that assume others whether in the minority or outside it, are slaves at the disposal of Master. Context is all. ****Perhaps if Dr Williams were female or gay he might take a different view?  His is after all the voice of the prosperous and socially secure. Perhaps he feels guilty about his position assured in his Church as a heterosexual male?   I do not know his social origins.  I do know that the rejection by clergy of outright condemnation of the treatment of women by some Muslims here and many Muslims elsewhere conveys a message to me - as it must to Muslim women who are resistant to male supremacism - that we don't much care for, especially when in tandem as it is here with a willingness to condemn those of us who are willing to stick our heads above the parapets.  In this lecture, I have attempted to go a little below the surface in the discussion about what protection religious believers should enjoy from the law of the land, in order to pinpoint some of the related issues around what is actually desirable and morally defensible in a society that is 'procedurally secular' but genuinely open to the audibility of religious voices in public debate.  It is clear that the old blasphemy law is unworkable and that its assumptions are not those of contemporary lawmakers and citizens overall.  But as we think about the adequacy of what is coming to replace it, we should not, I believe, miss the opportunity of asking the larger questions about what is just and good for individuals and groups in our society who hold religious beliefs.  ***You know what I'm going to say - what is just and good for individuals and groups who do not.   As a believer, I think, of course, that what is just and good for such persons is also crucial to the justice and goodness, indeed the sustainability, of the whole society, in a very strong sense.  ***Then you should direct careful attention to what some religious persons actually believe and emerge from Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, preferably speedily.  Congratulations to Dr Williams, who has just claimed that tyranny = justice and evil = good.  Of course as a non-believer I'm supposed to be the moral relativist.  But I also think that even the unbeliever or agnostic ***Great goodness, 'even' unbelievers and agnostics are deemed capable of 'reasonably' questioning a flawed argument.  might reasonably ask how authentic are the claims of our society to proper democratic pluralism if we cannot do justice to this particular kind of variety in our public life and conversation.
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2107