In 1999 in Ireland, there was an attempt to prosecute a newspaper for a cartoon mocking the church, but the judge said that he could not prosecute, because there was no definition of what legally constituted blasphemy.
Well now there is. The Irish Government has just passed one that protects the Catholic Church and the high and mighty, from blogs like this. The law concerns itself with what might or might not cause "outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion" (note, not just Catholics, Sinn Fein, Nuns, priests, everyone except atheists it seems. This blog would probably be deemed illegal in a court of irish law. Sinn Fein's deputy first minister for the Queen in Ireland also wants dissident journalists gagged. There has been several journalists already assasinated recently in Ireland.
As Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland pointed out:
"The proposed law does not protect religious belief; it incentivises outrage and it criminalises free speech. Under this proposed law, if a person expresses one belief about gods, and other people think that this insults a different belief about gods, then these people can become outraged, and this outrage can make it illegal for the first person to express his or her beliefs."
So Irish law has now enshrined that the taking of offence is more important than free speech or expression. If something might cause a motivated group of say paedophile Catholics to be "outraged", then it is illegal, with a fine of up to €25,000 payable immediately or a long prison sentence.
A prosecution can be brought with ease and the punitive nature of the fine is not legislation, that is simply served to tie up a few loose ends. Again like the decades of torture and child abuse that happened in Ireland without complaint from either mothers or fathers hardly anybody cares in a culture of cruelty. People like Sinead o'Connor will be persecuted and prosecuted under the new Fianna Fail , Green party legislation.
Recently I blogged a petition about decades of violence, incarceration of my mother, electro-shock, etc of the 30 people with humanity and nature left in them, who signed just a couple of them are Irish from hundred who read these blogs.
After the demise of the Celtic church the Roman Catholic church asked the British to govern Ireland in return for huge property deals. The Roman Catholic church and the British raped, plundered and pillaged Ireland. They have now left a culture of mostly slave minded gombeens who generally have no compassion for their neighbours and children.
As always it falls to a very few heroic people to sacrifice their lives to challenge these outrageous crimes. Just a few hundred families are now left to preserve the soul of a once famed compassionate people.
