Anyway, Austin’s presentation conclusion regarding Blasphemy reminded me a bit of reading an article Kleiner linked regarding the Catholic church’s position on ordaining women, which began by stating that heresy is sometimes healthy and has been for the church. Challenges present themselves on perhaps vague or forgotten laws and it forces (and has forced) the church to properly define the issue and understand it.

Blasphemy, as Dacey put it, is the same kind of thing, a gadfly toward better faith, a healthy skepticism provided it doesn’t impede upon the dignity of individuals (inciting violence or “dehumanizing”, a word that sort of bit him in regards to the grandstanding audience member.) Individual humans have rights, ideas do not, so while living persons should be respected albeit challenged, ideas are open to anything, whether religious or secular. It is essentially freedom of belief (and non belief) and freedom to criticize such, while respecting dignity of human beings. One example he brought up was an article in Europe that stated Muslims “breed like rats.” This for Dacey wrong not because it went against religion but because it dehumanized the subject.

I’m putting his talk in pretty simple format here, for brevity’s sake. Being the most blasphemous (by a wide margin) of the Shaft club, I found his talk interesting, namely that he conceded that respect should be given to all sides, because of the real power of words, and that ideas shouldn’t be protected because of a sort of darwinism (i’m putting words in his mouth here) of ideas, that they are held on their own strengths rather than protected or vilified outright. Black Metal musicians burning a Norwegian church down, and an “art piece” that was a crucifix in a bottle of urine, may be equally offensive, but those are not crimes. The former is clearly violent action, the latter just incredibly stupid. Arresting the church burner is a good idea. You can’t arrest the artist, just ignore him, which Americans tend to be very good at. Running out of time, so I’ll leave others to fill in the blanks.

For conversation sake, I thought it funny that only one mentioned objectivity as a point but both were implying it pretty heavily.