by CHLOE BREYER
A central charge against the three members of the Pussy Riot punk-rock band who were recently sentenced to two years in prison was “inciting religious hatred.” This they are said to have done by briefly dancing at the front of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and splicing footage of their dance into a video critical of President Vladimir Putin.
A few days after their conviction, police in Pakistan arrested Rimsha Masih, an 11-year-old Christian girl reported to have Down Syndrome, on charges of blasphemy for purportedly burning pages of the Koran. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.
In different ways, both these cases raise the question of whether blasphemy should be punishable by law, as it may be in more than 30 historically Christian and Muslim countries, from Poland, Greece and Australia to Indonesia and Pakistan.
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Church fathers like St. Augustine inherited a dualistic understanding of spirit and body from the Greeks and assigned the female half of humanity the role of body, and the male half the spirit or intellect. St. Augustine’s take on Ephesians 5:23 (“For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body”) was that a woman had no head of her own. Her husband was to be her head, and she was to be his body.
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Increasingly, Muslim leaders are arguing that blasphemy laws as currently applied are un-Islamic as well. In a foreword to a recently released book, “Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide,” Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and a strong advocate for interfaith dialogue, wrote, “Nothing could possibly threaten God who is Omnipotent and existing as absolute and eternal truth. … Those who claim to defend God, Islam, or the Prophet are thus either deluding themselves or manipulating religion for their own mundane and political purposes.”
The New York Times for more
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