stupid misleading headline! The bill covers not only the quran but the public burning of all books with importance for religious groups.

The law criminalizes the “inappropriate treatment of writings with significant importance for a recognized religious community.”

This feels weird to me. Book bans I’m wholly against. But also throwing people in jail for burning paper seems strange as well. Like, I’m queer as hell and used to be religious. But if you want to wrap a Bible in a rainbow flag and burn it, then whatever. Waste of resources. But throwing people in prison over something some fraction of any population believes in (without violence, racism or hatespeech) seems excessive and favors religion.

Violence, hatespeech, racism, banning books, obviously all bets are off. I just wish everyone could dial back everything about 10 notches.

Over on YouTube, thunderfoot did a fun thought experiment. He filled a hard disk full of copies of the Quran and then proceeded to zero over all of them. Is destroying thousands of digital copies of the Quran equivalent to burning them?

Eh, I get what they are trying to go for, but this kind of appeasement won’t fix a group that doesn’t believe in the democracy they live in. What, will they also ban drawing Mohammed since it also upsets muslims and thus incites violence?

As distasteful as it is, this falls squarely within the paradox of tolerance. There is no reason to burn the quran other than to stick it to “those” people. It’s trolling, it’s intolerant, it does not promote social peace, it does not even promote any kind of dialogue on religious bigotry, it’s just an act of hatred, a fuck you. And the sovereign Danish parliament decided that in their country, the value of this particular fuck you is not worth the disturbance to the peace. They have decided to not tolerate this particular kind of intolerance. Disagree with them all you like, but I see a rationale and it’s far from pointless. “Free speech absolutism” might be an American foundational value but that simply is not the case in the rest of the world. And a democracy, like Denmark, may legitimately decide to resolve the paradox in this way at this point in their history, and they are perfectly free to reverse this down the line. They chose to limit one freedom, that frankly is mostly used in a petulant, childish and intolerant way, in the interest of peace. Good on them.

That’s really a sad moment in history. Sure, it’s really in bad taste if ones does it, but it’s your property and it’s just paper at the end of day.

They might as well start drawing the prophet Muhammad, it’s probably cheaper too.

Good.

First western nation to fall due to demands from terrorist. Ask and they shall receive I guess.

This will be the first text in some insane dominos memes in the future.

Meme government.

Good. The burning were done specifically to incite hatred and create social turmoil, for the explicit purpose of turning Muslims and non Muslims against each other. Much like free speech does not cover threat or calls to violence, stopping these burnings stops these bad actors while leaving your right to free /speech/ unaffected, so if you want to criticise islam and Muslims, you can still say whatever you want about them, so any claims about free speech are kinda moot.

Quite frankly it should be illegal to burn holy books/flags/effigies/etc.

What is possibly gained by symbolically lighting someone’s holy book on fire? Is religion regressive? Absolutely. But all you’re doing is creating righteous indignation in the group you disagree with, making them out to be the sympathetic party, and it kind of makes you look like a culture warrior tool to do the burning.

Insulting any religion in this way is stupid. It’s not going to make them agree with you. They are just going to hate you.

Also this is not just for the Quran but all other religious books as it should be. Good job Denmark.