Blasphemy is a religious crime in which a person challenges, questions, publicly doubts, or denies a foundational belief of a religious tradition. While heresy and apostasy are religious crimes committed by the followers of a particular religious tradition, blasphemy is often committed by those who are not affiliated with the religion. Thus, a Muslim may commit blasphemy against Christianity by denying the divinity of Jesus, and a Christian may commit blasphemy against Islam by denying that Mohammad was the prophet of God. Over the past few centuries, many Christians have accused scientists of blasphemy when scientific findings contradict or fail to support their Biblical interpretations of reality. For example, some schools, both public and private, do not teach evolution because it is considered blasphemous.
The etymology of “blasphemy” and “blaspheme” are fairly straight forward: the Middle English “blasfemen” was borrowed from the Late Latin “blasphemare” which in turn was borrowed from the Greek “blasphēmein” meaning “to speak ill of.” Today, blasphemy laws prohibit “hostility” to certain religions, religious beliefs, and/or religious believers. The concept of “hostility” may include any expressions which are critical or questioning of some aspect of religion. In his entry on blasphemy in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Ronald Lindsay writes:
“The core meaning of blasphemy is a legal or moral offense consisting of statements that disparage a deity, the deity’s attributes, or some person or object considered sacred because of close association with a deity (such as Muhammad or the Bible). Those who deny the existence of deities are, therefore, inclined to regard blasphemy as a victimless crime.”
In an article in Free Inquiry, Flemming Rose writes:
“Blasphemy is basically about transgression, about crossing the line between the sacred and the profane in ways that are seen as improper in a specific context.”
According to Flemming Rose, there are three broad concepts of blasphemy:
“First, there is an ancient concept of blasphemy as a direct verbal affront to the divine; second, a medieval concept of blasphemy arises as a seditious challenge to the sanctity of law, the public order, or the common good; and, third, there is a modern notion of blasphemy as an offense against the sensibilities, rights, or dignity of individual believers.”
Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae (written in 1265-1274) wrote that
“blasphemy, which is a sin committed against God, is more grave than murder, which is a sin against one’s neighbor.”
This was intended to be an instructional guide for theological students.
The crime of blasphemy existed long before the emergence of the Abrahamic religions. In ancient Egypt, for example, to gain immortality the deceased had to convince Osiris that he had not blasphemed a god.
The first of the Abrahamic religions to evolve was Judaism and the ancient Jews considered blasphemy a serious offense. Ronald Lindsay writes:
“In Jewish thought, the gravity of blasphemy was connected to the sacred character of God’s name. To invoke God’s name inappropriately was bad enough; to curse God was a horrific act.”
Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, reports:
“One of the fiercest penalties in the Old Testament is the one exacted for blasphemy.”
Edward Buckner and Michael Buckner, in their book In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty, ask:
“Why, from a religious perspective, is blasphemy considered so dangerous that it deserves the ultimate punishment, that it is even the one unforgivable sin according to the New Testament?”
Ronald Lindsay suggests one reason:
“One justification for human punishment of blasphemy is that the blasphemer places his or her community at risk, for example, if the offended deity no longer supports the community that harbors the blasphemer.”
Catastrophes, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, floods, and tsunamis, have been viewed as the response of a vengeful deity who has been insulted by the actions, thoughts, or words of some of the people.
On the other hand, A.C. Grayling, in The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, writes:
“Blasphemy laws, like those relating to obscenity and censorship, are instruments for controlling ideas and the expression of them.”
Historically, the Code of Justinian, enacted in 529 CE, provided the death penalty for blasphemy. Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) viewed blasphemy as a crime greater than murder. Following the Protestant Reformation, Protestants continued to be as likely as Catholics to execute people for blasphemy.
Blasphemy was a crime under English law from 1695 until 1967. Between 1911 and 1922, John William Gott (1866-1923) was imprisoned several times for blasphemy. In 1911, he was selling his pamphlet Rib Ticklers, or Questions for Parsons, when he was arrested and sentenced to four months in prison. Following his arrest in 1921, the judge described him as an atheist and socialist and sentenced him to nine months of hard labor.
Before the United States was created, the legislators in the colony of Virginia, in the early eighteenth century, decreed that disbelief in the authority of the Bible was illegal. In his book Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels, Kerry Walters reports:
“Blasphemy, which included as minor a transgression as the profession of doubt about scriptural authority, was a jailable offense.”
When the United States was created, it followed English common law and considered blasphemy a crime. In 1826, William Cannon was sentenced to six months in jail for blasphemy by a judge in New Haven, Connecticut and in 1829, James Granger was sentenced to a full year in Litchfield. In 1928, Charles Lee Smith, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, was convicted of blasphemy in Arkansas. He did not serve his sentence and charges were later dropped.
In 2009, the Center for Inquiry helped to establish what would become International Blasphemy Rights Day. Ronald Lindsay, writing in Free Inquiry, reports:
“Freedom of political speech is still restricted in many countries with authoritarian governments, but criticism of religion is even more widely restricted, being prohibited under some circumstances even in countries that have democratic governments, including Greece, Germany, and Canada.”
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve commissioned Muhammed cartoons which were viewed as blasphemous by many Muslims. The response was violent, with some people calling for the death of the blasphemers. In recognition of this event, International Blasphemy Rights Day (IBRD) is celebrated on September 30. Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry, writes:
“IBRD celebrates the right of authors, artists, and dissidents to treat religious matters as they see fit, even to the point of offending believers. And it calls for defending blasphemers when political expression or criminal prosecution loom. With that comes a call for the repeal—or when that is not possible, the moderation—of blasphemy statutes across the world.”
Also writing in Free Inquiry, Elizabeth Cassidy, the deputy director of Policy and Research at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, reports:
“More than fifty countries around the world still have criminal blasphemy laws, though some of them use them more than others. These laws usually are discriminatory on their face, protecting only one or some religions.”
Robert Lindsay also writes:
“Those who favor the punishment of expression critical of religious beliefs will sometimes refer to the right of believers not to be offended. But there is no such right.”
While in Europe and the United States, blasphemy laws and prosecution under these laws has disappeared, in Islamic countries blasphemy is still considered a major crime and can be punished by death. In many Muslim countries, images showing Allah, Muhammad, or Muhammad’s family are considered blasphemous. In an article in Free Inquiry, Sara Ali reports:
“There is no commandment in the Qur’an that restricts creating images of divine beings. Although the Qur’an does admonish blasphemy, it does not define any sort of punishment for it.”
Sara Ali also writes:
“According to my father and his interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith, depictions of these sacred beings may lead to the worship of false idols. He worries that the image, rather than the divine being, will become the object of veneration.”
Pakistan’s blasphemy law is the most severe and the most frequently applied. This law calls for the death penalty for blaspheming the name of the prophet Muhammad and for life imprisonment for desecrating the Qur’an. In 2001, for example, Dr. Younis Shaikh was sentenced to death in Pakistan for telling students that Muhammad was not a Muslim before he invented the religion at the age of forty.
In their book In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty, Edward Buckner and Michael Buckner write:
“In such countries as Pakistan, laws against ‘blaphemy’—including actual persecutions, as well as the threat of lynch mobs if no official action is taken—have been used to marginalize and oppress religious minorities (including minority Islamic sects as well as Christians).”
Regarding extrajudicial killings of blasphemers in Pakistan, Flemming Rose writes:
“When the government communicates to the public that blasphemy is more or less as evil as killing hundreds of innocent people, it should not come as a surprise that a lot of people are willing to take the law into their own hands.”
In Egypt, blasphemy is punishable by five years in prison. It is illegal to insult or defame any religion, not just Islam. Egypt in 2018 considered making atheism a crime.
In Bangladesh, criticism of religion is not tolerated and writing something that hurts the religious sentiments of others is not acceptable. In Mauritania, blogger Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir was sentenced to death in 2014 for writing that the prophet Muhammad had killed Jews but had forgiven the Arabs because they were his blood. In response to this sentence, the International Humanist and Ethical Union called on the Mauritanian government to abolish the crimes of blasphemy and apostasy.
Lest we think that blasphemy laws are only used in Islamic countries, when John William Gott compared Jesus to a clown in Britain in 1922, he was sentenced to nine months of hard labor.
Iceland retained blasphemy laws until 2015 when they were repealed through the efforts of the Pirate Party. The penalty for blasphemy had been a fine or three months in prison.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union, in their 2016 Freedom of Thought Report, found that blasphemy was illegal in 59 countries and that 36 countries still enforced their anti-blasphemy laws.
Religion 101/201
Religion 101/201 is a series exploring various religious topics in which the concept of religion is not restricted to the traditions of the Abrahamic religions. Religion 201 is an expansion of an earlier essay. More from this series:
Religion 101: The Great Awakenings
Religion 101: Confucianism
Religion 101: Naturalism
Religion 101: Deism
Religion 101: The Evolution of Morality
Religion 101: Divination in Ancient Civilizations
Religion 101: Christian Icons (Photo Diary)