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Danish law banning public burning of Quran sparks outcry
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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According to them, promoting non-belief causes harm and distress to them. So should it be banned?
No. Because, like I've said over and over again, the act itself would not be banned. What should be prohibited is intentionally causing people distress - in which case, it doesn't matter what the act is, it only matters about the intent.
This is in fact a fairly high bar to meet. It would be very difficult in many cases to prove intent. Sometimes people make their intent clear, though, either directly with what they say or with the specifics of how they act.
Promoting non-belief would easily not be banned, because you're doing it for the purpose of sharing your beliefs - in exactly the same way a religious person preaches. Burning a cross in your back garden also would be fine, so long as you weren't directing it at a specific Christian with clear intent to upset them. Burning a cross in public would likely be wrong, though, as you can't reasonably argue that you weren't trying to target some Christians out on the street to upset.
Substitute religion and religious symbol as you see fit. I'd also draw a comparison to flags and war memories, those are already protected under law in the nation they represent. This makes sense, the people making the law say you can't descecrate their symbols, just like a religion makes its rules. The reason behind this is because it is disrespectful. Is it really that much bigger a leap to say that you shouldn't damage other peoples' symbols either - particularly when the only reason you're doing it is to be disrespectful?
Like, I don't think throwing a flag on a fire is inherently wrong, however burning a flag in front of a load of war veterans on Rememberance day is definitely wrong. One is just burning something, the other is done with clear malicious intent. But the law would say both are wrong here, yet none are wrong with other symbols. The law doesn't quite fit.
Again, malicious intent and causing distress according to whom?
Plenty of acceptable acts are labeled as done with malicious intern to cause distress according to religious organizations.
Do you think for example we should ban this as it was done deliberate intent to upset the protestors?
According to a court, the classic test they would use is "the reasonable man" - "would a reasonable person consider the actions likely to cause distress?" is the kind of question they would ask. Proving intent is quite a high bar, most likely it would rely on the perpetrator slipping up and basically admitting it was their intent, either with what they say or in how they do it. For example, destroying a symbol in private doesn't have any specific target, but doing it in public could only reasonably be done to incite people offended by it.
The religion would not have a say in this. They would not be able to just change their symbols and immediately have them covered. It would have to be genuine, such that your average Joe would know about it, as without a reasonable person knowing about it then you cannot prove intent (unless they admit it).
No, because there's more than enough plausible deniability there. They may have been doing it to offend people - and that seems quite likely to us - but they could also just really want to kiss. People like kissing, it's not prohibited in public and this isn't the only time they've done it. Thus you cannot prove the intent.
To take another example, Hinduism says the cow is sacred. The cow is a religious symbol. If I eat beef in front of a Hindu person, it is very likely to cause offense to them. However, I regularly eat beef, and I'm probably not doing it to offend them but just because I like it. Even if I was trying to offend them, you'd struggle to disprove it if I made that claim. On the other hand, if I made a social media post saying I was going to eat beef in front of Hindu people and make them cry and then went and did it, then I would have admitted intent to cause harm and would clearly be doing something wrong.