Holy shit

For better or for worse, we (not only Finland, but the Western world in general), live in a society where the levels of freedom of speech are going down, and the desperate measures not to offend anyone are going up. I think that this is for the worse, but this is not the point of this post.

The point is that some motherfuckers are clearly more equal than others.

I don't even mean the religion of the perpetually offended in particular. Just the religion in general.

When a person starts believing in an invisible magical being, they are usually advised to cut down on alcohol and various illegal substances, and see a good psychiatrist. When sufficiently many people decide to believe in the same invisible magical being, they get to collect taxes, and teach about it in school, and we are supposed to pretend to respect them. Even if the being wants them to stone fellow citizens or do something similarly nice and respectable.

They get to publish pretty hardcore books, too. If somebody wrote the Old Testament or the Koran in the present-day Finland, they would have a pretty hard time publishing them, and would probably end up in court for agitating against somebody, or worse. I mean, even if we take only the anti-gay texts, it would be enough to convict the writers, and I am not even starting on the infidels.

Seriously. The stuff that those people are allowed to publish is filthy, downright unspeakable, and often contains direct incitement to murder. But since the unstable citizens who wrote it lived very long ago and had a very big following, it gets published.

One would think that organizations that inherently need to stretch the limits of the free speech that far would be very much for preserving the free speech and against all possible limitations on it. But no, the assholes (hmm, I should probably say "anuses") want respect! Respect enshrined in the law, no less, so that nobody would insult their armed-conflict-mongering holy books and their, ahem, age-of-consent-challenged prophets (police be upon them).

And since even they are not crazy enough to demand respect from each other, they want it from us, regular and mostly-secular people.

I should probably stop writing right here, because all I can think of is swear words, but I must say that sometimes I sort of wish the religious groups got what they are asking for, and had most of their literature and teachings banned for offending the other religions.