Len Gutkin in The Yale Review:
We tend to think of blasphemy—an offense against God—as a relic of an antique past. It seems to belong to times and places where religion and law speak with one voice. And a stern one: in Leviticus, God tells the Israelites that “he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.”
Though it may appear anachronistic in a secular democracy, Western liberalism has for much of its history preserved the concept of blasphemy, albeit with significant modifications. The locus of offense shifted from the honor of the deity to the honor of His followers. Leviticus forbids it not because of how it made the Israelites feel but because of how it made God feel. But in America, England, and other modern nations, blasphemy came to be seen as legally culpable because it could wound religious feelings, and in so doing provoke tumults and even killings. Keeping the peace provided a legal warrant for restricting irreligious speech: blaspheme the name of the Lord, and the congregation might riot. Should “unrestricted license” be “permitted to all men to speak and write and act as they pleased,” as an English Royal Commission wrote in 1841, “the feelings of mankind upon a subject of great moment”—religion—“would be frequently outraged.”
More here.
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