Secularity also includes freedom of religion and in developed democracies freedom of expression does not include hate-speech and inciting violence against minorities.
Publicly burning religious symbols is a pretty expressive form of hate speech against that religion, usually followed by burning people of that religion if allowed to.
But what do i know. My ancestors only burned Torahs 90 years ago, and that only escalated into one of the worst genocides in human history.
Yeah, no. I would burn all religion books if possible, doesn't mean I would burn christians, muslims or whatever. I personally can burn any book I want given that the book is my property. Your ancestors burning books wasn't what caused the genocide; the book burning and the genocide have a common cause, they don't cause each other.
freedom of expression does not include hate-speech and inciting violence against minorities.
I wish we could remove the hate speech from scripture or ban the distribution of scripture which contains hate speech (like Torah, Bible and Quran). But I digress.
Publicly burning religious symbols is a pretty expressive form of hate speech against that religion, usually followed by burning people of that religion if allowed to.
I understand how it can be seen this way, and recognize it often was analogue in history. But I disagree to automatically equate the two.
From my point of view, these book burnings exist because other people take offense about them in a very violent way. Some do burn embassies, some kill people. They want us to submit to the rules of their specific religion, although we don't believe in it. Some feel entitled to rage and anger when others don't do what they'd find acceptable.
This is childish and encroaching, and a threat to freedom, and sadly also sometimes a threat to life. To please this attitude by succumbing seems wrong to me. Provoke them until they learn that their rights end where our rights begin.
The article does not talk about the motives of the protesters, so we don't know in this particular case. There are cases where you are right; where book burnings are meant to incite hate and violence. There are cases when the opposite is true; book burnings to resist and protest encroachment and violence.
Freedom of Religion is just the right not to be forced to adhere to a specific religion by the state, it is not some sort of super-constitutional right that lifts every rule of every religion up to constitutional right status.
Not sure how a burned book is restricting anyones freedom of religion. Compulsory book burnings, that would be another story. Some people have fun believing in sky daddy, some people have fun burning fantasy books - there is no real problem in coexisting, if they tolerate each other.
For context: one of the announced burnings was by an ex-muslim Iraqi. Not everyone born in Islam stay in Islam. Some people move to Europe precisely because of this freedom of ours.
Yeah, fuck them. Human rights take precedence before any magical sky daddy book, no matter how much you love the pedophile that's one of the main characters.