The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, yesterday addressed some of the problems with the present blasphemy laws as well as the difficulties society could face if all protection from religious offence is removed.
Delivering the James Callaghan Memorial lecture entitled “Religious Hatred and Religious Offence”, Dr Williams questioned the liberal argument of free speech that some writers and artists use to defend their right to portray religion offensively, whilst ignoring the hurt that their actions may cause.
He also pointed to their lack of imagination in refusing to see people’s belief choices from any other perspective but their own.
“It is one thing to deny a sacred point of reference for one’s own moral or social policies. It is another to refuse to entertain – or imagine – what it might be like for someone else to experience the world differently,” he said. “Spectres of colonialism, ‘Orientalism’, and, once again, anti-Semitism are roused when this insensibility to the otherness of the religious other goes unquestioned.
“And behind this is the nagging problem of what happens to a culture in which, systematically, nothing is sacred.”
