Source: Religion News Services<\/p>\n
(RNS) THE AMHERST, NY, USA: The atheist group Center for Inquiry has changed the name of its “International Blasphemy Day” to “International Blasphemy Rights Day” in a bid to show that organizers are not interested in “mocking religion” for its own sake. <\/p>\n
Center for Inquiry representatives said the name change better describes the purpose of the event amidst criticism received after last year’s inaugural events. International Blasphemy Rights Day is part of a larger, national campaign for freedom of expression. The name change is meant to “emphasize the important connection that we think there is between blasphemy and the right to free speech,” said Ronald Lindsay, president and CEO of Center for Inquiry. Lindsay said some critics “interpreted blasphemy in its crudest form” but “blasphemy is a wider concept than that.” <\/p>\n
Although many people scoffed at last year’s campaign, he said, the center believes religion is not, and should not be, immune from criticism. “Religious beliefs should be on the same level of political beliefs,” Lindsay said. This year’s events are scheduled for Sept. 30, the fifth anniversary of the publication of 12 cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Blasphemy is often, unfortunately, associated with crude criticism of believers. But our focus is on looking at the beliefs,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Source: Religion News Services (RNS) THE AMHERST, NY, USA: The atheist group Center for Inquiry has changed the name of,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}