A pig named Jesus « More shameless remarks by Larko

A pig named Jesus

Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 23:45 | In Freedom of speech | 3 Comments
Tags: freedom of religion, sudan, tolerance

Gillian Gibbons is under arrest in Sudan because her class voted to name a teddy bear Muhammad. As you can read in this BBC report, Muhammad the teddy bear has nothing to do with the islam prophet with the same name. The name was suggested by a boy named Muhammad, a pupil in Ms Gibbons’s class.

In this Reuters video clip a local imam says that islam respects other religions and indeed freedom of speech but demands that non muslims “respect their opnion and deal with them fairly”.

from www.reuters.com

I am neither muslim nor christian, I have no religious belief at all. I am happy to respect both islam and christianity and indeed “deal with them fairly”, as it were. However, I would not accept that beliefs of islam or christianity or any other religion were imposed on me. So if I wanted to name a teddy bear, a dog or a pig Muhammad, Jesus or Buddha that would be my constitutional right within freedom of speech.

Unity High School in Khartoum is a christian sćhool. Demanding that they practise islam’s teddy bear naming policies is not what I understand as tolerance, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

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While at the same time they might have shown a little consideration as a Christian teacher at at Christian school in a Muslim country as to the place and time of the namedropping….
I can in no way defend the Sudanese authorities in this matter, but sometimes we might talk a little about freedom of consideration as well as freedom of speech.

Comment by geirsan — Wednesday, November 28, 2007 #
[...] skriver i dag om den britiske læreren Gillian Gibbons i Sudans hovedstad Khartoum. Da Gibbons ba klassen sin ved Unity High School om forslag på navn [...]

Pingback by Retten til å ytre en teddybjørns navn — Wednesday, November 28, 2007 #
[...] is a two way street Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher, who allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear after one of her [...]

Pingback by Tolerance is a two way street « More shameless remarks by Larko — Saturday, December 1, 2007 #