Heretical Cartoon Humor

I just love this strip.  Funny, irreligious, insightful.

A statement by a Supreme Court justice comes to mind: I know pornography when I see it. Similarly, heresy and humor are largely, if not fully, in the eye of the beholder.  As a liberal atheist, in defining either pornography or heresy, I would probably define these differently than other people.  The question of outlawing one or the other can depend on what definition a person uses.

Should visual images ever be outlawed?  While I can think of images I consider highly offensive and immoral — starting but not limited to sex acts with children — I don’t know if the viewing or the possessing of such images should be illegal.  I really don’t know.  Words and deeds are two separate things, and we currently tend to group images closer to words than we do to deeds.  Should that change?

Of course, there is a big difference between images that display violence of some type against innocent individuals and violence against other targets.  What about images that merely offend one’s values?  At this point I have come to no comfortable answer.  But in such cases I always opt to err on the side of freedom.

While I would nearly instantaneously amend the schoolyard rhyme about sticks and stones to, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me, I’m not so certain about images.  Images are significantly more provocative, and hence motivating, than words.  They can more readily influence behavior.  And individuals might get hurt.  But I draw the line, as do many democrats, at protecting the powerless: children and minority groups in real physical danger . . .  As for the powerful and the non-human, have-at-it.  Corporations, nations, mythical creatures, gods.  Go ahead and crack an iron pipe, in words or images, across their knees.  For they will feel no pain.

What do you think?

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