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Man raises demon in church. Is this a crime?
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But having no knowledge of law, my basic take on it is that this is, essentially, an attempt to do harm by placebo. Or selective vulnerability, maybe.
I'm not sure this metaphor works, but if I give sugar pills to a diabetic, it doesn't matter that most people wouldn't be affected. It doesn't even matter that this specific person only became diabetic because they ate junk food all the time like a dumbass. It only matters that I did it deliberately to harm the person, and the person had a specific vulnerability to what I was doing.
So if you go into a room full of people who believe in religious mythology and try to use the placebo effect to scare or hurt people, you're attempting harm. It doesn't matter that very few of us on this messageboard would have been vulnerable to an attack of that nature. He wasn't aiming for us.
And yes, I would also recommend harassment charges against hellfire preachers who try to invoke the lord's wrath, provided they try to invoke the lord's wrath after coming into someone else's specified place of worship.
1) Occultist sneaks into church
2) Occultist, sight unseen, performs demon-summoning (?)
3) Occultist notifies(?) church of 1) and 2)
4) Church wants to press charges.
Is that right? I don't see where the crime is here. It's not harassment, and if it constitutes threatening harm, you'd have to bring up half the priests in the country on charges.
edit: maybe they could get him on trespass and/or mischief if he actually defaced something or left markings, though
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Actually, no. That's where the last clause of the last sentence comes in, which you've so thoughtfully quoted for me. Here, I'll bold it and restate:
..."provided they try to invoke the lord's wrath after coming into someone else's specified place of worship."
Assholes yelling in their own church? Fine. Assholes yelling at home? Fine. Assholes yelling in a public place? Fine, unless you break the fire-in-theater class of speech. Assholes coming into someone else's specified place of belief and doing so? Not fine.
And since I suspect your next post would have been "but because I believe in the flying spaghetti monster, the entire world is my place of belief, so blah blah blah look I could game the system", note "specified". It's certainly not the best word, but a church is pretty obviously a specified place of worship. So is the lodge at the Cheyenne sundance. If the local Wicca group gets together in public woods and sets up a sacred circle, that's their specified area, although that one gets shaky because they don't actually own the land. (If they owned the land, that'd be clear-cut, but then, if they owned the land, they could just kick the guy out for trespassing at the time, since we're talking about Westboro and not Super Sekrit Demon Curser.)
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
No. As I said in my first post, I'm suggesting that at first glance, I'm proposing that I'm not opposed to pressing charges for whatever legal term can be made out of "attempted harm by placebo" in instances where that harm was done in a specified place of worship.
As this particular thought of mine is several hours old at the latest, I'm not exactly casting it in stone as my rule to live by, but so far Than has ignored the part where I said "on their turf" and then changed to "but he wasn't harassing them at the time", when I wasn't arguing harassment, for which we have several good laws already in many countries, but attack by placebo. So, you know, not seeing the light of the invisible pink unicorn yet.
EDIT: A really easy hole in my proposal would be a few solid links on how the placebo effect is bullshit. Will look around after getting kids down to bed, but, you know, not hard. Hopefully people who think I'm full of crap will look harder.
You are missing the fundamental point that "attack by placebo" winds up covering so much territory that it's ridiculous.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Explain please. Than has so far failed to game the system.
It's fucking ridiculous.
Any time you are in a religious gathering and make anyone question any belief ever you would have committed a crime. If you asked your priest some question about a problem you were having with your faith and someone else heard it, boom, crime. If you mess with the jehovah's witnesses who come to your door, crime.
Your stupid "attack by placebo" amounts to criminalizing the act of making someone uncomfortable.
It's dumb.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
You don't give someone a placebo by giving them a spoonful of sugar. You make the sugar into a shape of a pill. "I hope you get sick," is a little different from, "I have summoned a demon to infect people and hurt them emotionally." Both are negative, but only one suggests an actual attempt to harm. Like most criminal acts, the burden would be on the police to prove that it was an intentional act of harm.
And of course, you've left the specified place of worship part out.
It's fucking ridiculous.
I'd suggest that any place of worship that believes that the presence of a non-clapper is defilement would most likely not have an open-doors policy. In fact, most places with a "the presence of outsiders is an insult to our sacred spaces" clause don't let people inside, which is why I didn't get to see my buddy's wedding ceremony, since he's Mormon and I'm not.
For what it's worth, my thought process on "what a DA would have to prove to get a charge like this to stick" were:
1) Demonstrable intent to cause harm.
2) Demonstrable susceptibility on the part of the victim.
3) Intrusion into victim's space with intent to cause harm.
After thinking about it, most of that is covered by simple harassment. The kicker here is that the guy didn't harass anybody at the time, he just came in and informed people after the fact that he'd done something they would consider an attack.
So the intention to give offense is there, in that the guy said publicly that he cursed the church. But it didn't cause offense at the time.
So, hypothetically, and this may be a terrible analogy:
You're at the hospital for a routine procedure. You're not on a special diet of any kind. While you're there, a guy in a nursing uniform comes by and asks you to drink something, telling you it's medicine. You do so.
The next day, he calls you at the hospital and informs you that he's not a nurse. He snuck in and gave you poison.
He didn't actually give you poison -- he gave you water with a bit of soda water in there so it'd fizz. He is attempting to hurt you solely by the placebo effect, and you weren't offended or hurt at the time.
Is that harassment?
Alternately, how is my metaphor crap, beyond "I believe in medicine, and I don't believe in religion"?
edit: And I can't think of a way to punish your nurse impersonator except under some sort of fraud or impersonation charge. Something about an implicit claim that he was a nurse, which he is not, and maybe doesn't have the right to pretend. It's hard to apply that to the demon situation. A better analogy would be if some dude came into your room dressed normally and gave you a cup of water, then later called you up and claimed it was poison.
It happened in the church, which is public in terms of not requiring a fee for admission but is owned by the religious institution and is known generally to be used for religious ceremonies -- but did not cause offense at the time. And in fact, nobody even saw it, so there was no possibility of offense given, not even "There was a guy there who was acting oddly." (As far as I understand from this thread, that is.)
My argument was that entering into someone else's sacred space specifically for the purpose of screwing around with said sacred space was bad. At least down in the States, where I took high school civics, we can't regulate the soul, so you could walk into a church and hate it as much as you want as long as you didn't interfere with services or break any laws. Regulating speech is limited, and while threats qualify, phrasing your threats in mystical terms of the lord striking you down or demons infesting your soul puts it at arm's reach. If the guy had just announced that he'd placed a curse, it'd be no different from any other religious nutjob preaching their own brand of hellfire. This one, though, went into the church to do it. In my mind, that makes a difference, even if the presence in the church came at a different time from the announcement of ill intent.
I wanted it to be its own crime, but a) harassment seems to fit on everything except causing offense at the time, and b) nobody except me seems to think it works.
If the "no offense caused at time" part of harassment were considered to be met in this case, does anybody know what the penalty for something like this would be? I'm assuming it's on the order of a restraining order and a fine. As much as I want to regulate everyone's religions with my nefarious plans, I wasn't assuming anyone would be doing jail time over interreligious dickery.
Well sure, if you worship modern medicine.
This less about worshipping medicine and more about blindly and arrogantly attacking innocent people.
That is rather weak. Personally, the first analogy that came to my mind was walking into a kosher deli and dropping a wad of lard on the counter.
To be fair, it's the demon doing the actual attacking, so the worst you could charge the summoner with is aiding and abetting. :lol:
Protip: Yeah, it doesn't work how you think it does. Also, Europe isn't a country.
That whole "Rawr, all of Europe has horrible laws, that's why Neil Gaiman lives in America!" thing is especially funny, and I think I've seen it several times over the last few days on these boards?
'Get your fucking finger on the wookie'
It's more like you walked in and the guy pork was tasty
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Not in the slightest.
Don't worry man, I trust you and your 100% true arguements in favor of how Black People are trying to oppress the Poor White Man. Fucking savages, why can't those backwards bunch of motherfuckers learn how to be enlightened. Whatever though, as a Evil Hypocritical Liberal I realize I'm not as Racially Enlightened as you, Mr. Deep South Is Far More Racially Progressive Guy And Man We Should Just Let Them N**gers Fight It Out, Don't Get Involved Okay?
It's just staggering, the level of internal hypocrisy I have. I mean, I thought reasonably limiting hate speech was a good idea, but I realized we should be far more like the Racial Disneyland South, with their Awesome "Call Minorities Anything You Want, It's Your Right To Openly Hate Others In A Way That Intimidates Your Targets!" Policy! Look how well it works for them! There is simply no racial segregation in the U.S., besides the North because us Dirty Liberal Closet Racists aren't allowed to openly terrorize blacks for being black like in Alabama!
The situation is more sacred than that
More like giving your child the mix while you are away and telling you what he did. The helplessness of the people seems to be going over heads here. Even though they wouldn't believe it, they were basically unrightfully one upped by some dick head in his quest for prominence, who arrogantly disrespected a major part of their lives
1. Interesting, but some immediate problems I see:
2. Did Mr. Demon Raiser interfere with any services or break any laws (in the sense that you meant above)?
3. So what exactly constitutes an announcement of ill intent?
Is this illegal?
Obviously you can't join the EU with something as barbaric as the death penalty still on the books (whoops, I guess I forgot to put my American nationalist blinders on this morning, can't imagine what happened). EU does have requirements of its member states with regards to human rights, though I was wrong in assuming earlier in this thread that freedom of speech was one of those rights; article 10 is fucking toothless. It seems to state that everyone has the right to free expression except if there's a law against it. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
I mean, if you think that the British law against insulting people isn't a horrible law, that's fine, we disagree, how about presenting some arguments on your behalf instead of threadshitting uselessly?
P.S. Neil Gaiman is awesome but unless there's some illuminating anecdote about him running into speech law issues I could give a shit why he lives wherever he lives.
If you didn't write anything inane about Europe as a whole, or Neil Gaiman (and yes, I'm not sure why he was important here either), you don't really have any reason to get all worked up about those things. If you did, well, sorry. Maybe that was 'threadshitting', but then you wrote something that was just too dumb to pass over.
'Get your fucking finger on the wookie'
And I'm amused that once more I'm told not to read the letter of the law, but to trust in the discretion of the constables and barristers. It's rare that I'm glad, much less proud, to be an American... I should be basking in this. Maybe go out and get a hotdog, oppress some native peoples, start a war, or something.
I fail to see how Europe isn't great on free speech, though - but that wasn't your comment, I think, so let's not argue over that either. Maybe I live in a bizzaro Europe where I can say and write pretty much anything I want and never worry about getting into trouble for it - hell, I think we could be stricter here. I don't really think we need to allow nazism, for example. They had their shot, it didn't work out. But we do, and that's okay. Gotta stand up for what you don't like so they'll stand up for what you like, and all that. I've always seen America as trailing behind a lot of European countries in that regard (which is probably my inane assumption). Go figure.
'Get your fucking finger on the wookie'
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.