Thomas Jefferson once said "My right to swing my
fist ends when it hits your
face."
Many people do think its alright to walk around naked in public. In reality, no harm is done.
A corpse cannot feel anything, so doing anything harmful to a corpse is better than doing it to a person, assuming religious and personal requests of the deceased (made before death) are respected. Hell (on no curse) that may be their religion.
I hate you might be a rude, inappropriate and even bad thing to say, but because of a little thing called free speech, yes it is OK.
Rape always causes physical harm, and its something you are doing TO someone else, so it does not fall under free expression.
It is OK to go into a church and yell God Sucks!, even if it is rude and inappropriate.
Swearing or cursing is a figment of everyone's imagination. They are arbritrary words deemed taboo. The word is not the thing.
I'd rather have a real and honest mind then a limited happy one (see ignorance is bliss).
Tem42 - To clear up any confusion, when i say OK , that does not mean it is right and good, just that I shouldn't be able to stop them from doing it ( as noted when I said I thought it was rude and inappropriate).
Science dispelled many people's beliefs on religion. That causes them mental harm. Yet what is worse, being lied to your whole life and gleefully skipping through it, or having your eyes open and experience both the good and bad of life? More harm, both mental and physical, by limiting someones thought and expression than restricting it.
I would be upset if someone butchered and ate a corpse in front of me. Yet I have no right to stop them, nor should I (assuming above criteria). In India, they would throw dead bodies into the river or let them rot in a isolated field or mountain because they believe the body is worthless without the soul but Western thought would call this barbaric and many would try to stop it.
Rape is wrong because you impose you will on someone by doing a physical act on them(I'm not positive where this topic even came from). The harm there is mental, but as a result of an actual physical act not words.
Basically I believe one should be able to do anything that does not directly harm another. That is the best balance between protecting my rights and not violating others.
Tem 2;
You are too general with mental harm. The mental harm from rape is bad, but so is getting shot in the face. If someone is seriously harmed from someone walking into a church and yelling God Sucks, or saying fist fuck they have serious problems.
Perhaps you are causing me mental harm by disagreeing with me. If this is worse than physical harm, I could go over there and break your nose, and you would be more evil. The level of physical harm is dependant on the aggressor; the level mental harm on the other hand (most of the time) is primarily dependant on the victim.
Yelling God Sucks doesn't take away God from them. Revealing scientific fact doesn't force it on them - rational people accept it by themselves or remain ignorant. Neither does saying fuck force anything on them. My right to speak supercedes your right to not have things said to you (thats not even a real right). You don't have to believe me, but you can't silence me.
Tem 3
You say you agree with MoJoe (so do I), but note his language. He doesn't think that you should scream God sucks in a church.
Yet with all respect to MoJoe, he doesn't decide what is right or wrong for everyone (at least not yet.....)
He also doesn't think it should be illegal so that others can't decide it's rightness or wrongness. If this is not forcing words or ideas on someone, could you give an example where someone does without doing something in the physical world?