Remember the Greek guy who mocked a Greek Orthodox monk by pretending to call him a pasta dish? And was charged with blasphemy? Well he’s been convicted of that stupid non-crime, and sentenced to ten months in prison.
A man who created a Facebook page poking fun at a revered Greek Orthodox monk has been sentenced to 10 months in prison in Greece after being found guilty of blasphemy.
Thousands of Greeks took to social networking sites to protest against the arrest in 2012 of Filippos Loizos, 28, who used a play on words to portray Father Paisios as a traditional pasta-based dish.
“He was merely satirising in a country that gave birth to satire,” his lawyer, Yorgos Kleftodimos, said on Friday.
Aristophanes ring a bell? Loukian of Samosata? (Ok he was Assyrian but he wrote in Greek, and that amounts to being Greek.)
The charges against him, of insulting religion and malicious blasphemy, were filed after Christos Pappas, a politician from the far-right Golden Dawn party, brought the issue before parliament. Pappas is currently detained pending trial on charges of belonging to a criminal group, as part of a government crackdown on Golden Dawn.
I wish Euripides were around right now.
insulting religion and malicious blasphemy
They killed Socrates for that, didn’t they??* I suppose Loizos should be glad he’s not being given hemlock?
(* Well, actually they killed him for being anti-democratic and being really annoying, but the charges were encouraging blasphemy…)
Corrupting the youth and worshipping gods that the city doesn’t worship.
But Cleon tried to have Aristophanes convicted for defamation of the polis. And there was a contract offered for Lucian’s head. The tradition is up and well.
Socrates’ offences were essentially political, not religious, “blasphemy” in its modern sense, is really a product of 1000 years of Christian totalitarianism.
Apparently the Greeks still don’t understand democracy.
On October 4, 1961, Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that “to is a preposition, come is a verb”. Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity.
RJW – I’d say that using blasphemy charges as a tool to suppress political dissidents is very similar in the ancient world, the mediaeval and the modern.
And the business about the alien gods was part of the charge.
@6
Agreed, the use of blasphemy charges has a long and repugnant history.
Politics and religion were not separate in Classical Athens. State religion was seen as essential to the functioning of the state so questioning it was sometimes politically dangerous. Socrates was not the only philosopher executed. A playwright was also prosecuted for revealing too much about mystery rites in a play as well.
Hey, Marcus, I notice you did not feel the need to take a cheap shot at the United States on this article. This is how racist paternalism shows itself. You are willing to criticize the poorer, less stable white society directly, but not the super-wealthy brown one.