A sensible attitude


It has always been absurd that the followers of a faith that believes in an all-powerful deity would think that they need to take law into their own hands or to require the government to crack down on what they see as heresy and heretics. If their god is upset, surely he could deal with it by himself? Conversely, the fact that their god did not do anything must be because he was not upset by whatever it was that got his followers all hot and bothered.

However the head of Brazil’s supreme court seems to have understood this logic, overturning a ruling by a lower court judge that Netflix must remove the parody film The First Temptation of Christ that I earlier reviewed favorably here. Religious fanatics had firebombed the offices of the comedy troupe that created the film.

The president of Brazil’s supreme court has issued an order that allowing Netflix to continue showing a satirical film depicting Jesus as a gay man and reaffirmed Brazilians’ right to free speech.

“It is not to be assumed that a humorous satire has the magic power to undermine the values of the Christian faith, whose existence goes back more than two thousand years,” supreme court president José Antonio Dias Toffoli wrote in his decision.

Netflix earlier the same day filed an official complaint with the country’s top legal authority, decrying attempted censorship by a judge in Rio de Janeiro who ordered the film’s withdrawal from its platform. The film was never removed.

Comments

  1. Who Cares says

    @jrkrideau (#1, #2)
    That is for both the simplest way to comply with US sanctions. Someone mentioning Iran might want to try and send that money that way which would get either company in hot water for ignoring sanctions.
    But instead of passing it to a human checker it is a (moronically simple) regex that if positive removes the possible felonious attempt at raising money. That is how bad the penalties are, guilty until proven innocent but there is no one to plead your innocence to since that person (or persons) costs money.

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    … the Christian faith, whose existence goes back more than two thousand years,

    His math is not strong. Even taking the gospels at face value, and starting from the time Jesus recruited his first disciples, it is not more than 1990 years old.

  3. jrkrideau says

    @ 3 Who Cares
    That is for both the simplest way to comply with US sanctions.
    Could very well be. Really helps the USA look like a free country too.

  4. jrkrideau says

    @ 4 Reginald Selkirk
    His math is not strong.
    The legal profession and judiciary, often, do not seem too numerate in many countries; it seems the Brazil is with them.

    At least the judge was more or less in the ballpark.

  5. says

    @mano:

    I did see the movie a while after your review. I had intended to see it promptly, but a friend I only see once a week or so wanted to watch it with me and then it slipped my mind the first time she came over, blah, blah.

    Anyway, when we finally did watch it, it surpassed my expectations. It really was quite enjoyable, with the language barrier not preventing us from laughing quite a lot. I can only assume that people able to make a work that transcends the language barrier so well would have further included wordplay and cultural references that would have made it even better for Brazilian speakers of Portuguese. This was a seriously great production.

    On the downside, the potential for women characters was really quite underdeveloped [Mild Spoiler] almost literally limited to the Madonna and the whore. Really unfortunate that folks that obviously talented and inventive couldn’t do more with the women characters.

  6. JLAINPA says

    Ah yes, but the true believers would tell you that G*d was using the unruly mob to do his work on earth. It’s that simple. When they get the results they want it’s the will of G*d. When the results are not what they want, they have not prayed sufficiently. Simple excuses from simple minds.

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