Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 115
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 115 or some might say that this is extremely foolish of him; only time will tell ! The last execution for blasphemy in Great Britain occurred in 1697 under Scottish law. In 1698 the English Parliament passed a new act against blasphemy, reducing the penalties. A new era of freedom of religious expression was ushered in with the next century. From then on the victims of the blasphemy laws tended to be freethinkers, rationalists, agnostics and atheists, and they had begun to rely for their defence on the freedom of the press as well as freedom of religion. BL A SPH E M Y I N T H E 2 0 T H C E N T U RY The twentieth century may not be as great an age of faith as the times when men burned witches, blasphemers, and heretics; but in the early part of the century blasphemy was still regarded as an of- fence and punishable by imprisonment. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, there were a great number of cases of blasphemy throughout the Christian world. For example, in England, a blasphemous atheist was jailed for his coarse obscenities about the Gospels and, in particular, for his description of Jesus(as) entering Jerusalem ‘like a circus clown on the back of two donkeys. ’ (Rex v. Gott, 16 Crim. App. Rep. 37; 1922 ). In the United States, the State of Maine imprisoned a radical for his insulting rejection of religion generally and of the doctrines of virgin birth and incarnation especially. (State v. Mockus, 120 Maine 84, 1921). Similarly, the State of Massachusetts prosecuted another radi- cal for simply denying the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus(as). The same state jailed the author of a book on freemasonry for referring to Jesus(as) as immoral. Arkansas convicted the presi- dent of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism for possessing literature that ridiculed the Bible’s depiction of the creation. (New York Times, February 19, 1926).