Any type of blasphemy is utterly irresponsible and morally unjustifiable. In my blog essay below of March 31, "The Crisis of Morality" (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2015/03/the-crisis-of-morality.html), I outlined the connection between freedom and responsibility, in fact making clear that both are but two sides of the same coin. We can't think of freedom without responsibility; responsibility is void unless somebody is free to act. Consequently, human freedom is about responsible freedom. Irresponsible freedom, the arbitrariness of doing what one wills, epitomizing itself in unconstrained ego-centrism, gives only the illusion of freedom. Whoever is a prisoner of his impulses and indifferent selfishness is not free; but rather held hostage by his deficient personality, always inclined to act irresponsibly.
From my morality essay below: "True human freedom is finite freedom, limited by the conditions of social coexistence and the legitimate aspirations of all other individuals. We must not mistake freedom as independence from everything, but rather has to be considered as a choice to something."
From this quote, it becomes clear that our responsibility as human beings extends, in any given social and political context, to all other human entities and living organisms, as far as they assume significance in terms of our own actions. And the line of demarcation between our freedom, and the freedom of every other, in a most formal and universally applicable way, is what we call justice. Injustice, therefore, is the extension of one's freedom beyond the boundary of justice into the realm of somebody else's freedom, encroaching upon the entitlement to make use of their freedom. If we meet the claims of righteousness by our own volition, we exercise justice morally. Conversely, the purpose of human law, which always connects to enforcement capabilities, is to outline this line of demarcation we call justice and, when violated, to implement and enforce it. This explanation also establishes the perennial task for the legislator to determine justice in relevant existential contexts at any time and in any place. As we can see, while the application of justice is dynamic and ever-changing, as it has to consider the evolution of human coexistence, the idea of justice is timeless and unchanging. However, this also explains why positive law stipulations, which lose sight of this normative principle, can represent unjust legislature.
This concept is universal and normative and also sound in religious terms. The face of the Other is "Where God passes" (Emmanuel Levinas), bestowing upon us, in the social condition of our existence, the primary responsibility, which is ethical and arises from the equally valid claim to freedom that our fellow man asserts.
Having said this, we become aware of how utterly irresponsible, and thus unnecessary and (morally) unjustifiable, any form of blasphemy is. No matter what law allows for, never is it ethically justified to mock or ridicule other people's faith. To provoke Muslims by making fun of their Prophet Muhammad is as misplaced as provoking Christians by deriding Jesus Christ in works of satire and art. In Paris, Charlie Hebdo was misguided and irresponsible in using his satirical magazine to mock religious figures, as was Ms. Pamela Geller in her "Draw Muhammad" cartoon competition in Garland, Texas. Both were pushing their ideological and monetary aims by hiding behind a clear misinterpretation of the free speech principle, be it expressed in the form of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution or in the form of a moral-philosophical ideal.
Genuinely free and therefore utterly responsible people have long understood that responsible behavior does never exhaust itself by merely abiding by law regulations. They have comprehended the fact that the legal provision, first and foremost, establishes the conditions one doesn't have to suffer. In contrast, moral responsibility determines what we have to do and how we ought to act.
If, however, somebody engages in blasphemy under the guise of artistic creativity or political free speech, could we think of any ethical-moral severe concept that would justify killing this person? Of course not. Interestingly, the blasphemous act tells us something about the individual's moral character or group of individuals carrying it out. The reaction of the recipients of the wicked action tells us even more about their concept of humaneness.
