On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
As far as I'm aware, we've had an image of Muhammad's face in our article for many years. A desire to maintain the status quo (which is based upon our NPOV and no censorship policy) and to stand by our policy is not "fuck 'em, free speech". If issues had been raised and we had introduced the image just to get under their skin, you may be right. Ultimately, if someone thinks they would be offended by an image of Muhammad's face, why would they take a look at an article about Muhammad on a non-Muslim website without being careful?
Exactly. Let's say this is a neutral article, and it's about a religious figure. If that's the case we should present this religious figure like other religious figures. They have images. If we remove images from this article that is not neutral, because we would be treating it differently. What possible reason would we have to remove images from this article and not others? It's against the religion of the people who care most about the subject to allow others to create images of this person? It offends people who care a lot about the subject? Or, the Hadiths say to remove it. I think most people would agree we are not doing it because the Hadiths say so, but rather because people don't like it.
What possible rules can we take away from that? 1) We accept that if someone asks for something to be done based on their religion we do it, 2) We remove things when it offends people who care about the subject a lot, 3) We follow all primary and apocryphal religious texts. These seem silly. This is not an anti-Muslim view, it's a neutral one. There are a lot of things that people disagree with, some for religious reasons. I'd feel equally as strongly if a group of Jewish people complained about [[Tetragrammaton]].