Comment by madaxe_again
4 months ago
I mean, yes, these are religious texts, but if we are to judge them on a level with other content, they absolutely warrant a warning.
The abrahamic religious texts intersect largely around the Old Testament, which is a smorgasbord of genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse of all flavours, and all the rest.
I guess the question is whether religious texts should be exempt from content warnings, in which case one should expect films like “The Passion of the Christ” to be available for general audiences, not R.
Exempting religious content makes no sense in any context to me. It's all human generated content.
Apart from anything else, the Song of Solomon (which I actually like!) or Ezekiel 23:20 would probably trigger some kind of automated detection system. Not to mention the legitimately horrible parts like Deuteronomy 22:23.
From an App Store rating perspective, this particularly affects children, which leads to a much more focused question:
Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?
This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.
> Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
>> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
Like wikipedia?
Any world history source, such as Wikipedia, yes. (If that’s not the reason you brought it up, I only saw your first two words in the discussion; perhaps your reply was truncated unexpectedly?)
This definitely ties into a weakness in the U.S. speech laws — we rarely view obscenity as relevant to non-erotic topics, so our social edifices are ill-equipped at considering this topic at all: by social assumption, a non-erotic text such as the old testament bible is unconsciously assumed exempt from obscenity concerns even though it is blatantly NSFW. (I can’t speak to how other countries handle this topic.)
wikipedia provides a factual description of those, bible shows it as actions of a perfect god
If you see this as the innocent equivalent of a “content warning,” then I would expect more apps to be flagged. The commenters in that thread point out numerous apps or games that are obviously built around content that is not appropriate for children.
Perhaps this is the only “think of the children” content warning they have, and therefore it seems odd when applied to religious texts. It’s like a movie rating system where there are only G and X ratings. If it’s not G, it gets lumped in with other stuff, including X-rated porn, and the only way to find it in our App Store is to allow for X-rated content.
Seems like a bug at best, but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to think this is an “aww shucks, rules are rules” application of some policy.
Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
Uncle Tom's cabin actually should be banned based on their rules, but not because of its depiction of slavery, for the ending, where Uncle Tom refuses to rat out the slave women he helped escape and in turn is brutally whipped to death, whilst forgiving those who are whipping him. The violence and gore in the ending is enough regardless of the rest of the book.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
Again, distinguishing "advocacy" as your criteria for censorship is censoring on interpretation. I know you are sincere in your opinions about this, they won't change, and I even share them.
They are still our opinions. We share the planet with people who think, equally inflexibly, that the bible does not advocate for slavery and genocide. And the way we do that without resorting to terrible violence (including slavery and genocide!) is by agreeing to disagree by not censoring each other.
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