SPEECH AND IDEAS ARE PROTECTED LIBERTIES

Remember back in grade school, someone would say to you, your mother is a xxxx!  And then you tried to beat him up!

Children naturally take words over-seriously, not knowing that freedom of speech allows a person to say almost anything he wants, including, your mother is a . . . . !

Actually, freedom of speech flows out of freedom of ideas.  This is a connection that the Catholic Church has never understood.  It tries to make certain thoughts, "sinful."  Maybe, the priests succeeded in convincing people that this was the case for the first 1700 years of Christianity, but then came the French Enlightenment, and the idea that ideas could be sinful or harmful was tossed on the dung heap of discredited belief.

It is amazing to think that words still are the basis for hurting or killing people.   Or that insults should be met with a gun or a sword, especially when the insults are imagined as being directed to a religious prophet.

ENLIOGHTENMENT CHANGES WESTERN WORLD IN 18TH CENTURY

The western world was never the same after the French Enlightenment in the 18th Century.  Religion no longer was the absolute font of wisdom and sexual morality.  People began to think outside the box of theological construction.  Thinkers such as Diderot and Montesquieu pursued secular humanism with their La Religieuse and Lettres Persanes.  Liberty of speech and thought acquired supremacy.  Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world never had their own Enlightenment.