Profanity, also known as swearing, cursing, or cussing involves the use of notionally offensive words for a variety of purposes, including to demonstrate disrespect or negativity, to relieve pain, to express a strong emotion, as a grammatical intensifier or emphasis, or to express informality or conversational intimacy. In many formal or polite social situations, it is considered impolite, and in some religious groups it is considered a sin. Profanity includes slurs, but there are many insults that do not use swear words.
Blasphemy refers to an insult that shows contempt, disrespect or lack of reverence concerning a deity, an object considered sacred, or something considered inviolable. Some religions regard blasphemy as a crime, including insulting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in Islam, speaking the "sacred name" in Judaism, and blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is "eternal sin" in Christianity. It was also a crime under English common law.
Sacrilege is the violation or injurious treatment of a sacred object, site or person. This can take the form of irreverence to sacred persons, places, and things. When the sacrilegious offence is verbal, it is called blasphemy, and when physical, it is often called desecration. In a more general sense, any transgression against what is seen as the virtue of religion would be a sacrilege, and so is coming near a sacred site without permission.
Laws prohibiting blasphemy and blasphemous libel in the United Kingdom date back to the medieval times as common law and in some special cases as enacted legislation. The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2024. Equivalent laws remain in Northern Ireland.
"Jesus wept" is a phrase famous for being the shortest verse in the King James Version of the Bible, as well as in many other translations. It is not the shortest in the original languages. The phrase is found in the Gospel of John, chapter 11, verse 35. Verse breaks—or versification—were introduced into the Greek text by Robert Estienne in 1551 in order to make the texts easier to cite and compare.
The Nonintercourse Act is the collective name given to six statutes passed by the United States Congress in 1790, 1793, 1796, 1799, 1802, and 1834 to set boundaries of American Indian reservations. The various acts were also intended to regulate commerce between White Americans and citizens of Indigenous nations. The most notable provisions of the act regulate the inalienability of aboriginal title in the United States, a continuing source of litigation for almost 200 years. The prohibition on purchases of Indian lands without the approval of the federal government has its origins in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Confederation Congress Proclamation of 1783.
In Christian hamartiology, eternal sin, the unforgivable sin, unpardonable sin, or ultimate sin is the sin which will not be forgiven by God. One eternal or unforgivable sin, also known as the sin unto death, is specified in several passages of the Synoptic Gospels, including Mark 3:28–29, Matthew 12:31–32, and Luke 12:10, as well as other New Testament passages including Hebrews 6:4–6, Hebrews 10:26–31, and 1 John 5:16.
Psalm 89 is the 89th psalm of the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever". In the slightly different numbering system used in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate translations of the Bible, this psalm is Psalm 88. In Latin, it is known as "Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo". It is described as a maschil or "contemplation".
Sworn testimony is evidence given by a witness who has made a commitment to tell the truth. If the witness is later found to have lied whilst bound by the commitment, they can often be charged with the crime of perjury. The types of commitment can include oaths, affirmations and promises which are explained in more detail below. The exact wording of the commitments vary from country to country.
American Booksellers Ass'n, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323, aff'd mem., 475 U.S. 1001 (1986), was a 1985 court case that successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, as enacted in Indianapolis, Indiana the previous year.
In United States law, a federal enclave is a parcel of federal property within a state that is under the "Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the United States". While these enclaves, which are used for all the many federal governmental purposes, such as post offices, arsenals, dams, road, etc., and usually are owned by the government. The United States in many cases has received similar jurisdictional authority over privately owned properties which it leases, or privately owned and occupied properties which are located within the exterior boundaries of a large area as to which a state has ceded jurisdiction to the United States.
The origins of the United States' defamation laws pre-date the American Revolution; one influential case in 1734 involved John Peter Zenger and established precedent that "The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel. Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states. The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". Later Supreme Court cases barred strict liability for libel and forbade libel claims for statements that are so ridiculous as to be obviously facetious. Recent cases have added precedent on defamation law and the Internet.
Sugarman v. Dougall, 413 U.S. 634 (1973), was a case before the United States Supreme Court.
"Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain" is the second or third of God's Ten Commandments to man in Judaism and Christianity.
In Ireland, "publication or utterance of blasphemous matter", defamatory of any religion, was a criminal offence until 17 January 2020. It was a requirement of the 1937 Constitution until removed after a 2018 referendum. The common law offence of blasphemous libel, applicable only to Christianity and last prosecuted in 1855, was believed to fulfil the constitutional requirement until a 1999 ruling that it was incompatible with the constitution's guarantee of religious equality. The Defamation Act 2009 included a provision intended to fill the lacuna while being "virtually impossible" to enforce, and no prosecution was made under it. The 2009 statute increased controversy, with proponents of freedom of speech and freedom of religion arguing for amending the constitution. After the 2018 constitutional amendment, a separate bill to repeal the 2009 provision and residual references to blasphemy was enacted in 2019 by the Oireachtas (parliament) and came into force in 2020. The Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989, which includes religion among the characteristics protected from incitement to hatred, remains in force.
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression v. Strickland, 560 F.3d 443, is a decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals involving a constitutional challenge—both facially and as-applied to internet communications—to an Ohio statute prohibiting the dissemination or display to juveniles of certain sexually-explicit materials or performances. The Sixth Circuit panel declined to resolve the constitutional issue but, instead, certified two questions to the Ohio Supreme Court regarding the interpretation of the statute. The Ohio Supreme Court answered both questions affirmatively and placed a narrowing construction on the statute. Since the Ohio Supreme Court's decision, the Sixth Circuit has not reheard the case.
People v. Aguilar, 2 N.E.3d 321, was an Illinois Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Aggravated Unlawful Use of a Weapon (AUUF) statute violated the right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The Court stated that this was because the statute amounted to a wholesale statutory ban on the exercise of a personal right that was specifically named in and guaranteed by the United States Constitution, as construed by the United States Supreme Court. A conviction for Unlawful Possession of a Firearm (UPF) was proper because the possession of handguns by minors was conduct that fell outside the scope of the Second Amendment's protection.
Antanas "Anthony" Bimba Jr. (1894–1982) was a Lithuanian-born American newspaper editor, historian, and radical political activist. An editor of a number of Lithuanian-language Marxist periodicals published in the United States, Bimba is best remembered as the defendant in a sensational 1926 legal case in which he was charged with sedition and violation of a 229-year-old law against blasphemy in the state of Massachusetts.
Michael X. Mockus was a Lithuanian-American philosopher and former Unitarian minister. Mockus is remembered for having been convicted in nationally publicized trials for having violated archaic Connecticut and Maine state laws prohibiting blasphemy as a result of his public challenges of certain points of Christian orthodox religious belief.
Holmby Productions, Inc. v. Vaughn, 177 Kan. 728 (1955), 282 P.2d 412, is a Kansas Supreme Court case in which the Kansas State Board of Review, the state censorship board, and the attorney defendants appealed the decision of the District Court of Wyandotte County. It was found that the law that allowed the board to deny a request for a permit allowing United Artists to show the motion picture The Moon is Blue in Kansas theaters was unconstitutional, and an injunction was issued prohibiting the defendants from stopping the exhibition of the film in Kansas.
