Religious Freedom Versus Freedom Of Speech, the unstopable force meets the immovable Options

[bryden42]

Ok, So I am all up for free speech and whilst not a great fan of religion I also up for anyone believing in whatever they wish but an interesting situation arose for a teacher friend of mine the other week and I thought that I would field it to you guys to discuss.

It goes like this:
Teacher is asked by small girl (who is a Pentacostalist christian)
"how long can someone hold their breath for?"
Teacher (with alarm bells ringing) asks
"Why do you want to know?"
Little girl replies
"last Sunday the pastor was telling us about jonah and the whale, And I was wondering how long jonah could have held his breath for"
Teacher replies
"I think that that story is meant to be allegorical"
Small child gets Irate and says
"No its not our pastor says so, and he said that anyone that saidit was is going to hell"

Now there are a number of things that concern me about this story (Respect for elders and the brainwashing of small children not withstanding) what concerns me here though is the fact that after the outburst the teacher in question left the conversation and walked away, Why? because of fear of losing a job. This leads me to the question where do you draw the line between being able to say what you want despite the religious implications and religion being able to control what is said, for example the Hamas party has recently said that it does not recognise Israel and its right to exist or believe what it does (not an exact quote but deffinately the upshot of).
Of course I don't recognise any religions right to tell me what I can or cannot say or do does this make me an extremist? (of course I have enough respect for others beliefs to live and let live).

Any body else any thoughts?

[Astarael]

The demand for beheadings is far too extreme. I can sympathize with a bit of righteous anger at first, but it should have settled down into most of the offended people grumbling a bit and perhaps writing occasional letters to the editor of the newspaper that published the cartoons originally. There likely would have been a few die-hard fanatics screaming about sinful the whole business was, but that sort of whinging happens every time someone gets snarky with any religion. This kind of widespread rage shouldn't be continuing for so long, and the people who stirred it up originally were being very stupid.
I just read another article about it, and apparently some protesters set the Norwegian embassy in Syria on fire. This has reached the point of unreasonable anger, and I'm not really sure what would be best to settle the crisis at this point.