Oppression within religious communities  Blasphemy laws can be used to enforce oppressive and exclusionary practices within religions. The proposition side have gone out of their way to highlight the harm that can be done to religions by actors external to the religious group. However, this analysis does not fit so comfortably with the problems that occur when a member of a religious community wishes to make controversial and divisive statements about their own religion.  Dissenters within a religious group may often face exclusion from their communities and hostility from friends and family. The current law of western liberal democracies ensures that social disapproval does not transform into threats or violent conduct directed at these individuals. In this way, liberal democratic states recognise the right to speak freely without fear of violent or disproportionate repercussions, irrespective of the social and cultural standards enforced by the community that an individual might belong to.  By criminalising blasphemy, proposition run the risk of discouraging religious dissent within religious communities. Heterodox thinkers who want to share their views on their religion with other believers, must now run the dual risks of effective exile from a social environment that they consider to be their home and prosecution by the state. Anti-blasphemy laws would give communities the ability to indirectly harm and intimidate anyone holding controversial opinions, by directing state power- in the form of prosecutors and the police- against them. Further, anti-blasphemy laws might simply discourage free expression of this type, the prospect of prosecution being sufficient to discourage controversial statements and discussions.  Religions- even if based on divine revelation- develop through human debate, thought and discussion. The proposition position would harm the development of religions if it were realised. It would balance the environment of collective discourse within a religion in favour of conservative and reactionary thinkers.  It should also be noted that it is the state which drafts the law and its organs then apply it, deciding which cases will or will not be prosecuted. It might be enforced unevenly by the government, thus favouring certain religions and victimizing others. It could be used to limit the expression of unpopular ideas, which are the ones that need the most protection, as has happened in the past with the work of artists criticizing the social and political mores of the time with previous cases showing their books being banned from libraries or their paintings from art galleries. Take for example the banning of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in numerous states around the world. (Bald, M. 2006)