Socio-legal analysis of the criminal law prohibition against insulting the religious feelings of believers

The aim of this work is to determine the necessity and sufficiency of measures for the criminal legal protection of the religious feelings of believers, understood as individual human emotional processes. The subject of the research is a socio-legal analysis of the criminal law prohibition established by parts 1 and 2 of Article 148 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The study employs historical, formal-logical, and concrete-sociological methods of scientific inquiry. The results of the study indicate a lack of sufficient social and legal grounds for the existence of criminal law norms protecting the religious feelings of believers and, simultaneously, an excessiveness of such protection. The area of application for the study's results may be the sphere of improving and rationalizing criminal legislation. The novelty of the research lies in identifying the socio-historical and psychological context of the problem of protecting believers' feelings through criminal law means, which affects the necessity and sufficiency of such measures. The author concludes that the practical implementation of the criminal legal protection of believers' feelings is complicated by the socio-legal and historical context regulating this sphere. For a long period, the state consistently and persistently cultivated an antireligious worldview among citizens, within which religious feelings were viewed as an archaic model of understanding the world, hindering the progressive development of society. When addressing the issues of criminalizing acts such as those outlined in Article 148 of the Criminal Code, the legislator, it seems, must clearly understand whether the punitive state mechanism can be driven by a misalignment between the ethical and aesthetic perceptions of citizens regarding real or unreal reality and their perception of personal offense. Substituting real public interests with narrow group interests differentiates society and generates acute social contradictions. For the population of Russia, the majority of whom are former Soviet citizens and the younger generation raised by them, an instantaneous change in their atheistic and anticlerical self-identification is not possible. A state that, within the lifespan of one generation, attempts to radically transform its citizens' notions of what is proper and legislatively change ideological and worldview paradigms to their opposites deforms public and individual legal consciousness. Citizens, becoming hostages to radical social changes, may, in some cases, exhibit deviant and delinquent behavior. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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