Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

A secular society offers our best hope of better treatment for all – religious believers and non-believers. However freedom of speech is a fundamental part of that. Our ability to criticise (as in examine and comment) beliefs and practices and how they affect people should also be protected.

Religious, political, cultural, educational and legal practices should all equally be open to examination and comment. Harmful Islamic, Christian, Hindu behaviours or bad school teachings or hateful political speechs should equally be condemned.

Many secular supporters are increasingly worried that Western governments are conspiring to protect religions from this sort of accountability. That is plain wrong. Even though people can feel strongly about their religions and religious beliefs, that should not in some way protect them from scrutiny. I include the scrutiny of anti-religious diatribes as well.

Here is the beginning of a newspaper article expressing similar sentiments from Brisbane, Australia.

For years, the Western world has listened aghast to stories from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations of citizens jailed or executed for questioning or offending Islam.
Even the most seemingly minor infractions elicit draconian punishments. Late last year, two Afghan journalists were sentenced to prison for blasphemy because they translated the Koran into a Farsi dialect that Afghans can read. In Jordan, a poet was arrested for incorporating Koranic verses into his work. And last week, an Egyptian court banned a magazine for running a similar poem.

But now an equally troubling trend is developing in the West. … (full article)

Now for a short, sharp line from that wonderfully talented Stephen Fry:

“The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more.”
(Stephen Fry, GT) (quoted from a recent newsletter of the National Secular Society (UK))

Here is a related article from Terry Eagleton in the Guardian on the threats to liberalism:

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. This, surely, is the acid test of any liberal creed. Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. A community of the broad-minded is a pleasant place, but requires no great moral effort. The key issue is how the liberal state copes with those who reject its ideological framework. It is fashionable today to speak of being open to the “Other”. But what if the Other detests your openness as much as it does your lapdancing clubs?

Alex McCullie