Protectionism
Let’s think a little about this idea that there is a tension or conflict or contradiction between freedom of speech and religious freedom.
What is meant by religious freedom? One, individual belief. No problem. However, that does not entail protection and insulation from disagreement – from awarness of other people who don’t share one’s beliefs. That is not how we understand freedom. My freedom to run up and down hooting and waggling my fingers does not mean that other people can’t laugh and point and make remarks. Freedom just means freedom, it doesn’t mean freedom plus nice pleasant soothing feelings of calm self-satisfaction free of all disruptive challenge. If you want insulation from awareness of people who don’t agree with or unconditionally admire your religion, you have to enter a closed religious order. You have to insulate yourself, you can’t call on the state or international law to insulate you. Two, practice. That’s different, because it may affect other people (and other sentient beings). Familiar stuff – drugs, animal slaughter, education, pacifism and the draft, medical attention, underage marriage, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, caste systems, female subordination, punishment, law – and a great deal more. Practice is where religious freedom really can be in tension with other very important values and commitments, which is why disputes over the tension often end up in court. But the idea that freedom of speech and religious freedom are in tension seems to be about belief rather than practice. It seems to be about claiming that one is not free to believe what one wants to unless other people are prevented from interfering with that freedom by mentioning their refusal to believe the same thing. But an irrational belief that depends for its survival on the assent of everyone else is no kind of irrational belief at all; it’s just sissy stuff. Surely real zealots ought to be embarrassed at themselves for turning to the UN to help them hang on to their beliefs! True ‘faith’ comes from within, and laughs to scorn the idea that it needs outside help – especially from the UN of all places.
Exactly. It’s just opportunistic hypocrisy to use liberal principles in support of a religion, if that religion then demands that illiberal rules be placed on others.
The present case of “apostasy” in Afghanistan is an excellent illustration of freedom of speech vs religious freedom.
The Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HC25Df02.html) reports the thoughts of a “renowned Muslim intellectual”:
“For a Muslim to change his religion, ‘he will have to be executed because it is related to an ontological debate’.
” ‘If somebody at one point affirms the truth [belief in God] and then rejects it or denies it, it would jeopardize the whole paradigm of truth. This is such a big offense that the penalty can only be death.’ ”
And there is more, equally fascinating, in that article.
I don’t know whether this is this one guy’s raving, or actually part of the beliefs of all Muslims, but it seems to me to bespeak a profound insecurity. This particular intellectual, at least, seems to be so unsure of the truth of his faith that he has to threaten those who want to stray from the fold with death.
Yeah. This whole business of the appropriation of liberal ideas and hoorah-words for purposes that are antithetical to those very ideas and words – is very annoying and sinister, not least because it works. We gotta resist.
“‘he will have to be executed because it is related to an ontological debate'”
Boy – that’s one for the ages.
Think of all the philosophy dictionaries and encyclopedias that need updating, now we know that ontological debate carries the death penalty.
If what’s at stake is “the whole paradigm of truth”, then surely it’s not an “ontological debate” but an epistemolgical one? I’ve no problem with slaughtering people over philosophical matters, but let’s at least be right about the particulars.
Hyes but Tom, can one not say that hin a very hreal sense, the whole parhadigm of truth is hindeed a reification of the ontological debate? Or, to put it hanother way, does hepistemology not has it were echo ontology? I put it to you.
You got me there. I’ll just go and behead myself…
And if fundamentalist religion weren’t so anti-science, it’d be able to bring genetic engineering to such perfection that they’d develop a strain of non-believing humans who behead themselves. Presumably, they’d have to start with non-believing rats…
“And if fundamentalist religion weren’t so anti-science, it’d be able to bring genetic engineering to such perfection that they’d develop a strain of non-believing humans who behead themselves. “
Why should they bother? They are outbreeding us anyway. The future belongs to Islam and fundamentalist Christianity because the followers of these ideologies are the ones having children.
Freedom! they cry – demanding
the freedom to deny mine.
Tolerance! they plead – tolerance
for a religion that wants to kill me.
And echoing the thoughts of Ali Sina:
The secular west must learn to compromise with Islam: only prison beatings and not death for unbelievers; only two wives.
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