Tag: Freedom of speech

  • Shut up so that you won’t have to shut up

    Another thing about Ruse’s claim.

    Most of all I detest the New Atheism because I think it is playing into the hands of the Religious Right.

    But if you decide it’s Forbidden to say certain things lest you “play into the hands of the Religious Right” then you are already playing into the hands of the Religious Right. If you give up the right to free speech as a precaution against theocracy then you are already in a theocracy. It doesn’t make sense to give up secular rights in order to hang on to secular rights.

    I don’t want the religious Right deciding what I can say. I don’t want to defer to their sensitivities or their unreasonable beliefs. I don’t want to check what I say for acceptability to the religious Right before I go public with it.

    Ruse is arguing for burning the village to save the village. No thanks; I’d rather just hang on to the village.

    Dave Barash made a similar point on Ruse’s post:

    The argument that we shouldn’t call out the incompatability between science – any science, including evolutionary biology – and religion for fear that this will compromise our constitutional right to teach the former strikes me as logically fallacious, legally naive, pedagogically vapid and intellectually cowardly.

    I couldn’t possibly comment.

  • Paul Sims on the Harry Taylor question

    I don’t disagree with Paul Sims on all points, but I do on some.

    If Taylor had been convicted for publishing the images in a magazine, or on a website, where members of the public have the choice not to buy or visit, I would strongly oppose his conviction. But this isn’t what Taylor did – he placed the images in a room provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith, away from public space.

    But why is a room provided in an airport for the religious to quietly practise their faith? Rooms aren’t provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith in supermarkets and bookshops and bus terminals and parks, so why in airports? And if such rooms are provided in airports, do they thereby become the equivalents of churches and mosques? If they are, then, again, what are they doing in airports? Why is part of a public space provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith at all? Why is part of a public space turned into a mini-mosque or church?

    Either the “prayer room” isn’t really a quasi-church or mosque, in which case Harry Taylor was just expressing his views in public, or it is, in which case Harry Taylor was making what seems to me to be a valid objection to religious encroachment on public space.

    But given the confrontational nature of the material, isn’t it entirely plausible that his aim was in fact to “harass, alarm or distress” religious believers by making them feel uncomfortable using a room provided precisely to allow them to feel comfortable practising their faith in a busy public building?

    But there again – why are rooms being provided to allow people to feel comfortable practising their faith in a busy public building? Why is this seen as desirable or necessary? Why can’t people just “practice their faith” internally until they get home or to a mosque or church?

    And it follows that the Chaplain was right to inform the police once she discovered that someone who clearly had no business in the prayer room was leaving this material in public view with a deliberateness that certainly warranted investigation.

    But there again, again – how can you have a room in a public facility where someone “has no business”? – apart from obvious exceptions like rest rooms and nursing rooms. And what are airports doing having “chaplains”? And if religious believers get to have chaplains, can we have the atheist or secular equivalent to speak for us and protect our delicate feelings and keep people out of our room?

    Having said all that – I don’t entirely disagree that what Taylor did was obnoxious. On the other hand, I don’t think being obnoxious should be illegal, much less subject to the ferocious punishment he got.

  • Be Quieters v atheists

    It reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny line – “Of course you know, this means war.”

    This means war. The grotesque punishment meted out to Harry Taylor might as well be an official government announcement that atheists have no rights.

    It is a common accusation that the “new” atheists are bullies who gang up on poor innocent bystanders like Mooney and De Dora and other Be Quieters.

    Well – not so fast. Let’s pause and consider. Who exactly is bullying whom?

    Which is the majoritarian view? Which is the conventional wisdom? Atheism? Hardly. No, the majoritarian conventional wisdom is, at the very least, that religion deserves an almost infinite amount of “respect” and that any atheist who falls short of that heightened “respect” is automatically a “New” aggressive militant brash extreme atheist and subject to being called just that by people with prominent soapboxes like…Mooney and De Dora.

    The dissenting view is a minority one, and it is somewhat odd to accuse people with minority views of bullying people with majority views. Only somewhat odd; it is of course literally possible that, say, an atheist could physically bully a theist or a Be Quieter. But to see the disagreements between Be Quieters and atheists as the latter bullying the former seems warped to me. To me it looks much more as if various prominent Be Quieters with lots of media access started shouting at atheists and calling them names, and then atheists fought back. I don’t consider fighting back “bullying.”

    This always happens when people start to feel their oats and speak up, you know. It happened with the civil rights movement, it happened with the women’s movement, it happened with the gay rights movement. There are always anxious people hopping up and down on the edges saying, “Oh dear oh dear I agree with you, I support you, I’m on your side, but for god’s sake slow down, and ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, don’t say it so loudly, be careful, watch out, keep your head down, you mustn’t be so extreme. I fully support you but be patient! Extremeness never got anyone anywhere. Be patient, be respectful, be well-dressed and punctual and neatly brushed, and in a few decades, or it may be generations, things will start to get better, I promise you.”

    Fuck that. (I should work up a “fuck that” dance to go with Stewart’s “go fuck yourself” dance.) Things are starting to get better, Harry Taylor notwithstanding, but that’s because we have been making noise rather than being quiet. Annie Laurie Gaylor says as much.

    “It used to be a lot worse,” said Ms. Gaylor, 54, an atheist whose organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recently won a suit in federal court here that declared the National Day of Prayer to be a violation of the First Amendment. “Things are changing. Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.”

    And there are more of us. Not fewer – not quieter – not more apologetic – but more, and more vocal, and more forthright. And that’s how change is made.

  • It’s even more of an outrage than I thought

    Manic street preacher reports that

    Mr Taylor seemed like a perfectly rational, intelligent and calm man who wanted to put his point across and was certainly not the “crackpot” that several bloggers, including myself to an extent, had presumed him to be. He was clearly still deeply affected by his horrendous childhood experiences of a strict Catholic upbringing by the Christian Brotherhood and was so distressed by the prospect of receiving a custodial sentence that he had to leave the courtroom midway through the hearing after nearly fainting.

    He also quotes the Telegraph with more and even nastier details:

    Judge James told him: “Not only have you shown no remorse for what you did but even now you continue to maintain that you have done nothing wrong and say that whenever you feel like it you intend to do the same thing again in the future.”…

    He was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for two years, ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work and pay £250 costs.

    Remorse – why should he show remorse for something so minor, so non-criminal, so victimless, so basically anodyne? What is all this monstrous bullying in the name of ever more abject “respect” for religion?

  • It’s an outrage

    Harry Taylor left some religion-mocking leaflets and cartoons in a “prayer room” at Liverpool airport. (Why does Liverpool airport have a “prayer room”?) For that he was charged with “three counts of causing religiously aggravated harassment” and convicted by a jury at Liverpool Crown Court. He was given a suspended six-month sentence and an Asbo forbidding him to carry anti-religious leaflets in public.

    One of the posters Taylor left at the airport depicted a smiling crucified Christ next to an advert for a brand of “no nails” glue. In another, a cartoon depicted two Muslims holding a placard demanding equality with the caption: “Not for women or gays, obviously.” A third poster showed Islamic suicide bombers at the gates of paradise being told: “Stop, stop, we’ve run out of virgins”.

    This is simply disgusting, and contemptible, and reactionary, and a scandal.