'Religious freedom' sends the wrong message to the wrong people

[rug]

Doug Sanders
Oct 6, 2012 7:39AM EDT

It’s time to speak out against religious freedom.

Or, to be precise, against its promotion and the way it’s used. To those of us who believe freedoms should be absolute and robust, and are ardently opposed to the persecution of people for their beliefs, this might sound like an odd proposition. What could be more benign than another freedom?

But Canada is within days of opening a federal Office of Religious Freedom (within the Department of Foreign Affairs), and it’s becoming apparent that this isn’t a good idea for our country or the world. In fact, it’s very likely to contribute to the very problems we hope it might help solve.

We might as well face it: When groups of people exercise their self-proclaimed religious freedoms, terrible things tend to happen. The phrase “religious freedom” is evoked by Hindu nationalist parties in India to justify killing rampages in Muslim neighbourhoods, by the Buddhist-majority government of Sri Lanka to imprison members of the country’s Hindu minority, by Jewish religious parties in Israel to call for the denial of Israeli Muslims’ full citizenship rights, and by crowds of Salafists and Islamists in Egypt bent on ruining the lives of Coptic Christians.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/religious-freedom-sends-the-wrong-message-to-the-wrong-people/article4591927/

[LARED]

1. Can anyone say slippery slope?

Last edited Sat Oct 6, 2012, 07:26 PM - Edit history (1)

That’s why the most important religious freedom is freedom from religion. This applies not just to those without religion. It’s even more important for believers, who are most often persecuted by other faiths. In those examples of persecution listed above, it’s protection from a religion – not more freedom for believers – that’s needed.

Seems to me that freedom from religion is no great distance from freedom from someone's opinion.

If you decide to beat someone up or harass them because they are Christian or Muslim is it any different than beating someone up because they are black or white, Republican or Democratic, Yankee fan or Red Socks fan. The point is there already exist manifold laws dealing with criminal behavior no matter what the motivation happens to be.

These "great ideas" never seem to work as intended.

[Humanist_Activist]

4. You do realize that he's mostly talking about making it legal to beat up Christians, Muslims...

or other faiths because of religious "freedom" by other faiths. Its not a slippery slope either, its evident already in many places in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

[LARED]

5. I didn't get that out of his article

Did you mean to to say illegal not legal?

[Humanist_Activist]

7. Sorry I wasn't clearer, bad set of words, what I meant was that the term "religious freedom" is...

used as a club to oppress people of other faiths(or none) by the people proclaiming such. An extreme example would be much of the oppression of religious minorities in the places he mentioned. A milder form would be the Catholic Church complaining about "religious freedom" being violated in the United States because of the rules of the ACA.

Freedom FROM religion is exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak, you are free from having to follow the restrictions or rules of other religions, and you afford others that same right in relation to your own religion. You are free to set up such rules for yourself, or join others in doing so, as long as it doesn't violate the freedoms of others.

[LARED]

8. I agree with you, but

my point was that creating laws to protect a new right called 'freedom from religion' is a slippery slope. If in the name of freedom of religion you oppress someone as identified in the article you most likely have broken a law. You should be persecuted under that law, not under a law created to protect freedom from religion.

Creating new laws that protect freedom from religion is fought with problems even identifying what that means and how should courts interpret these laws. I fear this would quickly become nothing more than a quagmire of conflicting ideals resulting in a sort of policy that suppresses freedom of religious expression or even possibly spill over in constrianig freedom of other expressions.

[Humanist_Activist]

9. Actually, from what I read in the article, he's saying the same thing about freedom of religion...

laws. He calls both unnecessary when freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech are protected, then freedom from or of religion is redundant.

[dimbear]

2. It is interesting to note how closely explosions and religions are associated.

I suppose it's because most religions don't have standing armies, but it goes way back.

See the "Jesuit plot." Or the "King David Hotel bombing." Or "Air India Flight 182."

[SarahM32]

3. A further quote gets to the crux of the matter.

For the ardent religious believer and the organized, hierarchical religious organization, “religious freedom” often refers to the right to restrict the freedoms of others, or to impose one’s religion on the larger world.

That’s why the most important religious freedom is freedom from religion. This applies not just to those without religion. It’s even more important for believers, who are most often persecuted by other faiths. In those examples of persecution listed above, it’s protection from a religion – not more freedom for believers – that’s needed

.

Now that's saying what the message I promote says -- that the Founding Fathers of the U.S.A. wrote Article 6 and the 1st Amendment of the Constitution not only to ensure religious freedom and freedom of religion, but also to ensure freedom from Theocracy.

In spite of that, however, the "religious right" in America acts as if freedom of religion means the freedom to impose their religion on us all. From the Reaganite "Moral Majority" to the "Christian Coalition" to the current mobs led by all the hypocrites from Pat Robertson to the revisionist "historian" David Barton, they insist that the Founding Fathers wanted America to be "The Land of Jesus." And their bigotry and discrimination based on religion has steadily increased over the last 30 years.

That's why Americans need to learn how the Founding Fathers really felt about religion.

[E_Pluribus_Unitarian]

6. Religious freedom also should mean freedom "within" religion.

On my Faith of the Free Facebook page, I've posted a quote by Soren Kierkegaard that says "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." So much of religion is so authoritarian that even talking about religion to many people comes down a back-and-forth over unquestioned, prepackaged beliefs. Little "free and open inquiry" goes into the process. But if freedom is such a good thing, then why shouldn't it treated with the sincerity that it deserves, and applied even to the way we seek and compare notes about ultimate things?

One of the leaders in my UU faith, John Wolf, suggests that what we share is a "hermeneutic of religious freedom" which assumes that we all have the potential and the right to seek our own "ultimate truths", in our own way, at our own pace. He added that "In practice, it is John Stuart Mill’s philosophy bound by covenant membership: The truth never suffered from an open argument. We are all souls searching for truth in diversity." In other words, we believe that even religious freedom needs a strong institutional advocacy and local communities (by whatever name) for the non-authoritarian sharing of those personal quests for greater truth and meaning. I think that one of our challenges is to "reclaim religious freedom"...to insist to the dogmatists and authoritarians (on all sides) that any freedom that doesn't include a "freedom within" (a place for honesty, doubt, humility and critical questioning) is just a cheap substitute.