Despite the Riots….

Posted on March 21, 2009

Check this out:

Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone – and in response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article.

Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states have successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.

I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes – have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be “respected” – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of “adulterous” women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are “religious” issues, and it is “offensive” to talk about them.

- Johann Hari: Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote.  Read the full article here

The author touches on some deep issues in the article (which goes on quite a bit longer and which I highly recomend that ya’ll go read) but I think the best is that Freedom of Speech must be unrestricted in order to function and that the antidote to people who use it to say stupid and ridiculous things is more freedom of speech from other people who oppose them – not government or religious censorship in the name of “public decency” or any such garbage.  Public Decency laws have nothing to do with decency and everything to do with the people who control the State using morality as an excuse to silence those who threaten the status quo.

2 more videos on Religion & Secularism

Posted on July 17, 2008

2 more videos from Pat Condell on faith and religion.  These 2 are a bit more intense then he usually gets, but he’s still dead on when you strip away all the polite bullshit and look at thing the way they really are.

Catholic Morality

Posted on May 2, 2008

A news clip on a 40 year old document that’s just surfaced showing that the Vatican overtly and explicitly ordered Bishops to cover up sexual abuse by priests. Way to spread God’s love. fuckers.

and these are the bastards who claim that they have the right to pass moral judgments on the rest of us and that we should look to them for moral guidance! ha!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – belief without evidence in supernatural beings does not condone moral authority. If anything it should be a huge warning sign that the person/institution in question has forsaken reason in favor of superstition. Religion isn’t the source of morality, it’s the antithesis of morality. Morality requires a conscious effort to determine what’s right and wrong for yourself from one day to the next. I’m absolutely sure there are millions of catholics (and other religious people) who make a conscious effort to do that from day to day despite the influence of their church’s and are throughly moral people in every sense of the word, but it’s pretty clear that the people actually running the show in the Vatican are much less concerned with searching for Truth and doing what’s right then they are with protecting their own power and influence. Some might say that’s an outrageous claim, but the fact that this document was sent to every single bishop in the entire Roman Catholic church and it still took 40 years – and hundreds of thousands if not millions of abused children – to surface is pretty convincing evidence that as an institution the Catholic Church is pathologically incapable of telling right from wrong.