Too busy being indicted for tax fraud?
A narrow victory for the freedom to express opinions. Worryingly, these votes were only on amendments, it seems; the Bill itself will still become law, although hopefully in as meaningless and unenforcable a way as the farcical hunting ban (another law designed purely to garner votes from disproportionately vocal minorities).
Muslims "need protection" according to ministers, just like Jews and Sikhs, who are already protected by race hate laws. The differences between race and religion have been rehearsed in the context of this Bill ad nauseam and need no further discussion here. It should be obvious to anyone capable of grasping the concept of free will that race cannot be chosen and religion, while sometimes indoctrinated from birth, is still essentially a choice: and anything that can be chosen by one can be rejected by another; and if one is free to proclaim his choice as good and righteous, the other should equally be free to declaim it as malevolent or meretricious or anything he feels it to be.
Races just are: they are literally an accident of birth. As such they should legitimately be protected from prejudice, for there can be no grounds for it. But the ideas that form a religion have no greater claim to protection than those that form a scientific theory - and a fundamental part of science is the opening of one's ideas to the community for criticism. Note that criticism, in this sense, doesn't necessarily mean negative feedback. But ideas are there to be discussed, to be thrown back and forth and sometimes to change. An idea, like Islam, that has survived for 13 centuries clearly has something a lot of people find attractive. The "protection" that ministers feel they need to give it is surely right there in the strength of the ideas. There's an essential contradiciton in the notion that deprecating an idea offends those who hold it most dear. If they're so easily piqued, the idea can't be as strong as they thought it was.
Muslims "need protection" according to ministers, just like Jews and Sikhs, who are already protected by race hate laws. The differences between race and religion have been rehearsed in the context of this Bill ad nauseam and need no further discussion here. It should be obvious to anyone capable of grasping the concept of free will that race cannot be chosen and religion, while sometimes indoctrinated from birth, is still essentially a choice: and anything that can be chosen by one can be rejected by another; and if one is free to proclaim his choice as good and righteous, the other should equally be free to declaim it as malevolent or meretricious or anything he feels it to be.
Races just are: they are literally an accident of birth. As such they should legitimately be protected from prejudice, for there can be no grounds for it. But the ideas that form a religion have no greater claim to protection than those that form a scientific theory - and a fundamental part of science is the opening of one's ideas to the community for criticism. Note that criticism, in this sense, doesn't necessarily mean negative feedback. But ideas are there to be discussed, to be thrown back and forth and sometimes to change. An idea, like Islam, that has survived for 13 centuries clearly has something a lot of people find attractive. The "protection" that ministers feel they need to give it is surely right there in the strength of the ideas. There's an essential contradiciton in the notion that deprecating an idea offends those who hold it most dear. If they're so easily piqued, the idea can't be as strong as they thought it was.
posted by Novus at 11:09
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