Time Immortal

The freedom to worship according to one’s conscience is one of our Nation’s most cherished values. It is the first protection offered in the Bill of Rights: that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of Religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In America, people of different faiths can live together united in peace, tolerance, and humility. We are committed to the proposition that as equal citizens of the United States of America, all are free to worship as they choose.

In an era during which an unprecedented number of nations have embraced individual freedom, we have also witnessed the stubborn endurance of religious repression. Religious freedom belongs not to any one nation, but to the world, and my Administration continues to support freedom of worship at home and abroad. On Religious Freedom Day and throughout the year, we recognize the importance of religious freedom and the vital role it plays in spreading liberty and ensuring human dignity.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 16, 2008, as Religious Freedom Day. I call on all Americans to reflect on the great blessing of religious liberty, endeavor to preserve this freedom for future generations, and commemorate this day with appropriate events and activities.

This speech was delivered from Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive nations on Earth in general, but especially in regard to religion.

I think Bush is far more clever than the persona he projects, and than most people on (and a number of folks on the Right) are willing to give him credit for.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)

Patent stupidity from the HRC:

Hatred is a feeling, and feelings, until recently, couldn’t be crimes.

“Vicious” comments are punishable by fines now, my fellow Canadians — blog accordingly, or else.

“Discrimination” is merely the act of observing that some things, ideas or people are different than others, and until the 70s was known as “common sense“.

John David Beck is probably a big jerk. Regardless, he should refuse to pay this imaginary, arbitrary fine, impossed by a kangaroo “court”, and we should all protest this latest decision by our unelected, unaccountable, self-appointed Thought Police.

Beck’s ‘crime’ was using the Internet to publish material offensive to Jews, minorities, and the disabled. The name of the website was bcwhitepride.com. Is John David Beck a nice guy? No, very likely not. Is what he was saying very nice? No, absolutely not…in fact, it wouldn’t be hard at all to say that what he was publishing was, indeed, hateful and immoral.

But was it a crime, what he did?

The Canadian Human Rights Commission evidently feels so; they would not have fined him otherwise.

But what Beck did was no crime. Ugly as all sin, yes, but not a crime. Indeed, he was exercising a right that Canada purportedly ensures for him both in its Charter and through its commitment to international human rights agreements — that of the freedom of expression.

PENCanada — a Canadian non-profit organization that lobbies on behalf of writers, internationally, who have been forcibly silenced or imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression — defines freedom of expression thusly:

What do we mean by “freedom of expression?” Many definitions are out there. However, although the wording varies, the substance is the same. In its essence, freedom of expression is the right to say freely what you please, as well as the related right to hear what others have stated. This includes the freedom to create and distribute written works, movies, pictures, songs, dances and all other forms of expressive communication.

And on their list of obstacles to freedom of expression, the fourth item (after assault, threats, and murder) is:

Censorship (State or otherwise imposed)

Canadians lobby — and in many cases risk their freedom or their lives — on behalf of writers world-wide who have been denied what even the UN recognizes as a basic human right. Will these same Canadians now lobby on behalf of their fellow countrymen, who are being subjected to what amounts to state censorship?

Now, it’s easy to lobby for the release of writers who have been arguing, themselves, for noble causes, such as writers who have been imprisoned for criticizing the Chinese government and its brutality. It’s measurably harder to lobby for the freedom from censorship of writers who have very distasteful things to say. But there’s the rub: a human right — which freedom of expression most certainly is — is only a right, and only worth defending, if it is defended in every instance it is trampled upon, and in every instance where a human being is denied that right. Defending only those people who have something nice to say is meaningless, and actually destroys the concept of freedom of expression; what we are free to express, in that paradigm, is only that which is palatable to a majority of members of society.

There’s one further implication. Yeah, they only went after a racist website; so what? Well, a lot of people confuse criticism of Islam with racism, and I do a lot of criticism of Islam on this site (well, on some days I do). Does that make me a racist? Perhaps not objectively, but in the eyes of some people it certainly does. And a ruling like this tells me that someone could only too easily send government goons to my door…or to the door of any Canadian blogger who publishes something offensive to someone else (i.e. most conservative bloggers, who are called ‘racist’ by way of greeting by many on ).

Relatedly:

Update: Welcome, nohippo readers. Thanks, Winelreid, for the link!

…Bishop [the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali] made another point about the way in which the growth of Islam has been used as a pretext to dethrone Christianity in British public life.

He said “It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain. The existence of chapels and chaplaincies in places such as hospitals, prisons and institutions of further and higher education is in jeopardy either because of financial cuts or because the authorities want “multifaith” provision, without regard to the distinctively Christian character of the nation’s laws, values, customs and culture.”

I think this probably the most worrying aspect of the problem. Diplomacy, tolerance and good sense can - in the right conditions - almost certainly bring about integration in the divided cities of this country, given enough time and a breathing space in which mass immigration is halted.

A strong Muslim minority in this country could have many good effects (I’ll come to that later). But it is important that Islam does not gain the status of Christianity, for that will mean a moral and cultural revolution of enormous force.

One of the great puzzles of modern Britain is the political left’s attitude to Islam.

Why should an atheist, sexual liberationist, morally relaxed liberal attack people such as me (as they do) for criticising Islam? They have nothing in common.

It is in fact quite simple.

The left will deal with any ally against conservative Britain. It thinks it can use Islam to further its ends, just as in the past it has allied itself with any anti-conservative, anti-patriotic cause that was going. But the alliance lasts only long enough to allow the Left to destroy what it doesn’t like.

The trouble is, Islam is more serious and determined than any of the other people whom the left have sought to use for such purposes.

And so, while intending to dethrone Christianity and make this a secular society, the left now risks helping make this an Islamic society, which - if it comes to pass - will be profoundly hostile to everything the left wants.

These are the fruits of cynicism.

As the bishop notes, and as hospital chaplaincies so clearly show, the disestablishment of Christianity has not led to the opening of Richard Dawkins reading rooms in our hospitals, but in the increasing creation of multi-faith rooms which have an increasingly Islamic character, thanks to the fervour and devotion of Muslims, and the fading faith of the Christian churches.

Likewise the removal of Christianity from the state schools may well end in the existence if an increasing number of state schools which are in effect Islamic, while the official national religion, Christianity, goes neglected and untaught.

A Christian country would have kept the chapels, and allowed and encouraged the opening of separate rooms for other faiths.

I haven’t room or time here for an argument about the respective merits of Christianity and Islam, though it would be interesting to have one.

But I finish with this point.

There is no doubt that the laws, institutions, customs, language, marital arrangements, relaxations, family structure, even the diet of this country are the result of centuries of Christianity.

If it became a Muslim country, all these things would change, some beyond recognition.

If we want that to happen, and deliberately choose it, then all well and good.

Islam, as I stated earlier, has many admirable characteristics and would surely be better than total Godlessness, but how foolish to let it happen by mistake, and then regret it when it was too late.

The militant ‘war on terror’ sorts who inveigh against Islam still seem to think that the Maxim gun, or the CIA, or MI5, or airstrikes on Afghanistan, or invasions of Iraq and Iran, will defeat this powerful ideology.

The anti-British left seem to think, by contrast, that Islam is a pet pussycat which they can toy with, set on their enemies for while, and lay aside.

Both are wrong.

If you prefer our sort of society to an Islamic one, then you have to recognise that the good things about our society come from Christianity - and the more we throw those good things aside and the more we dismantle Christianity in our state, our schools, our culture in general, the weaker our society will become and the more likely it will be to embrace Islam - which suffers from no doubts about its rightness and is not in the least bit afraid of Professor Dawkins.

When I speak of atheism as the greatest threat to human liberty, I do so for two reasons. One is that, of course, if one is to look at the lessons of history, one observes an essentially 1-to-1 correlation between the act of a regime making atheism an explicit policy of the state and the engagement of that regime in murderous, repressive actions against its own people. The gulag is, really, the most logical outcome of officially-mandated state secularism.

But second to that is that atheism, in those states which drift toward a secular character without ever officially enshrining atheism as the ‘religion’ of the land, also serves as an enabler. Faced with the hopelessness that the materialist philosophy houses at its core, many people who have grown up in essentially secular lifestyles are finding, more and more, the need to discover meaning in their existence. And we see, in Europe especially, that they are finding it, in droves, in religion. Fortunate are those that find their way into Catholicism, or even into some of the various noble and respectable forms of Protestantism that have emerged from European tradition. Less fortunate are those whose thirst for meaning finds its fulfillment in the confidence and swagger of the more radicalized forms of Islam now sweeping through that same continent, and indeed through all the world.

Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and the same can be said for the spiritual vacuum that the secular worldview causes in the human soul. So not only is applied atheism a threat, but so is ‘merely philosophical’ atheism, for it serves as an enabler for other violent pathologies to insert themselves into Western societies.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)