I hate to disappoint you again with a post without any beautiful pictures of the Swiss Alps, but once again something else is on my mind. I am reading a most unlikely book and though I am only 27 pages into it I am pleasantly surprised. “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins was sitting on the dining room table and I just couldn’t resist a peak.
I learned the lesson once again not to judge a book by its cover, for despite the bold title, cover design, and ringing endorsements full of scorn for believers, the inside hold words with a pleasant tone, respect for the reader’s intelligence, and reasonable arguments. I have been searching for reason from “the other side” for a long time now. Have I found such a book? We’ve yet to see, but I’ve already learned a few things.
Dawson not only believes God doesn’t exist (I’ve yet to read his arguments for that) but that religion is bad for society. He proposes a world without religion (since there is unquestionably no evidence for God) and sees a world without war, or at least with far less evil. Never mind that someone of any other religious belief could propose a world that only followed the their God (since their God is of course the true one) and envision the same happy results. Despite the fact that he appears incapable of seeing the elements of faith that he employs to insist on his views being correct, he has some excellent points.
One excellent point is an objection to the unfair privilege of religion as untouchable verses any other personal conviction. He sights a case where parents sued for the right for their son to wear a T-shirt to school that said “Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!” Dawson states
“The parents might have had a conscionable case if they had based it on the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. But they didn’t . . . [they] appealed to the constitutional right to freedom of religion.”
They won the case, and Dawson makes a good point. He doesn’t just beat on Christians (which I would say is the most permissible religious group in our society to pick on, though he claims atheist are the most persecuted!). His main illustration is the reaction to the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. If Dawkins is right, the most offensive of the “cartoons” weren’t cartoons and weren’t from Denmark, but were added to the set by Danish Islamists who showed them all together on a tour of the Middle East. In conclusion Dawkins writes
“I am not in favor of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defense. What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect?”
It appears that religious prejudice is specifically sanctioned while any other prejudice is not. I now see a side I had not understood before and how some might feel threated by Christians specifically. However, I find what is in the ellipsis of the first quote extremely important. It actually reads,
“The parents might have had a conscionable case if they had based it on the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. But they didn’t: indeed, they couldn’t, because free speech is deemed not to include ‘hate speech.’:
The point is they couldn’t appeal to the First Amendment because they have already lost their First Amendment rights. Maybe religious groups appeal on the grounds of freedom of religion because it is all they have left.
Let me be clear, I don’t agree with that offensive T-shirt. I believe our society should condemn ‘hate speech’ in that we give it no audience so it dies in obscurity, but we should not impinge on the right to free speech. If you legislate that kind of morality, where will it stop? As Noam Chomsky said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
If Dawson really believes in the First Amendment then I completely agree with him and want to fight to get that right back. If he thinks the problem is too much religious freedom rather than not enough freedom for other groups (and so wants to let the government meddle with religious affairs even more than they already have), then I’m afraid I’m going to have to fight for my right of religious freedom as the only scrap of freedom I have left.
