In the wake of this mornings tragedy in London, I find this post from Right Reason to be provocative and important. Lydia McGrew wrote her post before the London bombing about deeply problematic situation of the two pastors in Australia. These Pastors will go to jail rather than apologizing (and pledging endless silence with respect to similar criticisms of Islam) for their alleged vilification of Islam in violation of a new law. McGrew nicely summarizes the condemning evidence against the pastors when she says “Two of the statements that resulted in this conviction were that Islam endorses mistreating women and that Muslims would like to make Australia a Muslim country.” The pastors claim they are telling the truth and that the particular law they are being jailed for needs to change. The law is apparently being used to silence non-adherents critical speech about religion.
Certainly free speech is in danger and religious freedom is questioned as well, but might there be more at stake? McGrew’s critical point is that truth is not an issue in the debate. Is this a fair expression of Islamic thinking? If so, then Islam should be on trial, and if that is not appropriate then the law should be reconsidered. Further, if truth is not important to the law, then the “law” has crossed the line and become cog in the great machine of totalitarianism. The question follows “how much more of the machine will be built?”. Ironically the UK may pass a similar bill adding another cog to the machine.
FYI: The pastors’ website is http://www.catchthefire.com.au/, but at the very least read McGrew’s insightful post.
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Thursday, July 07, 2005
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"Certainly free speech is in danger and religious freedom is questioned as well, but might there be more at stake?"
is semi-correct. Free speech and religious freedom is in danger for Christians and to some degree, non-liberals. All sorts of hateful speech come from non-Christians and it's tolerated because there is an acceptance of bigotry toward the majority--in this case Christians.
Muslims can call for the destruction of the Jews and Western way of life and little of it gets reported or criticized. Christians make a peep and they're screwed. Laws are legislated to fight the so called "hate speech" by the Christian and claim it applies to all. Let's see how many, if any non-Christians get charged with this crime. [We see this with hate crime laws here in America. There was an overwhelming assumption that the problem with hate crimes came exclusively from whites but that is not the case. Whites are charged but minority groups are not. I'm not talking only about race. If a black person beats up a homosexual, there is much relcutance by the law enforment to pursue it as a "hate crime". It will only be pursued as a regular crime--as it should be. There is an overwhelming disparity. You can look it up.]
We see this even in America. In public schools we can't even mention anything about Christianity without the ACLU filing a law suit but educating the kids about non-Christian religions is never challenged by the Left.
It's not about tolerance. It's only done through the guise of "tolerance". It's about the hatred of the Right, namely Christianity.
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