Friday, March 9, 2012

Blog Event: Greatest Threat to Religious Freedom?

Like Leslie, I'm going to have to go with radical Islam.

I'm worried about the state of theocracy in the U.S., but I can't say that I consider it a legitimate threat yet. Islam, on the other hand, is already a theocratic sitation in many countries. Islamic states like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia exist, with little to no separation between church and state. It's not illegal for non-Muslims to live in these countries, but it is not permitted for Muslims to convert.

So, there's that.

While that's the case, I don't think I can advocate any course of action to take. It's not simply the case of an evil dictatorship stripping religious liberty from the people. The people seem to want at least some restriction of expression and religious demonstration. I was reading a poll several months ago regarding which "democratic" scenarios they would like to see permitted in the future. At the far end of the scale was something like "People should be allowed to mock the Prophet Muhammed". No takers, at all. 0%. Some kinds of expression are simply too much to be allowed.

So, in as much as Islam is the chief offender, it's hard to get too worked up on it, except when Islam leaves it's own home territory to bomb cartoonists and journalists. That's not understandable or acceptable.

That's all I got.

1 comment:

  1. I want to make clear that while I do think that radical Islam poses the greatest threat to religious freedom in the world today, I think that the threat it poses is limited, and I expect that it will soon largely disappear. I think that the war for religious freedom has pretty much won, at least in the sense that there aren't many forces that suppress such freedom through law or violence today. However, I think that lack of education, lack of free thinking, lack of intellectual curiosity, and the moral and intellectual failures of organized religion all conspire to keep people from thinking clearly about religion. That may sound odd. Normally one thinks that the lack of intellectual curiosity etc. aids organized religion, rather than hindering it. I would say that it does both, for different people, and in different ways. There could be perfect freedom of thought the world - I'm still not sure that better would make more reasonable decisions about religion.

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