The lastest months have seen a fierce internal struggle of the multiple intellects within my greater intellect. Fierce, an inconsiderate word perhaps, but it has cost me time, drained energy and lost me a twinge of sympathy within a few souls who didn't really agree, or cared to understand. I now am of the opinion that freedom of religion is a superfluous fiction, by which I do not mean to say that religious speech or absence of the same is not worthy our protection, by every force necessitated by the enemies of this most noble right, which indeed goes beyond the right to worship a supreme being. My dilemma is rather put like this; presume we have the means and rights to express, unrestrained, our opinions through free speech, press, assembly, opinion, movement and so forth but with no specific paragraph as to where religion is concerned, and then conjure a scenario in which one or many individuals are suppressed from participating in a religious gathering.
Can you really conjur it? All the freedoms mentioned may, and factually have been restrained and are so today in every country on earth, if yet subject to a court of law (or individuals over which such judgment will loom) but even a cell offers freedom of movement from the bunk bed to the altar and neither literature or (save for the issue of noise or commotion) prayer should countenance further restriction of a liberty already closely cropped, not in my opinion.
Can you not? If so, will you one day be prepared to claim freedom of religion as rationally unjustified? The concept to which I strive to arrive is to denote, as the US Bill of Rights did in 1791, the concept of religion and its justification(s) in the public sphere to an entirely private matter, freedom of religion altered to the almost as famous but far less invoked issue of separation between state (i.e. legislation) and religion ("church" is not merely enough - all matters of faith ought to be included, including the ghastly idea of banning towers related to specific denominations; yes, I mean the one so grievously undertaken by my favorite democracy), a "wall of separation", as of Jefferson's words to the Connecticut Methodists who so anxiously and asked for his support in the matter. In order to safeguard against laws related to such matters the issue of faith must be mentioned in the constitution in the first place, a most viable Catch-22 and exception which I will hereafter ignore, but which is as utterly necessary as it ought to be alone in that regard.
Faith is an argument for many things, still, and do not believe that fact is restricted to the areas of the world where it is an imperative. For those familiar with the (possibly Rawlsian) concept of positive and negative liberties, I would put it into one, single pitiful sentence as follows; the negative rights vested in the freedom of religion, or freedom of worship as it might more humiliously be defined, are already vested in every other liberty commonly mentioned (except by their thus self-evident opponents). The concept of being allowed to express any thought or notion, if yet not in every way conceivable, just as that of bodily integrity and protection against its unwarranted violation both make a very strong defense against any attempt to circumvent or hinder a religious or spiritual gathering, just as much as a political or social one. If, however, faith is invoked to safeguard the compliance of others for exercising self-defined positive rights, I will not care to defend the right of its application, as that does precisely harm and attack that same openness and concept of bodily integrity with a bulwark of "respect" for divinely mandated oppression and bigotry. The right not to see or hear me invoke disgusting, insulting denials of the credibility or plausability or desirability of such holy things as - divine revelation, virginal procreation, men who descend into caves or their sub-conscious to converse with archangels, goblins, sprites, Santa Claus or so-called divine scriptures (which, by their content, seems to have been plagiarized by many angels when a remarkable update of a faith is to be mandated - perhaps along with the relaxation of divine Copyright) - is an absurdity and not a right. To submit another to genital mutilation or other, more or less irreversible religious rites or education against his or her will, is an abomination and not a right. To carry clothing or attire prescribed by a power of speculative influence or existence when reason-based arguments say otherwise or, much worse, ask (echoing Al Capone's famous statement, with a kind word and the looming gun of tribal violence) another to do that for the sake of your faith, is a cry for bigotry and not a right. Religions have no rights, no liberties, they mandate no privileges to its bearers in any public sense. Until 1970, the contrary was a legislated fact in Sweden, a sad such which still linger on embodied as the commonly accepted notion of the rights of religions and the respect they demand and which arrive about a hundred billion miles of good arguments before their ability to reinforce them with facts.
Written by me on the subject on Historum.com:
What is freedom of religion?
My personal standard, until I have been taught another sense on the matter, is that the term "separation between state and religious matters" (including of legislation and minarets, for instance) is preferrable to "freedom of religion". Not that I do not respect the latter; it is not by accident that Hoxhaist Albania, the world's first Atheist state was one of the worst regimes of post-WWII Europe, possibly the very worst, which also persecuted vegetarians, for instance, by forcing workers and schoolchildren to consume pork in an inhuman attempt to enforce defiance of Muslim doctrines. But I am concerned whether law is to touch on the matter at all and consider faith a matter of special breed worthy a special brand of protection. Vegetarians, such as myself, are not protected in this special way, to play on an already given example, though it is implicit by other rights granted. Forced consumption of anything of a value repulsive to the consumer would be considered abuse at the very least (I do not even believe it has been tried at Gitmo), but it doesn't mean there ought to be a "freedom of diet".
If the laws of men - and women, to an extent ever rising - are to rest on the soil I have now cared to crop a little its role in the context should be restricted to the mark of separation (but not opposition, which itself implies a subjective viewpoint) from all matters subjective, metaphysical, spiritual, and ostensibly godly. Religious discourses set in a secular setting must, as everything else, be handled by the gloves and tongs of secularism. Because if the right to freely express or mark distance from a notion contradictory to one's own, it is not only a problem of faith. If, however, faith in a celestial dictatorship or imagined order (which is not to say it does not exist) is ever used to condone privileges and support absent from the unfaithful it is indeed not much commended by the principles of any secular constitution or order.
Universal freedoms and liberties can make a living without the presence of religion - which, by the present consensus of faith and unfaithful, makes a remarkable bulwark for further abuses of human rights and freedoms. Mr Jefferson - build up that wall! All incursions from either side are only gifts for past very dark indeed to the favor of remaining speculations which, if yet more immortal than humankind itself, constitute no better argument than a gunbarrel does.
(Unless we talk of the real Bond intro - bring it back, please! = )
(Unless we talk of the real Bond intro - bring it back, please! = )
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