Why Should I Respect These Oppressive Religions?

The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid.
Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism -
giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds -
are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we "respect"
religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we
have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global
guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten - to put him on the
side of the religious censors.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a
world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the
highest aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for
mankind - and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the
Chinese dictatorship calls it "Western", Robert Mugabe calls it "colonialist",
and Dick Cheney calls it "outdated". The countries of the world
have chronically failed to meet it - but the document has been held up by
the United Nations as the ultimate standard against which to check
ourselves. Until now.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia,
demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think
and speak freely failed to "respect" the "unique sensitivities"
of the religious, they decided - so they issued an alternative Islamic
Declaration of Human Rights. It insisted that you can only speak within "the
limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or
disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the
Islamic community".

In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what
the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear
there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been
backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN's Rapporteur on Human Rights has
always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech -
including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that
his job description be changed so he can seek out and condemn "abuses
of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets".
The council agreed - so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of
condemning the people who wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be
condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed "religious" is no longer allowed to be
a subject of discussion at the UN - and almost everything is deemed
religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has
tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child
marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah "will
not happen" and "Islam will not be crucified in this council"
- and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course, the first victims of
locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are
ordinary Muslims.

Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week
in countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are
routinely thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their
children, so a large group of them wanted to stage a protest - but the
Shariah police declared it was "un-Islamic" and the marchers would
be beaten and whipped. In Saudi Arabia, the country's most senior
government-approved cleric said it was perfectly acceptable for old men to
marry 10-year-old girls, and those who disagree should be silenced. In
Egypt, a 27-year-old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman was seized, jailed and
tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah.

To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim
culture? Those women's, those children's, this blogger's - or their
oppressors'?

As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: "The ultimate aim of this
effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal
Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices
of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."

Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by
this.

Underpinning these "reforms" is a notion seeping even into
democratic societies - that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today,
whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents immediately claim
they are the victims of "prejudice" - and their outrage is
increasingly being backed by laws.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea
that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I
don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at
the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of
whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him.

I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the
Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't
respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live
again as woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance",
but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the
childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing
in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have
too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for
censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature
of faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against
reality. If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase
carbon dioxide emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views
are wrong, I can correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.

But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to
consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in
the absence of evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or
Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically
painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on
thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of
reason. It's easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced.

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is
based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs - but the
price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set
aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Yet this idea - at the heart of the Universal Declaration - is being lost. To
the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left,
it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur
by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea
disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak
freely.

An excellent blog that keeps you up to dates on secularist issues is
Butterflies and Wheels, which you can read here.