Did you know that yesterday was International Blasphemy Day? For those of you who don’t know, IBD is a campaign seeking to establish September 30th as a day to promote free speech. By raising awareness, the campaign hopes to get people to show solidarity for the freedom to challenge, criticize, and satirize religion without fear of murder, litigation, or reprisal.
The event was created in reaction against those who would seek to take away the right to satirize and criticize a particular set of beliefs that have been given a privileged status over other beliefs. It is itself part of an ongoing campaign organized by the Center for Inquiry in its Campaign for Freedom of Expression, which began as a response to various United Nations bodies—including the UN’s Human Rights Council—having “…recently adopted resolutions condemning so-called ‘defamation’ of religion.”
According to the CFI:
These resolutions lend credibility to efforts to suppress dissent and criticism, especially in Islamic countries, but Western European countries are also debating laws that would criminalize religiously offensive statements. For example, Ireland recently enacted a new blasphemy law that prohibits publication of material “insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion.”
I find the whole idea of beliefs needing protection and rights abhorrent. Belief in your own particular version of a religion is a personal thing and shouldn’t intrude upon the human rights of others. If faith can’t stand firm in the face of criticism, then maybe one should be questioning the basis of that faith. Don’t put the onus (and the crime) on the people who don’t share those views.
Free speech is a right others have died for so that future generations could express themselves without fear of retribution. It is human beings—people, individuals who are locked away in cells, far from family and friends—who need rights, not ideologies based on dogma and revelation.
Richard Dawkins was in Toronto this week (the night before Blasphemy Day in fact) to give a reading from his latest book The Greatest Show on Earth. I attended the event with a couple of friends. At the Q&A at the end of the reading he was asked by a member of the audience as to his opinion on the recent Irish blasphemy law, to which he concluded after a longer reply; “blasphemy is a victimless crime.”
While I agree with him in principle on this, it’s unfortunate that the true victims of this “victimless crime” are the real flesh-and-blood people who find themselves on the receiving end of such archaic laws.
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