As a follow up to the recent Gallup poll revealing that our fine state of Mississippi is the "most religious" (along with all of the other causal factors that particular recognition implies about our less than stellar statistics regarding health, wealth and wisdom), I thought I'd share with you a chilling bit of news from my ancestral home of Ireland.
It appears that while our country has more than its fair share of those folks who believe (paraphrasing the late George Carlin):
"...that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!"
We still have a secular US Constitution and the Bill of Rights to protect our freedom of speech, to include blasphemy and outright rejection of the claims made by religious adherents.
A recent law in Ireland, however, has made blasphemy in that country a crime by enacting:
Yes, this is now the currently "on the books" law, punishable by exorbitant fine and the search and seizure of material at any location by police using force if necessary.
The Dark Ages firmly revisited and always content to fight the good fight, our inherently clever Irish kin are standing up to this bit of nonsense in diligent and unambiguous terms by...well, of course...using the best of the best blasphemers in history and lore to make their point. You know the ones, those rabble-rousers and militant disturbers of the peace, Jesus, Muhammed, Mark Twain, Tim Minchin, Bjork, PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins to name a few.
While I don't personally recommend or make it a practice to overtly mock or ridicule people for their religious beliefs, for many are my own caring friends, co-workers and family members and because I just think it is counterproductive to be rude...I wholeheartedly defend the freedom of expression to do so.
Equally, I defend the religious adherent's their right to make all sorts of insulting, crude and outright false statements about atheists, atheism, secular humanism, etc., and will engage in a forthright discussion to soundly refute such dehumanizing rhetoric in the open marketplace of ideas.
Open Marketplace of Ideas
If we are to buy into the purported beneficial causal effects of religion and the claims of adherents without any allowance of refutation out of a fear that our ideas and our speech will be perceived as "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion", then it could stifle a critical analysis of religious claims that may affect our human liberty, health and well-being.
Returning to the recent Gallup poll regarding causal relationships between religion and the overall condition of our state and citizens, we run the risk of defamation of religion by openly suggesting that such religious piety, faith and ritual is just as possibly correlated to perpetuating poverty, ignorance, illness and war.
Potentially, only one "side" of religion and the claims of religious adherents could ever be presented, that being the one that only shows it in a positive light...honest critical inquiry, alternative view and facts be damned, fined and destroyed.
Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Voltaire, Thomas Aikenhead, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson spring immediately to my mind.
Furthermore, it isn't clear how the Irish court would deal with a claim of blasphemy by one religious adherent offended by the defamation espoused by an adherent of a different faith.
I wonder what would happen if a group of orthodox Jews brought the claim of blasphemy by stating that it was grossly abusive and insulting in matters held sacred to their religion that others would take their holy text, the Torah, and use it to claim that their deity now has a son?
And what about the apostates of Islam, Salman Rushdie, Ibn Warraq, Taslima Nasreen, Parvin Darabi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, etc.?
Should there be no hope of refuting and outright rejecting sacred religious orthodoxy regardless of brand?
This law and subsequent proactive atheist challenge in Ireland has certainly presented a conundrum to the final arbiters of mind crimes to be sure.