There was yet another article in the SMH today about protecting religious freedom. We still have not seen any evidence that religious people are being persecuted in Australia beyond occasionally facing questioning, and having their assumptions of moral superiority challenged, but the debate goes on – and its about the “information mess”, that I often write about, so here we are again.
And at the moment these comments, and presumably others, seem to have been suppressed at the SMH.
The “pro-freedom” author asserts:
“Religious freedom…, is not about a group of entitled, God-bothering zealots insisting on their civic privilege”.
The problem is that nothing in his article contradicts this imagined position.
Lets begin by accepting the reality that religion is important to many people, and that religion will always be important to many people. Following a particular religion, or not, may be one of the most important decisions in a person’s life; it may be the most frightening depending on their society or if their God is one of the threatening ones.
So let us be clear, Religion is important and should be protected – just like discussion and difference.
The author lists all the things the legislation would protect: such as a person’s right to remain employed, to have accommodation, education, or engage in sport. Doctors would not be personally forced to perform abortions, or commit euthanasia, etc. This is fine, good even.
However, the author objects to the proposed Bill because the bill only makes religious belief a “protected attribute” of individuals “akin to age, sex or sexual orientation,” and does not recognise religion as a “positive good” for everyone.
While religion may be a positive good for me, I’m not sure absolutely everything which can be classified as religion is a positive good for everyone. Mass human sacrifice? Religious terror? Religious war? Religious discrimination? Fear of eternal torture? These acts and ideas can be important to religious people, but why should they be protected?
Then the author slides into demands for the freedom of religious people to discriminate against others on the grounds of sexuality, gender, or marriage and what looks like a request to be able to offend, humiliate, intimidate, insult or ridicule other people on religious grounds. Offense might be fine, but these things can slowly shift into violence.
He wants Religious people to be able to *ensure* a person dies with huge suffering if religious people have any control over the sufferer’s body. He wants freedom for organisations to sack people if they marry someone of the same gender. Religious businesses should be able to break the law about discriminating against religion, by being able to sack people on grounds of their religion, and to refuse to serve customers because of their religion or other grounds. He presumably wants religious schools to be able to dismiss children on religious grounds as that keeps coming up from other religious people.
It is hard not to see all this as primarily about entitled religious people wanting privilege, and refusing to act with the general community. He gives no grounds for making exceptions to this position. If someone declares that truly religious people should be able to kill or assault people because they are of the wrong religion or gender, where does he stand and why? If people insist that their religion requires them to genitally, or otherwise, mutilate their children or other people’s children, where does he stand and why? If religions want to excommunicate or burn up businesses that deal with gay, black, people, or women, where does he stand and why? No limits are even suggested.
The lack of limits apparently stems from the idea that
Christianity and other religious traditions aspire through public outreach to strengthen communities. They need protection to conduct their public work in an authentic manner. To ignore the communitarian dimension of religious faith – as this bill does – strikes at the heart of the personal identity of believers.
But, the bill clearly does not stop people doing good works in the community, but if those good works involve discrimination, assertions of superiority, or attacks on the community, then perhaps they are not good works?
Perhaps the Author should read Matthew 6
“1: Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be praised by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their reward.”
Jesus does not seem to expect that Christians should seek out flattery and recognition for Good Works – they should just do them.
The bill also does not recognise the social benefits of atheism, in atheists’ attempts to prohibit burning of heretics, enslavement of non-believers, wife beating, and so on. More sadly, the bill does not recognise the rights of atheists to exist. This is a problem – after all its easily possible to imagine that religious people will discriminate and persecute atheists as well as people from other religions or sects. We can repeatedly see how religious people accuse atheists of not having morals… even when the atheist is clearly holding a moral position such as “gay people should not be persecuted simply because they are gay”. But then if the mainstream Christian demand is that they should have the right to discriminate against Christians from other denominations, we can assume that atheists will get less protection than Cthulhu worshippers.
The bill is certainly not perfect, but it appears that some religious people will demand the privilege to harm others, and will not be satisfied until they can do this with impunity, simply because they say their religion (whatever it is) requires this, or justifies this.
Tags: Disinformation, ethics, religion
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
Leave a comment