Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information. Ill add in the blogroll to my sidebar once i figure out how to do it.
That seems the most appropriate way to start the new year given that I want to announce that Zone5 is now officially listed on the Atheist Blogroll while Ireland sees the instigation of its new Blasphemy Law. The 25 Blaspemous quotes quoted here by Atheist Ireland make for hilarious reading, but especially dont miss No 25:
Dermot Ahern, Irish Minister for Justice, introducing his blasphemy law at an Oireachtas Justice Committee meeting, 2009, and referring to comments made about him personally: “They are blasphemous.” Deputy Pat Rabbitte replied: “Given the Minister’s self-image, it could very well be that we are blaspheming,” and Minister Ahern replied: “Deputy Rabbitte says that I am close to the baby Jesus, I am so pure.” So here we have an Irish Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.
Blasphemy is certainly a bizarre concept in the modern world where we prefer to operate within frameworks such as “democracy” and “freedom of speech”.
The Irish government’s excuse for this appears to be that because ireland is becoming more multicultural these days, there are now lots more ways that people might take offence, so we need laws to protect them. There will be a widespread suspicion though that this law has been sponsored by the Catholic Church perhaps to deflect critisism of its apparent true function of instituionalised of child rape.
The whole thing begs the question of what is a religion of course, and indeed atheism as well as “science” and “rationality” are themselves often called a religion- by the religious, or by religious apologists- as a way of denigrating reason and skepticism, which is odd since you would think that, if religions are “true” then atheism should, to the religious, gain in stature should they take on the religious mantel… paradox upon paradox…
Another interesting case of this was that of Tim Nicholson who was sacked for contesting some of his companies’ policies on environmental grounds:
The case involved Tim Nicholson, 42, who was laid off last year from his job as head of sustainability at Grainger Plc, Britain’s largest residential-property company. Nicholson contended he was laid off because his views on the environment were not shared by Grainger executives, and he sued the company for unfair dismissal under Britain’s six-year-old Religion and Belief Regulations, which make it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their religious or philosophical beliefs. Grainger argued that Nicholson’s climate-change convictions did not qualify for protection under the law. But in a landmark ruling on Nov. 3, Justice Michael Burton found that “a belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of [the 2003 law].”
This might be good for Mr. Nicholson but is a disaster for the environmental movement, which must promote itself as being based on science and reason if it is to retain any credibility at all. Many aspects of environmentalism, from Biodynamics to Fairy-worship, the naturalistic fallacies of the organic Movement and the de-la-la land of quack medicine could indeed be properly seen as faith-based and therefore religious, and should be rejected by self-respecting environmentalists, but climate change does not come into that category, despite being frequently critisised as such by climate deniers.
This whole issue is all the more relevant and disturbing given another story from this very young year of 2010, of a near fatal attack on the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard who has been living under police protection since his 2006 cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb under his turban produced death threats from sections of the Mulsim community.
It seems horrific that the government of Ireland should pass laws to appease groups like this: “Say anything that makes our religion look anything but peace-loving and we’ll kill you!”
Perhaps there are however some cases in which blaspemy does indeed go too far, and some kind of legal restraints may need to be invoked to protect those who, like myself, follow The One True Faith:
