Freedom of speech

[liv]

Somebody on Twitter linked to a really pointed Al Jazeera article: The freedom to criticise free speech. It concisely articulates something I've thought for a long time, but haven't quite been able to state without waffling a lot. tl;dr version: freedom of speech – Muslims have it too.

This is my big bone of contention with large swathes of the New Atheist / Skeptic / Rational movement(s): they seem to be very shouty about the right, mostly exercised by people who are (entirely coincidentally I don't think) white, middle-class men living in powerful, rich countries, to publish utterly vile, ignorant, hateful stuff about Muslims and Islam. But as soon as any Muslim raises the slightest objection to this, it's an attack on free speech and the very foundations of democracy. Yes, it's important to protect freedom of speech you don't agree with, but I don't see much knee-jerk Voltaire quoting when it's Muslims exercising that right.

Even in the most repressive regimes, powerful, influential, well-connected people can pretty much say what they like, there's nothing especially notable about that. The point of enshrining freedom of speech as a right is that it applies to people of subaltern status. Immigrants, members of minority religions or ethnic groups, these days people living formerly colonized countries. If it's important to you to have or protect the right to express prejudices, then you should care at least equally much about the right of oppressed or relatively less powerful to point out that bigotry is bigotry. They also have the right to refuse to give money or attention to people publishing bigoted stuff, that's not an attack on free speech, that's exercising their democratic, free market right to give their business to people whose views they agree with. And yes, some of them are wrong, they see things as offensive or attacking when they're actually true and harmless. So? They still have the right to hold and express their opinions, that's the whole point about freedom of speech.

Comments

[jack]

actually assume all religions are some variant on right-wing American Protestant Christianity, and reserve the really nasty attacks for Islam and / or Catholicism, which don't fit that mould very well. And happen to be correlated with ethnic groups that are often despised anyway, which is why I don't hesitate to regard Islamophobia and virulent Catholic-hatred as a species of racism.

Yes, I think this is very true. I don't know whether bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Islam are better or worse than bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Atheism, or bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Christianity, but whether they are or not, I think people seize on objections to them because they're unfamiliar. (To be fair, many people also do the complete opposite and spend all their effort objecting to the dominant religion where they are, but that doesn't make either ok.)

[liv]

I think it's not entirely fair to compare Atheism, even Atheism-the-movement, with Islam and Christianity, like that. Because obviously some atheists do bad things, but rarely using their atheism as a justification, and even if they do, other atheists are not in any meaningful way responsible for the bad actions of their fellow atheists. It wouldn't make sense to expect someone to start believing in God because an atheist committed an atrocity!

The worst things perpetuated in the name of Christianity and Islam (and many other religions too) go all the way up to genocide. So obviously no aspect of atheism is as bad as that. One might possibly expect a morally committed religious person to leave their religion if their religion is promoting mass-murder. Still not just to carry out collective punishment of everybody who shares a religion with anyone who does awful things, though.

[jack]

Hm, I was trying to agree with the general point WITHOUT questioning whether atheism was better or worse, since I think it's valid either way, but apparently I fail at that too :(

But this point if actually really interesting, hold on, I want to come back to it in a separate comment to divorce "interesting things it made me think of" from "was your original point basically correct"...

[jack]

It wouldn't make sense to expect someone to start believing in God because an atheist committed an atrocity!

That's actually really interesting. Obviously I wouldn't expect that, but I think there are people who say things like "I don't believe in God, but I'm not one of those atheists" where they endorse the dictionary definition, but they associate atheism with a whole lot of stuff they don't like (smugness, sexism, islamophobia, etc -- rampant in at least some segments of the atheism community, although I hope we can have atheism without any of that!)

But where is the line? I think of religion as primarily a cultural choice, but other people don't -- some Christians would presumably say that it's just true that the God of the bible exists, and however evil other supposed Christians may be, that can't change the fact of God's existence.

And it's normally accepted that if you're British, but Britain does horrible things, it's acceptable to stay and try to prevent them if you can, rather than emigrating being the only moral option.

And even for groups which are voluntary, I'm not at all sure where the dividing line between "we need to fix this" and "this is irredeemable, we need to get out" is -- it's probably useful for people to have different lines. For instance, it seems likely there's no hope of redeeming scientology: it would be nice if people could, but I think the bad things are so pervasive, the chance of maintaining the organisation without them is negligible. But obviously, I don't think that applies to Islam.