Discussion Group Report

Barabara Smoker is the previous President of the National Secular Society of Great Britain. On May 25, 2006, she took part in the Oxford University Union Debate opposing the motion that "Free speech should be moderated by respect for religion." The chief speaker on her side was Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the controversial Muhammad cartoons. There was a seven figure bounty on his head so security at the debate was heavy. Having lost many previous similar debates like this in the 60's and 70's she was pleased to win this one by a vote of 129-59. She notes that if any other noun rather than religion had been used the vote would have been 188-0. Suppose the word would have been science. The motion would read :"Free speech should be moderated by respect for science." No reasonable person would vote for that-least of all a genuine scientist. Science is all about testing any idea or hypothesis.

As she pointed out in the debate, the precept to respect religion is similar to the Mosaic commandment, "Honor thy Father and thy Mother." But what if your father and mother were murderers? They wouldn't deserve your respect, and most religions don't either. Should we then respect religious faith? Certainly not; but we should respect religious people? Yes, as long as they are not anti-social and don't try to impose their religious views on others.

However, even if we respect them as good-living people, we cannot respect their beliefs. Faith, which means firm belief in the absence of evidence, betrays human intelligence, undermines science-based knowledge, and compromises ordinary morality. If there were objective evidence for its doctrines, it would no longer be faith; it would be knowledge.

We have to excuse the medieval skeptics who pretended to respect Christianity rather than risk being burned at the stake, and likewise the apostate Muslims of today who pay lip-service to Islam in those Islamic countries where apostasy is still a capital offense. But, we who live in a comparatively liberal society have no such excuse. Skepticism is of paramount importance, because it is the gateway to knowledge; but unless the skeptical ideas are freely argued over, they cannot be assessed, nor can the ensuing knowledge spread through society.

Totalitarian extremists, of whatever religion or sect, invariably put faith first and freedom nowhere. Censorship, including insidious self-censorship, is then the order of the day, followed closely by violence. In a society where religious orthodoxy rules, there is no freedom of speech, nor of religion, for that matter. Incidentally, the violence provoked by the Danish cartoons was deliberately stirred up by Islamic fundamentalists publishing exaggerated versions of them in Muslim countries, up to four months after the originals were published.

Pressured by religious leaders sinking their differences in the common cause of authoritarianism, the Council of Europe is currently considering the introduction of legislation in the European Parliament and even the United Nations to enforce "respect for religious feelings" internationally. Insertion of the word feelings lends this tendentious goal a semblance of humane empathy. But religion cannot, in all conscience, be intellectually respected, if honesty is to prevail over hypocrisy-and giving it false respect would not just be obsequious and dishonest, but it would actually allow superstitions of the Dark Ages to rise again in triumph, destroying the whole range of social and individual freedoms courageously won over the past few centuries.

So for the sake of liberty as well as truth, we must resist the indefensible furtherance of hypocritical respect. Far from being willing to moderate free speech by respect for religion, we should moderate respect for religion in favor of free speech.