This article was originally published on the NSS’s website on 23 July 2024.

It’s easy to see how the idea of being saved by an act of ‘divine intervention’ might well appeal to a narcissist like Donald Trump. But his claim that he had ‘God on his side’ during the recent failed assassination attempt is more likely to be the sentiment of a grifter exploiting religion for political gain.

But sincere belief in the supernatural isn’t necessary for Trump and his cronies to dismantle America’s wall of separation between church and state. His nomination of conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his previous term of office paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade—a significant win for evangelicals. With a return to the White House looking distinctly possible, more laws to enforce the doctrines of his Christian support base could be on the cards.

The rise of Christian nationalism in the US is another indicator of a backsliding of secular liberal democratic values, the foundation upon which many successful modern societies are built.

Right across the world, wherever religion and political power are entwined, the chips are down for liberalism. Whether it’s Protestant evangelicalism in the US, Hindu nationalism in India, or Islamism in the Middle East, the closer clerics are to governance, the lower the likelihood that individual rights and freedoms can flourish.

Europe, too, is facing testing times.

American Christian Right organisations are pouring millions of dollars into the continent to fuel campaigns aimed at diminishing the rights of women and sexual minorities. Christian identity politics has become intertwined with nationalist ideologies, shaping the political landscape and contributing to the growth of far-right movements across the continent.

Meanwhile, mass migration and a failure to integrate sizeable Muslim populations have contributed to the undermining and challenging of fundamental liberal values like free speech, equality, and state neutrality.

One of secularism’s most important roles in protecting liberal values is in preserving freedom of expression—making sure that individuals are free to voice their ideas, beliefs, criticisms, and scorn of religious ideas without the threat of censorship or punishment.

Here in the UK, an incident at a Batley school starkly illustrated the erosion of this freedom. A teacher who used a cartoon of Muhammad to teach pupils about debates on free expression faced immediate and credible death threats and now must live under a new identity.

The writing has been on the wall ever since the Rushdie affair. But a spate of violent protests and murders across Europe since has sent the clear message to European citizens that, even if blasphemy laws have been abolished (and not all have been), they remain in place for Islam, and will be enforced by intimidation and violence.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of women and young girls on the continent are compelled to obey sexist religious modesty codes and thousands of children from minority backgrounds are attending illegal schools run by religious extremists.

Meaningful debates on these matters have become increasingly challenging due to the pervasive influence of ‘Islamophobia’, a term once noted by Christopher Hitchens as strategically employed to insinuate a ‘foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible message’. The language of Islamophobia has fostered a fear of being labelled ‘racist’ or bigoted, causing many liberals to refrain from criticising any manifestation of Islam, however worthy of disdain. This has created a void that is exploited by extremists on the far right.

Meanwhile, a crisis in confidence that secular liberalism can counter the ascendancy of radical Islam and ‘wokery’ has led some public intellectuals to be lured by the notion that Christianity is somehow indispensable in safeguarding the Western way of life. Daniel James Sharp and Matt Johnson have presented compelling critiques of this ‘New Theism’ and its defence of Christian privilege. But entrusting the preservation of liberal democracy to a belief one considers untrue yet expedient seems precarious at best.

All this is to say that the current climate for liberal values and human rights is challenging.

Amidst the ongoing threat posed by religious fundamentalism, a renewed embrace of the Enlightenment concept of separation of religion and state is sorely needed to safeguard individual rights and freedoms.

These are the issues we’ll be addressing at Secularism 2024, the National Secular Society’s upcoming conference on October 19th. A diverse range of expert speakers will shed light on some of the contemporary challenges faced by liberal societies and explore the role of secularism in protecting liberal values and social cohesion.

To be part of this important conversation about democracy, freedom of speech, individual rights, and the rule of law, join us at Secularism 2024. Tickets are on sale now.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together, by Megan Manson

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

The post An upcoming secularist conference on the safeguarding of liberal values in a time of crisis appeared first on The Freethinker.

Books sometimes have a way of turning up at opportune times. In mid-2022 a collection of essays on the themes of blasphemy and violence in Europe, Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today, went off to the printers. According to the publisher, De Gruyter, the book ‘offers a much-needed analysis of a subject that historians have largely ignored, yet that has considerable relevance for today’s world: the powerful connection that exists between offences against the sacred and different forms of violence.’

‘Considerable relevance’ would shortly prove a massive understatement. On 12 August 2022, a month before the book’s publication, author Sir Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked as he was preparing to deliver a lecture in New York. Repeatedly stabbed, Rushie only narrowly survived, although he has lost sight in one eye. A New Jersey man of Lebanese background, Hadi Matar, is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder. All the facts will come out then, but from what we know, it is safe to say the attack was a violent response to blasphemy.

Rushdie has been living with the threat of such an attack since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the ailing Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed that his novel The Satanic Verses was ‘a text written, edited, and published against Islam’ and its author deserved death. This fatwa still stood in 2022, although amidst the tumult of COVID-19, the 2020 United States presidential election, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine it was hardly front of mind for most people. The attack on Rushdie reminded us that, whatever else is happening in the world, the threat of zealous violence against those who fail to treat the sacred with the level of reverence the zealots consider to be its due has not gone away. The fatwa still stands today.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic work, or a collection of academic works, exploring the connection between blasphemy and violence in Europe over the last two and a half centuries. Each chapter has a theme, usually a particular time and place. For example, one essay by Julio de la Cueva looks at blasphemy and violence in the Spanish Civil War. David Nash, one of the book’s editors (the other is Eveline G. Bouwers), contributes a chapter on blasphemy in English law, in which early editions of the Freethinker make an appearance. The final chapter, by Manfred Sing, covers the Rushdie affair.

A Conceptual Chameleon

‘Words are not violence’ is a long-running catchcry of the defenders of free speech. There are those, like Khomeini, who disagree, and Demystifying the Sacred can give some insight into their thinking. To them, blasphemy itself is violence, and blasphemers are themselves the instigators. The book does not just deal with violence against people, but violence against property. It starts, in fact, with the vandalism of an artwork.

It’s easy to assume that a book on blasphemy and violence will tell the story of the struggle against book-burning fanatics by the advocates of tolerance, reason, and Enlightenment. But the themes of Demystifying the Sacred are much broader. According to the book’s editors, blasphemy is a ‘conceptual chameleon’, related to but distinct from heresy, apostasy, and sacrilege. It has been criminalised in both religious and secular law, albeit often for different reasons, and at times it has even been treated as the symptom of a mental illness.

Each chapter can be read on its own, and I will not go into them all in detail. But a few themes run across them. One is the long-running connection between blasphemy and politics, where authorities have prosecuted blasphemy in the name of upholding public order and protecting the nation from its internal or external enemies.

More Politics than Religion

In his chapter on blasphemy in English law, Nash cites the 1911 blasphemy case of a man named T. W. Stewart. Stewart had taken to giving public lectures criticising the morality of the Bible, concluding in delightfully Edwardian fashion that ‘God is not fit company for a respectable man like me’. The Leeds Chief Constable concluded that these addresses were ‘most offensive and distressing to respectable persons passing by’ and had him hauled before Justice Thomas Gardner Horridge.

Justice Horridge did not criticise Stewart for the substance of what he said. Rather, maintained the Judge, ‘there was a difference between the drawing room and the street’, and while it might be acceptable to ridicule Christianity in private among friends, making the same claims before a crowd was a threat to public order. Stewart was convicted, which, as critics of the case pointed out, seemed to make a lapse of good taste a criminal offence.

Manfred Sing’s chapter on the Rushie Affair looks at the topic of blasphemy and politics from a different angle. Reading the chapter, I was surprised by the lack of clarity around many of the key facts of the episode. It was unclear what, if anything, was actually blasphemous about The Satanic Verses. It was unclear what, if any, actual legal effect Khomeini’s decree had in either Islamic or Iranian law (as Sing explains, it was not formally a fatwa, although the Western media ran with the term). And while commentators in the West saw the fatwa as a broadside against Western secular values, Khomeini’s attention might have been much closer to home. In 1989, Iran was in the midst of a political and constitutional crisis in the wake of the bloody war against Iraq, the regime’s domestic critics were becoming more vocal than the Ayatollahs were comfortable with, and its elderly and frail leader was well aware his time was coming to an end and that thoughts both inside and outside the country were turning to succession. According to Sing, it is likely that Khomeini issued the fatwa, or decree,to buttress his authority as both Iran’s temporal and spiritual head.

Of course, radical Muslims in Western countries had a simpler view. Sing quotes British Muslim intellectual Shabbir Akhtar, who argued at the time of the Rushie Affair that without ‘an internal temper of militant, but constructive wrath’ Islam would, like Christianity, fade away in an increasingly secular world. In this worldview, violence in response to blasphemy becomes almost a type of collective self-defence.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic book which will be of more interest to those researching its subject than general readers. But it brings together a huge amount of scholarship about its subject in an accessible volume, and the electronic version is available for free download, making it a great resource for writers to reference. The subject, sadly, is unlikely to become unimportant any time soon.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a collection of Freethinker articles compiled by Emma Park

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Blasphemy and violence: review of ‘Demystifying the Sacred’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

We all remember Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ in which charlatans convince the vain Emperor that only clever people can see the clothes they make for him. Everyone goes along with this delusion for fear of looking stupid, including the Emperor’s advisers. Until, that is, they parade through the town one day and a little boy shouts, ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’ Thus the spell is broken and the people laugh at their Emperor. Feeling embarrassed, the Emperor continues on with his parade, for now he fears looking foolish.

There is a parallel here with the religious mindset. Religious people often need everyone else to share their beliefs. Why? Are they just so enraptured with their faith that they feel they are doing everyone a favour by proselytising? Or could it be that a part of them knows their beliefs are, shall we say, unscientific at best? Who knows—perhaps these itchy doubts are soothed by the participation of all?

The Bible itself, not atypically, gives mixed messages on this need to ‘witness’ private beliefs. Jesus extolls Simon and Peter to leave behind their nets and become ‘fishers of men’ rather than of fish. And yet Matthew 6:5 says that ‘when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.’  

Which is it? And where do we draw the line in a modern, secular society? Freedom of religion and freedom FROM religion is an important principle for secularists. The right to hold religious beliefs and not to be persecuted or discriminated against is paramount, but sometimes the invocation of ‘religious freedom’ is used as cover by the religious to make special claims and demand special platforms for themselves. Examples of this are endless so forgive my summarising of some of the more egregious examples in modern Britain:

• We have unelected clerics in national and local government (bishops in the House of Lords and, in Scotland, religious nominees on council education committees). Embarrassingly, this makes the UK one of two countries to have unelected clerics in government. The other is Iran.
• Taxpayer-funded faith schools can often select their students using religious criteria and are allowed exemptions from many equality laws, notably in their teaching of sex education.
• There is compulsory religious (Christian) observance even in state schools. (Note that this is very different from Religious Education classes, which teach about, rather than preach, religion.)
• In Scotland under the new Hate Crime Act, religious belief (a choice) is a ‘protected characteristic’ on a par with immutable personal identities like race and sexual orientation.
• We allow the mutilation of children’s genitals for non-medical reasons—so long as the mutilators are convinced that they are carrying out a religious duty. Why is religious custom a protection from activities which would normally be criminal?
• Religion is given automatic stewardship of events like Remembrance Sunday. If important civic events like this are to be chained to an ever-diminishing Christianity, there is a real danger that both will be forgotten together.
• Religions are given privileges in charity law: to become a registered charity (with accompanying tax breaks), ‘the promotion of religion’, however controversial the views in question, is de facto in itself sufficient to qualify.
• The state pays for hospital chaplains. Why should a niche service which only serves a minority be paid for by all?
• Churches are empowered by the state to solemnise marriages and yet many, notably the established Church of England, retain the power to decide the marriages of which they approve.

Here, we must distinguish between secularism and atheism. Atheism is a metaphysical position which holds that there is no good reason to believe in any gods. Secularism is a principle of social administration by which the state is kept separate from religious influence (and vice versa).

For secular campaigners, this is an important line. Secularists campaign for secularism, not for atheism: a distinction which too many still fail to appreciate. Secularists do not seek to impose state atheism. So when the religious argue that ‘you just want to impose your atheism in place of our religion!’, the proper response is to compare this to a noisy neighbour arguing that ‘you just want to impose your silence in place of my noise!’

Last year in Scotland there was an SNP leadership election; the winning candidate would become First Minister. That one of the candidates, Kate Forbes, declared her opposition to marriage equality on account of her religious beliefs flagged up an interesting nuance in the argument about ‘religious freedom’.

Ms Forbes, I assume, did not rise to her political position because of her Christianity so there was no unfair religious privilege involved here. She was entitled therefore to allow her religious views to inform her political views, as she did. Similarly, the public was entitled not to vote for her because of her views. No arguments so far, but the problem arises from the fact that her defenders argued that to reject her candidacy because of her homophobia was to discriminate against her Christian beliefs! This clash of ‘protected characteristics’ has come up before (remember the gay cake). [Update: Forbes is now Deputy First Minister – Ed.]

For various reasons, including (but far from limited to) the need to fill in explanatory gaps and the human impulse to seek agency where there is none, religious belief has been and remains incredibly tenacious. But tenaciousness is not a testament to worthiness, nor does it mean that religion ought to be privileged in public life. It might bring comfort to many, and no secularist would wish to deny this comfort to those who need it, but religious freedom should not grant a seat next to the Prime Minister. 

Like the mythologies of all the many world religions, the Bible might still contain comfort and wisdom for some, but Christian belief has declined precipitously in the UK—and that trend shows no sign of stopping. Historic churches are falling into disrepair and rightly being taken over by the state to be used as premises for all. Christianity no longer represents Britain, and Christians must now act with grace: they must decouple from local and national government and they must relinquish their privileges. In short, they must be content to be treated equally under the law. The same, naturally, applies to all other religions.

Nobody begrudges the faithful their private beliefs but if they expect religious freedom to mean religious privilege, they risk being humiliated by any little boy who shouts, ‘The church has no clothes!’

Further reading

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

Disestablishment and Bishops in the House of Lords

‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023, by Emma Park

Bishops in the Lords: Why are they still there? by Emma Park

Religion in schools

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg

The Scottish Hate Crime Act

From Satan to the Hate Monster, by Emma Park

Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

Genital mutilation

Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about, by Alejandro Sanchez

Religion and charity law

Faith and charity law: time for a rethink and Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

The post The case for secularism (or, the church’s new clothes) appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘What you have made will long endure.’ This is how Salman Rushdie signed off one of his last emails to his friend Martin Amis. Amis was dying from oesophageal cancer (the same cancer that killed his and Rushdie’s old comrade Christopher Hitchens) and Rushdie was still recovering from the savage attack against him in Chautauqua, New York when those words were written. Amis had previously written to Rushdie, of seeing him for the first time since the attack, that ‘I expected you to be altered, diminished in some way. Not a bit of it: you were and are intact and entire. And I thought with amazement, He’s EQUAL to it.’

Simple expressions of love and solidarity between two men all too well acquainted with the destroying angel: the perfect riposte to death, and to the bigotry and fanaticism of those, like Rushdie’s attacker, who worship it. This is just one of many life-affirming moments in Rushdie’s account of what Amis so appropriately calls ‘the atrocity’ of August 2022 and its aftermath, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Like the late Amis (who died last May), what Rushdie has made will long endure. His contributions to literature will endure for their power and beauty and truth, not because of the horrors inflicted upon their author. Still, and though he would prefer not to be defined by those horrors, his courage and his unswerving commitment to the defence of free expression in the face of them—this example, too, will long endure.

In August 2022, on the very day of the atrocity, I wrote a response, concluding with these words: ‘Pull through, Salman. Pull through.’ And pull through he did. He was equal to it, all right. The sheer strength of the man is nothing less than astounding: a 74-year-old asthmatic, who had endured through a COVID-19 infection, is stabbed and slashed over and over by a would-be assassin, and he pulls through, even though the doctors thought his survival a near-impossibility. No, he more than pulled through: he won. He has lost an eye and suffered horrifically, but his mind remains, and he has written a brave and beautiful book to ‘answer violence with art.’

‘I wasn’t well enough to take in clearly the scale of what was happening outside my hospital room, but I felt it,’ Rushdie writes of the thousands of outpourings of solidarity he received. ‘I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.’ It is heartening to know that the tsunami of love heartened Rushdie in his hospital bed; whether or not he knew of my own outpouring I do not know, but it is nice to think of it as a small undulation in the tsunami.

Knife is not just a personal narrative. It is also a reaffirmation of Rushdie’s commitment to the fight for ‘the idea of freedom—Thomas Paine’s idea, the Enlightenment idea, John Stuart Mill’s idea’ against its many enemies, whether left or right, progressive or reactionary. He also reaffirms his secularism and his atheism: ‘My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.’

But the genius of the book is that it is not a horror story, or not merely a horror story. It is, ultimately, a love story. Rushdie tells us how he met and fell in love with the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he married in 2021, and how Griffiths helped him through the horror: ‘The woman I loved and who loved me was by my side. We would win this battle. I would live.’

As against this, Rushdie’s attacker is not named at all. He is referred to only as ‘the A.’, ‘[m]y Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation . . .’ In one powerful chapter, Rushdie imagines a conversation between himself and the A., and the A. is revealed as the nameless loser he undoubtedly is. Later, Rushdie tells us what he would like to say to the A. in court, and he concludes that:

‘Your intrusion into my life was violent and damaging, but now my life has resumed, and it is a life filled with love… I don’t forgive you. I don’t not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me. And from now on, for the rest of your days, you will be irrelevant to everyone else. I’m glad I have my life, and not yours. And my life will go on.’

But Rushdie also tells us that he no longer really cares about getting to face his attacker; the A. truly has become irrelevant. And life and love go on: ‘After the angel of death, the angel of life.’

Like Rushdie’s latest novel Victory City, Knife is a humanist triumph. Referring to the former, I wrote that ‘Rushdie shows us the triumph of love, life and literature against philistinism, death and fanaticism.’ And so he continues to do. Knife, despite it all, has a happy ending. Rushdie and Griffiths return to the scene of the crime, more than a year later, and Rushdie realises his triumph:

‘Yes, we had reconstructed our happiness, even if imperfectly. Even on this blue-sky day, I knew it was not the cloudless thing we had known before. It was a wounded happiness, and there was, and perhaps always would be, a shadow in the corner of it. But it was a strong happiness nevertheless, and as we embraced, I knew it would be enough.’

In Knife, Salman Rushdie shows us that he has lost none of his power. The horror is subsumed and conquered by love. It is a work of genius, another testament, like his memoir Joseph Anton, to what Rushdie has called ‘the liberty instinct’: the indestructible human desire for freedom. In the end, Knife is Rushdie’s greatest victory.

Knife can be purchased here. Note that, when you use this link to purchase the book, we earn from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a compendium of relevant articles by Emma Park

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Rushdie’s victory appeared first on The Freethinker.

Since their earliest origins, Christian cultures have been preoccupied with the temptations of the Devil, and humanity’s susceptibility to them. ‘Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ (James 1: 14-15)

The popularity of Satan, the arch-tempter, may be on the wane, but Police Scotland, in preparing to implement the Scottish Hate Crime Act, have found a contemporary devil to replace him: the Hate Monster. ‘When yer feeling insecure, when ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon [sic].’

Beware, anyone who has ever felt any heated disagreement with someone or something, especially where a ‘protected characteristic’ is involved: you may be possessed by the Hate Monster and anything you say or do, especially on social media, may be used by righteous informers and priests – sorry, police – as evidence of your sinful mind.

As far as the protected characteristic of religion is concerned, the unbeliever may be glad that, under section 9(b) of the Act, expressions of ‘antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult’ are not, on their own, automatically deemed to constitute ‘threatening or abusive’ behaviour, which is the first element in the section 4(2) offence of ‘stirring up hatred’. (The second element of the offence is the intent to ‘stir up hatred against a group of persons’ on the basis of their protected characteristic.)

Yet to advocates of open debate, this carve-out for free expression about religion offers tepid comfort. Not only is it apparently confined to certain categories of expression, but it does not apply to any of the other protected characteristics, including, most controversially, ‘transgender identity’.

As a criterion of judging whether apparently threatening or abusive behaviour is ‘reasonable’ and therefore defensible, section 4(5) invokes the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, including of ‘ideas that offend, shock or disturb’. However, under section 9, while ‘discussion or criticism’ of protected characteristics is not automatically deemed threatening or abusive, antipathy, ridicule and the like presumably would be in the case of any characteristic except religion.

Altogether, the wording of the Act raises several questions about how it will function in practice, and how sections 4 and 9 will relate to each other.

If someone is gauche enough, for instance, to criticise the claim that a man can change into a woman, how is he or she to know whether doing so will be deemed mere discussion or an act that a ‘reasonable’ person would consider threatening or abusive – and if the latter, whether it will itself still be judged ‘reasonable’ on the basis of the ECHR right to freedom of expression, or will be held an unreasonable, impermissible act of stirring up hatred against trans people? Who should decide what is ‘reasonable’ in such fraught debates? You might as well ask a lay court to adjudicate on the relative merits of con- and transubstantiation.

Moreover, if it is a question of intent, how is the court to determine, as a second and distinct test, what the defendant intended the effect of their words to be, other than by the words themselves?

The overall thrust of the ‘stirring-up’ offences is to imply that the expression of disagreement about characteristics specially defined and sanctioned by the Scottish state is always potentially criminal. This is a short step from criminalising thought itself. And that is what the Hate Monster is all about.

The idea that thought can be sinful goes right back to the Old Testament: ‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ (Leviticus 18: 28)

From next week in Scotland, therefore, who knows how mild an expression of doubtful or dissenting views, in particular ‘gender critical’ ones, may be sufficient to saddle a person with a criminal record – or whether most dissenters will be too afraid to speak at all, because they do not want to risk it. No wonder the Act has been so heavily criticised by women’s rights campaigners, as well as free speech advocates more generally.

Of course, if you are inclined to express antipathy to women, no need to worry – biological sex, unlike transgender identity, is not on the protected list.

Section 12 does contain a power for the Ministers to add ‘the characteristic of sex’ to the list. So in theory, if supporters of women’s rights ever won a majority at Holyrood, they could implement this section, and then sit back and watch the police and the courts tearing their hair out as trans women denounced women for misgendering, and women denounced trans women for misogyny.

In the long term, though, slapping more restrictions on speech about ever more categories of protected groups will benefit no one, except perhaps those who happen to be in power for the time being. If we want a society which is not a dictatorship, if we believe in intellectual and moral progress rather than stagnation, then we have to be prepared for give and take: to be offended, insulted, made uncomfortable and even upset by the views of people who disagree with us, even on the most sensitive subjects of all.

As Jonathan Rauch put it, ‘To appeal to a country’s conscience, you need an antagonist.’ If you demonise your antagonists, if you label anyone who disagrees with you an agent of Satan or the Hate Monster, then you as a country are depriving yourselves of the opportunity for moral doubt and conflict, which is the essence of a conscience.

Plato once defined thinking as the soul’s dialogue with itself. Take away a country’s opportunity for dialogue and disagreement, and you might as well kill its soul.

The post From Satan to the Hate Monster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Know your place, woman!

In February, the National Secular Society (NSS) complained to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator about a sermon given to the good folks of Rosyth Baptist Church, a registered charity, in which the ‘reverend’ Chris Demetriou clamped down on any uppity women who might be among his flock. As the NSS reported: ‘[In the sermon, Demetriou] explains a wife “should submit to her husband’s leadership” because “that’s the Lord’s pattern for us”. She submits to him “out of obedience to Christ”.’ (It should be noted that Demetriou has belatedly—and rather lamely—responded to the NSS’s complaints.)

So, there you have it. From now on, should any women disagree with anything I write in the Freethinker or elsewhere, I shall simply employ Demetriou’s Defence: know your place, woman! [Praise the Lord! – Ed.]

Know your place, infidel!

In a new report for the UK Commission for Countering Extremism, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens warns that ‘Anti-blasphemy activism in the UK is gaining momentum and showing signs of becoming increasingly radicalised.’ Meleagrou-Hitchens has provided a valuable summary and analysis of the threats posed by Islamists to free thought in the UK. It is eye-opening even for those of us who pay close attention to this sort of thing. And, as he astutely notes, it is not just non-Muslims like the Batley schoolteacher who face Islamist intimidation, but ‘heretical’ Muslims too—Ahmadi Muslims in particular, one of whom was murdered in Glasgow in 2016 for his beliefs. At a time when gay MPs have been scared by Islamists into giving up their seats, and when even the Speaker of the House of Commons is more or less openly expressing his fear of Islamist violence against MPs, Meleagrou-Hitchens’s analysis is essential, if also alarming, reading.

From Pakistan with terror

Meleagrou-Hitchens reports that much of this ‘anti-blasphemy activism’ is linked to ‘the emergence of a UK wing of the extremist Pakistani anti-blasphemy political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP).’ This is unsurprising, given the long and ignoble tradition of Pakistani Islamists’ interference in other countries (the Pakistani government’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan being the most disgraceful example)—not to mention the equally ignoble tradition of persecuting infidels within Pakistan itself.

Just this month, the BBC reported that a young man has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for the crime of sharing images and videos offensive to Muslims. Despite all this, Pakistan remains a ‘major non-NATO ally’, thus sullying the name of an organisation that, for all its past and present crimes and follies, is now one of the world’s great bulwarks of liberal democracy. So it goes.

A note on ‘extremism’

Michael Gove has produced a new official definition of ‘extremism’ that is both broad and vague, and therefore a threat to free speech. There are many problems with having the state define what constitutes ‘extremism’ in the first place—it is a contested word and concept, one liable to misuse by governments wishing to muzzle the opposition. What business is it of the state to define the limits of acceptable political discourse? What business is it of anyone to do so, unless they want to shut their critics up?

But the Gove definition is particularly dubious. As the NSS put it, it could include ‘those who seek to “undermine” the country’s institutions or values’, a group which would include opponents of the established Church of England and the monarchy (the NSS spoke before the definition was made public on 14 March, but its concerns still apply). On the one hand, then, the UK Commission for Countering Extremism (!) is rightly concerned about Islamic ‘anti-blasphemy activism’; on the other, the government seems to want to erode free speech in this country even further.

By the way, would blasphemy not be considered ‘extremist’ by the votaries of the various faiths? Indeed, it was not so long ago that we had an official blasphemy ban on the law books. The government’s attempts to counter the phenomenon nebulously described as ‘extremism’ is a little too close for my liking to a ban on blasphemy—even on free speech tout court.

The Scottish Hate Monster

Meanwhile, Scotland’s long-delayed and authoritarian Hate Crime Act will come into force on (appropriately) 1 April, with ‘non-crime hate incidents’ also being recorded. Thankfully, a Police Scotland video has resurfaced to put us all in our places. The narrator, in condescending faux chummy Scots, informs us that the ‘Hate Monster’ will grow within us every time we commit a hate crime. The criminal urge can just creep up on you, it seems: one moment you’re a bit peeved and ‘then, before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime.’ A sound basis for prosecution…

Being Scottish, I have long had concerns about the Hate Crime Act. In 2022, I went so far as to say how shameful—and terrifying—it was. And this in one of the heartlands of the Enlightenment, no less! I can easily see how things I have written (including in this very Faith Watch), and things which have appeared in the Freethinker generally, might fall afoul of the Act or be seized upon by some offence-seeking enemy of free thought.

With Michael Gove and Humza Yousaf fighting for our freedoms, who needs tyrants? All I can say is that we at the Freethinker have no intention of being silenced.

Of rum and Ramadan

The month of Muslim fasting and prayer began on 10 March. There is no objection to people freely practising their religion, of course, but let us not forget the closeted apostates and liberal or non-practising Muslims around the world forced into doing so on pain of ostracisation—or worse. In Nigeria, for example, 11 Muslims have already been arrested for the crime of eating during the hours of fasting. That is why it is nice to see the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) planning to have a picnic in defiance of religious bullying this month.

Apparently, 23 March is Atheist Day, which I would normally find very silly except for the happy coincidence that it falls within Ramadan this year and is the date on which CEMB invites everyone to ‘take a shot of Rum for #atheists and #exMuslims across the globe’ using the hashtag #AtheistDayRUMadan. I for one will join in, though probably with whisky rather than rum. Happy Rumadan!

Ramadan and the Uyghurs

While Ramadan can inspire Islamic bullying and tyranny, it is also a good time to remember the Uyghur Muslims, who are facing genocide at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Their plight has faded from the media as other horrors have risen up to capture our attention, but they should not be forgotten.

For them, Ramadan is a dangerous time indeed. As the Campaign for Uyghurs put it:

‘The blessed month of Ramadan is also synonymous with the extreme torture and hardships perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it wages a brutal war on Islam amidst the ongoing Uyghur genocide. The CCP ludicrously deems any public expression of the Islamic faith as “religious extremism” [there’s that word again] and outlaws religious practices among the Uyghurs, including fasting, owning a Qur’an, and praying. During Ramadan, Uyghurs are forced to abandon their fasts, consume non-halal (prohibited) products, and engage in other activities that contradict their faith. If they refuse, they are subject to severe punishment.’

So even as I have no sympathy with religious belief and practice, I feel a little softer towards Ramadan these days than I normally would. Of course, the only thing is to be consistent in one’s advocation of liberty: just as nobody should be compelled to practice religion, nobody should be prevented from doing so if they freely choose it.

Alexander and Hephaestion redux

In happier news, one of the most famously gay places in all of history has legalised same-sex marriage. Despite the best efforts of the Greek Orthodox Church, the first-ever gay wedding in the Athens City Hall was conducted on 7 March. Nearly three thousand years after Achilles and Patroclus, and more than two thousand after Alexander and Hephaestion, it’s about time! Perhaps now is a good moment to revisit Mary Renault’s beautiful novel about the latter pair, Fire from Heaven (1969); it is a personal favourite of mine, and its sequels, The Persian Boy (1972) and Funeral Games (1981), are also well worth reading.

I can’t resist an apt quote from Fire from Heaven here. Alexander has just expressed his love for his closest friend: ‘Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning bolt.’

The continued decay of subcontinental (and global) secularism

In last month’s Faith Watch, I wrote of Narendra Modi’s ‘assault on India’s rich secularist history’. Well, here we are again. Less than two months after Modi opened a new temple to Ram in Ayodhya, his government has announced that it is set to fulfil another Hindu nationalist dream by enacting the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed in 2019. Even the name of the act sounds slightly sinister.

As the writer and Modi critic Mukul Kesavan wrote in 2019, when the act was just a bill, ‘Couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, the CAB’s main purpose is the de-legitimization of Muslim citizenship.’ He went on to describe it as one of ‘the greatest institutional threats to Indian democracy today.’

With Modi and his party up for re-election later this year, it is no wonder they are so flagrantly pandering to their Hindu nationalist base. Modi is likely to win a third term, so for how much longer will India be able to retain the title of the world’s largest secular democracy? Meanwhile, with Donald Trump, darling of the Christian nationalists, tying with and sometimes even surpassing Joe Biden in the polls, the world’s oldest secular democracy might also be preparing to self-immolate this year.

Perhaps nations like India and the US have forgotten the value of secularism. They should look to Iran, where a poll run by the state found a huge majority in favour of secular government. And, in a rebuke to all those who so vacuously celebrated World Hijab Day on 1 February, it also found that most Iranians are opposed to the mandatory hijab.

Should India and the US choose to abandon their hard-won secular democracies, they will miss them dearly—and they will have to fight for them all over again. At least the ideals of secular democracy will survive among those who most appreciate its worth.

Yet more papal piffle

The above words could be applied to almost everything every pope has ever said, including Pope Francis’s recent intervention wherein he might as well have told the Ukrainians to surrender to annihilation (having forgotten his church’s historical complicity with fascism, Francis has now reportedly joined Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping in congratulating Putin on his recent election victory), but I have in mind a book released earlier this year: The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger. I read (though ‘endured’ might be a better word) this book, intending to review it more fully, but it is so bad that it is not worth the effort. Instead, I shall limit myself to a few reflections.

First, why is a respected university press publishing a book almost entirely composed of theological waffle written mostly by committed theological wafflers? They may as well publish a Cambridge Companion to Scientology written by L. Ron Hubbard fans. If Catholics (or Scientologists) want to publish this stuff, they are free to do so – and they certainly have the resources with which to do it. And there is no reasonable objection to the publication of historical-analytical volumes on religion and theology.

But a serious academic press printing what amounts to mumbo-jumbo? I look forward to a future Cambridge Companion to John Frum Worship consisting entirely of pseudo-sophisticated analysis by Melanesian acolytes of the eponymous cargo cult. (Again, anthropological study is an entirely different thing.)

The Ratzinger book opens breathlessly, with the editors placing their subject alongside Aristotle and Shakespeare in the depth of his influence (in his case, on Catholic theology rather than philosophy and literature). He is also compared with Augustine and Aquinas (of course), but at least that pair had the excuse of living in periods of relative ignorance. The editors and contributors clearly think of Ratzinger as a great and humane scholar. A useful tonic to this hero worship is Daniel Gawthrop’s 2013 book The Trial of Pope Benedict, which (so far as I am concerned, anyway) exposes Ratzinger as the nasty, authoritarian, reactionary old bigot and bully that he was.

Here is an example of theo-waffle from Joseph Ratzinger, as quoted by a contributor to the Companion, so that the reader can judge for him- or herself this towering intellect:

‘The truth cannot unfold except in an otherness open to God, who wishes to reveal his own otherness in and through my human brothers and sisters. Hence it is not fitting to state in an exclusive way: “I possess the truth.” The truth is not possessed by anyone; it is always a gift which calls us to undertake a journey of ever closer assimilation to truth… truth is disclosed only in an encounter of love.’

As with so much theology, this babble is reminiscent of the worst stylings of the postmodernists. It is an irony that conservative theologians like Ratzinger, who abhor postmodernism and the like, sound so much like them—and carry about as much intellectual weight, assuming as they do all the things that they need, and have signally failed, to prove before they even begin and building an absurd and abstruse system on top of those assumptions. Change a few words here and there, and the most sophisticated Christian theology can be rendered into a postmodernist, or even a cargo cult, tract. (And it is beyond me how the above quote can be squared with another contributor’s statement that ‘the Catholic Church, for Ratzinger, is…the Spirit-filled infallible authority…’)

Here is another example, this time from one of the contributors, whose simultaneous pomposity and meaninglessness might make even Jacques Derrida scoff: ‘[F]or Ratzinger, communion is the fundamental figure of reality, created and uncreated, and historically mediated relationality is thus disclosive of the deepest meaning of being.’ Thus disclosive of the deepest meaning of being—magnificent.

According to Ratzinger and his Cambridge companions, Christianity is a pre-eminently and uniquely rational religion. Curious, then, that even its most ‘sophisticated’ defenders fall back on such fatuous language (all the better to befuddle, I suppose). There is also the awkward fact that Ratzinger himself, as discussed in the book, admitted that silly doctrines such as the Trinity can only be accepted on the basis of revelation—after all, they do not do very well under rational scrutiny. And what of the plain superstition that is literal transubstantiation? Or intercessory prayer?

Worst of all, the Companion barely deals with the thousands of child rapes that Ratzinger was arguably morally culpable for. When it does, it is to excuse him and to warp the record to portray him as a saviour rather than an enabler. On moral as well as intellectual grounds, then, this book is almost as rancid as its subject.

I cannot think of an excuse for Cambridge University Press here. Would they take an obvious work of fiction, complete with its own metaphysics and theology and imagined history, and allow deluded people who believe that the fiction is real to write so sincerely about it?

There is a Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, but, so far as I can tell, none of its contributors believes in Aslan or Gandalf or treats fantasy as reality rather than literature—and it now strikes me that the papal piffle that fills the pages of the Ratzinger companion would be much more at home in the back-end of some anthology of third-rate fantasy.

Further reading:

Secularism, women’s rights, and religious charities

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Blasphemy and free speech in the UK

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle?

Blasphemy Month at the Freethinker

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

Freethought in Pakistan

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The post Faith Watch, March 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

2023 has been an eventful year for free thought, humanism and secularism. Below, Emma Park and Daniel James Sharp look back on some of the major issues that have been debated in the Freethinker this year.

I. Free speech, religion and the culture wars

Free thought and intellectual progress are not possible without a shared culture of free speech, open debate and a willingness to engage with different points of view. One of the Freethinker’s concerns this year has been with attempts to repress free speech, especially in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and in the context of the ‘culture wars’.

In Ireland, a new bill on hate offences threatens to undermine free speech, not just about religion but on a variety of the most sensitive topics – in other words, topics on which open debate is crucial. In Wakefield, England, in February, a non-Muslim woman, presumably under pressure, donned a veil and made a humiliating public apology in the local mosque, because her autistic son had brought a copy of the Quran into school and it was accidentally scuffed. And Puffin has made attempts to censor Roald Dahl in the name of ‘sensitivity’.

Free speech at universities also remains under pressure, as illustrated by the case of Professor Steven Greer, who was hounded by Bristol University Islamic Society in a smear campaign that was supported by academic colleagues who should have known better. Daniel reviewed Greer’s book about his experiences.

Across the pond, Professor Alex Byrne’s contract for a book critical of gender identity ideology was cancelled by Oxford University Press, but has since been published by Polity. From a different perspective, former vice chancellor Julius Weinberg argued that ‘freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas’.

To supporters of democracy in Hong Kong, the culture wars are all but an irrelevance. The suffocating control of the Chinese Communist Party, said Kevin Yam, forced campaigners across the political spectrum to work together.

II. Science, philosophy, and humanism

As well as exploring the issues of the day, the Freethinker has also explored some of their deeper philosophical and historical contexts.

We interviewed the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett about the relationship between philosophy and science, meaning and consciousness in a godless, Darwinian universe, and New Atheism. With historian Charles Freeman, we discussed the richness and variety of the ancient Greek mind and how the coming of Christian orthodoxy put an end to that tradition. And we caught up with the humanist and author Sarah Bakewell to explore different traditions of humanism.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson and Daniel Sharp both contributed articles about one of the most famous freethinkers of recent years, the late Christopher Hitchens.

III. Islam and free thought

With the rise of Islam in Britain and across the West, it has become urgent to consider how far the religion can be compatible with Western values and approaches. To explore this question, we interviewed Taj Hargey, possibly Britain’s only liberal imam. Other contributors have explored the need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought around the world, why the hijab is not a good symbol for women, and whether it is possible to distinguish between religious and political Islam.

IV. Secularism

Secularism is the principle that religion and state should be separated, and that religion should have no undue influence on public life. In the UK, thanks to a combination of political apathy and entrenched privilege, we still have an established church and unelected clergy in Parliament. Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, spoke to the Freethinker about why he introduced a bill to disestablish the Church of England.

With a general election on the cards for 2024, Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society discussed where the political parties stand on faith schools. Two recent events in which the NSS participated revealed some of the challenges involved in secularisation. Daniel also argued in an article for Only Sky that the Church of England’s record on gay marriage is another reason to hasten disestablishment.

Other contributors to the Freethinker have looked at secularism, its history and future, in Québec, Turkey and Wales, and the strengths and weaknesses of French-style laïcité.

Did you know that, while the advancement of any religion, as well as of humanism, is considered a charitable aim under English law, the advancement of free thought, atheism or secularism is not? See Emma’s piece for New Humanist.

V. Israel and Palestine

One of the year’s biggest events—the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war—has produced a wide range of often emotional and heated responses. In contrast to all this sound and fury, the Freethinker has published a series of articles dealing with the conflict from different and often disagreeing, but rationally and charitably argued perspectives.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid wrote about the ‘leftist postcolonial apologia’ for Hamas and argued that the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at root, a religious one, while in Emma’s interview with Taj Hargey, the imam was staunch in his support of the ‘occupied and oppressed’ Palestinians. Hina Husain wrote about her Pakistani upbringing and being inculcated with Islam-based anti-Semitism. Finally, Ralph Leonard responded to all these articles, arguing that the conflict is, in fact, inspired more by competing nationalisms than religious impulses.

VI. Republicanism

Free thought and secularism have been closely intertwined with republicanism in British history. The Freethinker has reinforced this link since its beginnings in 1881.

This year, we have continued in the same spirit of religious and political anti-authoritarianism, publishing a review by Daniel of the republican activist Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy book. Later in the year, Daniel interviewed Graham Smith in person at Conway Hall. Meanwhile, Emma delved into the archives to discover the connection between the Freethinker and Republic, of which Smith is the CEO.

See also Daniel’s article on the republican Thomas Paine’s influence on Christopher Hitchens and Tony Howe’s discussion of an even earlier famous British republican, John Milton.

VII. Free thought history

In June, we were saddened to hear of the death of Jim Herrick (1944-2023), former editor of the Freethinker. Bob Forder, NSS historian, wrote an obituary commemorating Jim’s lifelong dedication to free thought, humanism and secularism.

The composer Frances Lynch wrote a guest post about her rediscovery of Eliza Flower, a radical nineteenth-century composer associated with Conway Hall, who was neglected by the historical record because she was female.

We have also been reflecting on the history of the Freethinker and of the various non-religious movements in the UK. Former editor Nigel Sinnott kindly agreed to let us republish an article he wrote for the magazine in 1970 in which he discussed the complicated historical relationship between humanists and secularists. Historian Charlie Lynch introduced the recent book he co-wrote with two other academics charting the history of organised humanism in Britain, which Emma has also reviewed for New Humanist. And Bob Forder argued that free thought and secularism are inseparable.

VIII. The future of free thought

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in 2023. (We even used Dall-E, a generative AI model, to illustrate this post.) Given the exponential pace of development, it is clear that the implications need to be monitored very carefully. For instance, there are concerns that ChatGPT may be biased in favour of certain interpretations of Islam. And artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be just around the corner, making ethical oversight all the more urgent.

Emma and Daniel spoke about the nature of free thought and the challenges facing it today and in the future on the Humanism Now podcast, on Freethought Hour and to the Reading Humanists. Emma also spoke to the Central London Humanists about Pastafarianism, arguably the world’s fastest growing religion, and a topic about which there is much to say.

This year also saw the publication of two intriguing books about the impact of digital technology on free thought, one by Simon McCarthy-Jones, and another by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. Emma interviewed Laura Dodsworth for the Freethinker and reviewed both books for the Literary Review. We will be looking further at the implications of digital technology for free thought in 2024.

Finally, a request for your support…

The Freethinker is an independent, non-profit journal and completely open-access. We are funded by donations and legacies given by generations of readers back to the 19th century – and not by big corporations or billionaires. To keep us going in the future, we depend on the generosity of readers today. If you believe in the importance of fostering a culture of free thought, open enquiry and irreverence, please consider making a donation via this link.

And don’t forget to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter, to keep abreast of the latest developments in free thought in the UK and around the world.

Postscript: a merry Christmas of sorts from Christopher Hitchens…

The post Year in review: 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Alex Byrne is not necessarily the sort of person whom you would have expected to become involved in the ‘culture wars’. After an initial career in advertising, he studied philosophy at Birkbeck, King’s College London and Princeton, and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 1994 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Instructor in Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where he is now a professor. Up till a few years ago, his research centred on abstract philosophical questions like the nature of ‘colour’.

Byrne became interested in the disputes over the meaning of sex and gender in about 2017, after learning about an early academic furore over the analogy or disanalogy between transgenderism and transracialism. He then had a ‘ringside seat’ in the trans debate, or gender debate as it is also known, when his wife, Carole Hooven, was ‘cancelled’ by certain people at Harvard University for publicly expressing her view that sex is biological and binary. His own book, Trouble with Gender, was under contract to Oxford University Press, but the latter withdrew from the contract last year. He discussed the possible reasons for this in an article for Quillette. Trouble with Gender will be published by Polity on 27 October 2023.

I interviewed Professor Byrne across the Atlantic via Zoom. In the edited transcript below, we explore the origins of his interest in the trans debate and his later experience of it, what the debate is actually about, his reasons for writing a book about it, and how a philosopher can contribute to the debate by making clear distinctions.

We also consider how the atmosphere in philosophy departments has changed in recent years, and whether philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction.

On debating the trans debate: polite notice

The Freethinker is committed to open, well-reasoned and civilised discussion, in particular on issues where dogma, authoritarianism or fear have led to the suppression or distortion of certain points of view. We are also opposed to extremism and fanaticism of any kind, considering such qualities incompatible with our guiding principles of liberty, reason and humanity. Further discussion here.

We have endeavoured to find contributors to oppose the views advocated in previous articles on the trans or gender debate, but our invitations have so far been met with silence or refusal. If there is anyone out there who has experience or expertise on this topic, and who thinks that the various arguments put forward by Alex Byrne, Helen Joyce and Eliza Mondegreen are fundamentally flawed, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch via this link.

As always, any opinions expressed below are the sole responsibility of those expressing them.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

Alex Byrne: It was a rather convoluted route. I think that is true of many philosophers. I started off doing mathematics and physics and then I worked in advertising in London for a number of years. And while I was doing that, I went to Birkbeck College in the evenings to study for a second undergraduate degree in philosophy. I had always been interested in philosophy, but in Britain at the time, it was very hard to put a name to the sorts of issues that I was interested in. I did not realise that there was an actual subject that dealt with these problems and questions that fascinated me. One formative episode was when I saw Men of Ideas by Bryan Magee. I also read AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and found it completely enthralling. I believed for a while that logical positivism was the solution to all philosophical problems – I was soon disabused of that.

Looking back over your career in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, what are the contributions you have made to these fields of which you are the most proud?

That is a difficult question. You should really ask someone else about my contributions, such as they are. I have done a lot of work on perception, and in particular the perception of colour. Most of this has been with David Hilbert, a philosopher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. We have written many papers together defending the view that colours are physical properties. In particular, they are just ways of altering the incident light. This is quite a controversial view in the philosophy of colour – a little subdiscipline of philosophy. One view that is perhaps more popular than our physicalist view goes back to the ancient Greeks, that nothing actually is coloured. Even though it seems or looks as if tomatoes are red and grass is green and the sky is blue, in fact, this is just some sort of global illusion and nothing is really coloured. Or at best, if something really is coloured, it is an item in the mind, a mental image or picture.

I think it was Democritus who said, ‘By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void…’

Yes. Democritus is the standard source for this eliminativist view. As that quotation brings out, it is not just colour that is supposed to be an illusion or only in the mind or a matter of convention. It is also other perceptible properties like heat, tastes, smells, sounds and so on.

How and why did you move from this rather abstruse subject to sex and gender?

I had always been interested in sex differences and the explanation of sex differences – why males and females of our species in particular differ in some trait. Also I had always been interested in issues of free speech and was temperamentally inclined towards an absolutist position about speech. And then, in 2017, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published a paper called ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, which appeared in the leading journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia. There was a huge fuss about this paper, which essentially argued that the same courtesies and tolerant attitude granted to a transgender person like Caitlyn Jenner should be extended towards a transracial person like Rachel Dolezal.

The whole message of Tuvel’s paper was very progressive, and you might have thought that, within feminist philosophy, her paper would have been praised. But instead, the opposite happened: it was widely condemned as having the potential to cause great harm to various communities. An open letter appeared signed by many academics, including Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble, calling for the paper’s retraction. It was not retracted in the end, fortunately, but it brought home to me very vividly that philosophy at that time had an extremely intolerant side, opposed to academic freedom, which I thoroughly disapproved of.

You mentioned Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. Your book is called Trouble with Gender. Is that a deliberate allusion?

Yes. It is also an allusion to Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, the British science fiction writer.

You talk about the trouble that Tuvel’s paper caused in academic philosophy. When I was at Oxford in the 2000s, the Philosophy Faculty had a reputation for competitive, no-holds-barred debate. From what I have heard, that was true of many philosophy departments at the time. Is it still the case today? Is frank discussion still possible in university philosophy departments?

Yes, it certainly is, although I think that, over the years, that style of open combat and trying to tear the speaker down has changed. Back in the day, when an invited speaker came to deliver a talk at a colloquium, the attitude of some philosophers was, ‘We have to go into the talk with the aim of humiliating the speaker or destroying his or her ideas, and if we do that, then that is a satisfactory colloquium session.’ Sometimes philosophers went too far in that regard, and the result was that the discipline was less hospitable and welcoming to some people than it should have been.

Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: the emphasis is much more on constructive criticism and telling the speaker that his or her paper was excellent and incisive and a great contribution to the topic at hand. There is much more overt praising of speakers at the end of talks than there used to be. And as far as hot-button topics like sex and gender go, unfortunately it is not possible to have a freewheeling discussion without some people getting offended or hurt. As a result, we do not have no-holds-barred discussions about what women are or whether sex is binary.

This timidity came as something of a surprise to me. Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

In your experience, is that true on both sides of the Atlantic?

Yes.

Apart from the trans or gender debate, are there any other issues that cause this amount of friction?

At the moment it is mainly sex and gender. Race is another topic with plenty of no-go zones, in philosophy and elsewhere. Interestingly, in the subdiscipline called the philosophy of race, it is perfectly acceptable to argue for a biological theory of race – that what it is to be black or east Asian or white is to have a certain kind of ancient ancestry, a pure matter of biology, in some broad sense. 

Why is it that this issue of what a person is, or rather, what a woman is, has become such a huge bone of contention among so many people?

That is a good question. I am not sure what the answer is. The question, what is a woman, was asked most famously by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). And feminist philosophers have been obsessed with the question ever since. But it has never before had the valence that it has now. I suspect that part of the explanation is that in the UK, for example, organisations like Stonewall started hanging their hat on the slogan that ‘trans women are women’. If they had said instead, ‘trans women are trans women’, or ‘trans women deserve to be treated as women’, there is no reason why the issue of what a woman is would have become so contentious. It is quite surreal the way the ‘what is a woman’ question is now used as a kind of ‘gotcha’ question to ask politicians.

In response to this question, for instance, Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, said in 2021 that it was ‘not right’ to say that only women have a cervix. Then in March this year, he said that, ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological … and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ Finally, in July, he decided that a woman is an ‘adult female’. And as you point out in your book, ‘woman’ was Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022. Is there a sort of fixation on this question? Why is it always about women?

Of course it is ‘what is a woman?’ – rather than ‘what is a man?’ Not because the ‘woman’ version of the question is harder to answer, but because issues of access to various spaces – sporting competitions, prisons, shelters and so on – are really only an issue for women; there is not a corresponding issue for men. Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate. In fact, I think most trans men would very wisely choose to be in the female estate rather than the male estate.

This is one of those rare examples, like the Beatles, where the direction of cultural export goes from the UK to the US. The ‘adult human female’ slogan started in the UK, in 2018, when the infamous billboard went up that quoted the then Google dictionary definition: ‘Woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female’.

It was only some years later that this made its way over the Atlantic, when Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is very popular over here, made a documentary called What is a Woman? The answer that Walsh’s wife gives at the end of the documentary is that a woman is an ‘adult human female’. To get to that rather unexciting point, Walsh interviewed many experts – including, memorably, a gender studies professor – who were completely unable to answer the question coherently.

To sum up, what is really at the heart of the trans debate? What exactly is it about?

That is a good question. There are specific questions or specific issues that divide the so-called gender-critical side from the trans-activist side. One question is about the nature of women and men. What is it to be a woman or a man? Another question is about the nature of sex. Are there two sexes or more than two? Or is sex in some sense socially constructed? Is the notion of sex in good order anyway? Maybe it should be completely junked. And another question is about gender identity. Do we all have gender identities? And is a misaligned gender identity the explanation of why some people suffer distress at their sexed bodies?

There are all these specific issues which are hotly debated. And then, of course, there is the even more contentious issue of how to treat children and adolescents with gender dysphoria – whether to give some of them puberty blockers, for example.

But beyond listing these questions, it is not clear to me that there is some sort of overarching issue which is really what the whole trans debate is about. Everyone sensible in this debate thinks that trans people should be afforded the same dignity and rights as everyone else. They should not be discriminated against, they should receive proper health care, they should be treated with respect in day-to-day life just like their fellow citizens, and if some adults wish to transition, they should be able to.

Is the struggle for trans rights analogous to the historic struggle for gay rights?

No, it is not, because there is no particular right being demanded that trans people lack.

Are there points at which women’s rights and trans rights, whatever these are, will inevitably clash, or do you think there is a way of reconciling them?

I would not put it in terms of a clash of rights, but there certainly are points of conflict. The most obvious of these is in sports. If you are a trans woman and you live your life as a woman and are treated by most people as a woman, it is at least understandable that you would wish to join the women’s team or take part in women’s sporting competitions. On the other side, women have an interest in having female-only categories for many sports. So there is a clear conflict of interest there. Another clear conflict of interest is in the case of prisons.

Let’s talk about your book in a bit more detail. In the ‘acknowledgements’ section, you say your greatest debt is to your wife, Carole Hooven, who was a lecturer on human evolutionary biology at Harvard. In 2021, she published T, which was a popular science book about testosterone. Last year, she wrote an article describing how she was accused of transphobia by certain members of Harvard for explaining on Fox News that sex is binary and biological. To what extent have your wife’s experiences influenced your own interest in the trans (or gender) debate and your views about it?

As a result of the episode you mention, Carole is no longer a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard. She has a position as an associate in the psychology department, in Steven Pinker’s lab. When this whole affair snowballed, it became apparent that it was not feasible for her to continue teaching in her old department. So she left. Carole’s experiences influenced the book a great deal. In addition to witnessing the backlash against Rebecca Tuvel, Kathleen Stock and other philosophers like Holly Lawford-Smith, I got a ringside seat when it came to Carole’s own cancellation over sex and gender.

That experience made me more determined to write a book on the topic. It is not that I am a particularly courageous person, but it did seem to be extremely unchivalrous to stand by and do nothing when I knew that I had things to say. And many philosophers were promulgating various confusions and mistakes which, I thought, I was in a position to correct.

Where would you put yourself politically?

I am a boring centrist. I have no political affiliation to speak of. I have always voted Democrat in the US. Temperamentally, I think I would really like to be a conservative, but I have never found an intellectually satisfactory way of being one. Socially, I have liberal views of the sort held by most academics.

In your introduction to Trouble with Gender, you write that your book is not about the ‘vitriolic political issues’ associated with the trans debate. Nonetheless, it was refused publication by Oxford University Press, after previously having been accepted. Why do you think OUP refused to publish your book in the end?

This is speculation on my part, but it is worth looking at the immediate history, in particular the fuss over Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism, also published by Oxford University Press. Announcement of its publication produced two petitions of complaint. As I discussed in Quillette, one of these was signed by the OUP Guild (the union representing OUP staff in New York). The other was signed by ‘members of the international scholarly community with a relationship of some kind, or several kinds, to Oxford University Press’. The letters protested against the publication of Lawford-Smith’s book and told OUP to change its procedures so this sort of thing would never happen again.

As for my book, it is not as if OUP should have been surprised by what I actually produced, because I wrote a proposal, eagerly accepted at first, which accurately described the final manuscript. OUP’s single formal complaint against the book, namely that it did not treat the subject in ‘a sufficiently serious or respectful way’, is ludicrous. At least, I hope that readers will find it ludicrous.

Do you think that OUP’s response to your book is a symptom of the way things are going in academia at the moment? Is there a cowardice and an unwillingness to deal with arguments that challenge a particularly entrenched view about things?

Yes, for sure. It is a worrying trend. It is the same phenomenon as the philosophers who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. To put it another way, when academic publishing is subjected to a genuine stress test, it completely fails, even though the advertising beforehand was that it would work perfectly. OUP publishes all sorts of controversial philosophy books, which defend views that other philosophers think are ridiculous, misguided, or completely wrong. Often, in the pages of OUP philosophy books, the author will criticise other philosophers in the most uncompromising terms. It also happens that OUP philosophy books are reviewed by other philosophers in an extremely critical way.

So you might think that OUP would gladly publish a book on a hot topic like sex and gender – maybe that book would get trashed by other philosophers, but this is just the way of academic publishing, and nothing to be ashamed of. That is not what happened.

Your book is designed for a popular rather than an academic audience. Did you intend it to stir up controversy or make inflammatory claims?

No. I knew that some of the claims would be controversial. For example, there is a chapter in which the view that women are adult human females is defended. There is a chapter on sex which defends the orthodox view of what sex is and tries to expose various confusions surrounding this topic. There is a chapter which argues that gender identity, at least as people popularly conceive of it, is a myth. All these are inflammatory claims, but I did not intend to provoke or stir up controversy. No doubt I will, though. The book has eight chapters, and each one will annoy some people.

What does your book contribute to the trans debate that has not been said before?

It is a very different book from, say, Helen Joyce’s Trans or Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. It deliberately does not take a stand on any social and political issues. It is not written from a feminist or gender critical perspective. It just brings the tools of philosophy to bear on the questions that everyone seems to be asking these days and tries to sort things out. The fact that it is not about social and political issues gives me more room to treat these topics in the detail that they deserve.

I would regard it as a success if readers discovered how you can actually argue about these issues. They do not even have to have to agree with what I say; they just have to see how evidence and argument can be brought to bear on questions like, ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘does everyone have a gender identity?’ Normally, in public discussions of these issues, people do not really argue, in the sense that one side presents evidence and reasons and then the other side counters or presents their own evidence and reasons. They start shouting at each other instead.

What can a philosopher specifically contribute to a debate about sex and gender? Should it not be left to the biologists and psychologists?

I hope that my book demonstrates exactly what a philosopher can bring to the table. Philosophers are good at making crucial distinctions, being relatively clear and precise, and being able to set out arguments in the appropriate way, so that you see why the conclusion follows from the premises. It is not possible to master all academic disciplines in one life, so we need contributions from different specialists. That includes the biologists and the psychologists, but sometimes their discussions of these topics are flawed because they lack a crucial tool from the philosophical toolkit. But it must be admitted that philosophers also have their blind spots and weaknesses.

You observe in your book that ‘a concerning feature of debates around sex and gender is the attempt to prevent distinctions from being made by prohibiting or redefining certain words.’ How far would you argue that sex and gender should be distinguished, and why?

In one way sex and gender should not be distinguished at all, because one of the many senses of the word ‘gender’ is simply ‘sex’. That is, ‘gender’ is sometimes just a synonym for ‘sex’; in this sense, sex and gender are the same. Because ‘gender’ has many other meanings, and to avoid confusion, I think it would be a good idea only to use the word ‘gender’ to mean sex. That is my first point.

My second point is that there are all these other things which we definitely want to distinguish from sex. For example, we want to distinguish being male from being masculine. Everyone going back to the ancient Greeks has seen that there is a distinction here. You can be a feminine male or a masculine female, and one sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for masculinity and femininity. We need to distinguish being male from being masculine, but there is absolutely no reason to use the word ‘gender’ to mark that distinction.

Another distinction we would want to make is that between being female and being a woman. There are numerous females who are neither humans nor adults, so there are females who are not women. On anyone’s view, there is a distinction here. You should not identify being female with being a woman, even if you think that all women are female. Now another sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for the categories man, woman, boy, girl. But again, it is a terrible idea to use the word ‘gender’ to mark this distinction between being female and being a woman.

Another distinction is between being female and having a female gender identity. Assuming we can make sense of the notion of ‘gender identity’ in the first place, we need to distinguish between being female and having a female gender identity, because some males can have a female gender identity, for example. Yet another sense of ‘gender’ is ‘gender identity’. But yet again, it is a bad idea to use the single word ‘gender’ to mark the distinction: we already have the phrase ‘gender identity’ and we should use that instead.

It is sometimes argued that the claim that trans people cannot change gender is incompatible with a humane (or humanist) outlook. Or that to require trans people to live in the sex which they are ‘assigned’ at birth, rather than accepting that they can change, is contrary to their human rights. Therefore, it is argued, to be ‘gender critical’ is fundamentally a right-wing, if not extremist, position, and harsh and oppressive to trans people. What would you say in response to this line of argument?

I am not a gender critical feminist, but it is not part of their position that people should not transition. And if people do transition, it is not part of the gender critical position that they should be discriminated against or their human rights should be reduced or downgraded. If you think of transitioning as it was always thought of, as a palliative measure to deal with gender dysphoria, then assuming that this actually works, at least for some people, it is hard to see what objection there could be to it, because it is an effective medical procedure to deal with a troubling psychological condition. It is not that people transition just for the hell of it or to gain access to women’s spaces. They transition because life has become unbearable living as their natal gender or natal sex.

Like many people on the side of free speech in debates of this kind, you quote from George Orwell’s 1984 in your book. You choose the part where Syme, a worker on the Newspeak dictionary, says,

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’

In your view, how far is the whole of the trans debate – or gender debate – really a battle about words?

In one way, it is not about words at all. Take the question of what a woman is. That question is not about the word ‘woman’, although of course I have asked it using the word ‘woman’. I am interested in people of a certain kind, women, not in any English words.

But in another way the trans debate is about words. Various trans activist projects concern language: if you can stop people from using various words or get them to use other words or phrases instead, then the various distinctions that the activists do not want to be made, become a lot harder to make. One example of this is the frequent replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘sex assigned at birth’. If you want to get people to stop talking about the fact that we come in male and female varieties, then one excellent way of doing it is to try and enforce a rule where you never say that someone is ‘female’, but instead that she was ‘assigned female at birth’. This has the effect of suggesting that people’s sex is a matter of some doubt or speculation – that maybe no one really knows what sex people are.

Similarly, for expressions like ‘cervix havers’ or ‘uterus havers’ – if you want to avoid the suggestion that any adult female person is a woman, then substituting ‘uterus haver’ for ‘woman’ is an effective way of doing that. Language is extremely important if you are an activist – for the reason that Orwell identified in that quotation.

Do you think that philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction?

They have a duty to defend established ways of making valuable distinctions. One very valuable distinction is between males and females. To the extent that people are trying to prevent others from making that distinction, philosophers, I suppose, should step in and say, ‘no, stop, that’s a bad idea’. But that is not to say that anyone will listen to us.

In your experience of academia in the US and elsewhere, how far would you say that free and open enquiry and debate are under threat in today’s environment? 

We are going through a bad patch – I do not think there is any doubt about that. But the pendulum will swing back sooner or later. There are already many signs of pushback; books seem to be coming out all the time explaining what went wrong and how we can correct things. I have a book that just came out called The Identity Trap by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk, all about the origins of so-called ‘wokeness’ – which is of course closely connected to this present cultural moment and the enthusiasm for cancelling speakers and shutting down certain kinds of speech.

So there is already some momentum in the other direction, and, if history is any guide, these things come in waves and recede eventually. But that does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing.

Do you hope that your book will help to push the pendulum back in the other direction?

I hope that in a very small way it will widen the Overton window and broaden boundaries of acceptable speech to some extent – whether people agree with the conclusions or not.

The post ‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

The recent burning of the Quran in the Swedish city of Malmo by an Iraqi refugee, Salwan Momika, has caused outrage in many Muslim countries. Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and others have issued statements condemning the action and have asked Sweden to reconsider its laws protecting freedom of expression. There have been public protests in several cities in these countries, demanding the severance of diplomatic ties with Sweden.

Momika burnt a copy of the Quran on 3^rd September this year, as a protest against Islam. According to the Swedish newspaper, The Local, Momika claimed that his protest was against the Muslim religion, not Muslims, and that the Quran should be banned globally for causing a ‘negative impact’. In contrast, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News implied that Momika’s act was a cynical attempt to secure his refugee status. In response to his protest, some Muslims in Sweden also attacked local police.

Media outlets in Muslim-majority countries have covered this incident, and others like it, extensively, despite their limited domestic relevance. The media in these countries frame these incidents as a wilful assault on Islam, and portray the doers as malicious. Certainly, the outrage is understandable, given the deep Muslim reverence for the Quran. On the other hand, the strongly negative spin given to these burnings could put the lives of the protesters in danger, and also cause a difficult situation for religious minorities living in the Muslim-majority countries where the articles are published.

Sweden’s Quran burning is just one of several similar acts that have occurred recently across Europe. Far-right groups in Sweden and Denmark have also burnt copies of the Quran during rallies and protests. These incidents provoke intense outrage when covered by the Muslim media. For example, when a far-right activist burnt a copy of Quran in Sweden in 2020, the media outlets in Pakistan and Iran responded with inflammatory language of their own. Whatever the ideological motivations of the different protesters in different cases, the outrage of the Muslim media has been more or less the same.

Take the Pakistani media’s coverage of the recent Quran burning in Sweden as an example. Some local media outlets in Pakistan used the word ‘Maloon’ (‘accursed’) of Momika in headlines and news content. They described his act of burning the Quran as ‘na paak’ (‘impure’) and used the words ‘be hurmati’ (‘disrespectful’) to describe what had happened to the holy book of Islam. This inflammatory language probably has its roots in Pakistan’s stringent blasphemy laws, which consider even mentioning blasphemous words or acts to be blasphemous. However, such biased reporting fosters further intolerance in the country, especially toward religious minorities, who already face grave dangers from false blasphemy allegations. Influential figures in parts of Punjab and Sindh already exploit blasphemy charges as a weapon against minorities.

For instance, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman in Pakistan, was accused of blasphemy in June 2009 after an argument with a group of Muslim women. A year later, she became the first woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. In 2020, despite the Supreme Court overturning her conviction, she was forced to flee to Canada in fear for her life. Bibi now lives there in exile with her husband and two children, while three of her children remain in Pakistan.

Bibi’s plight highlights the grave dangers faced by religious minorities under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. The sensationalised coverage of blasphemy cases by the Pakistani media further fans the flames of intolerance, as it has failed to cover these issues responsibly. The disproportionate coverage given to Quran burnings in Europe stands in stark contrast to the lack of attention by the Pakistani media towards domestic issues, such as the Christian community of Faisalabad, who lost their homes in a mob attack on 16 August this year. In that incident, a mob of hundreds attacked Faisalabad over a false blasphemy accusation against two Christian men. The mob burnt churches, looted homes and damaged the properties of people who had paid for them with their life savings.

The Pakistani media rarely highlight the human impact and the stories behind blasphemy accusations and persecuted minorities. Most of their coverage is dominated by the trials and outrage of the Muslim majority over perceived insults to Islam. They give little attention to the perspectives of freethinkers, progressives, atheists and agnostics – even if they tacitly admit their existence through accusations of the harm that such freethinkers allegedly inflict on society and Islam. The media also overlook the plight of Ahmadiyya community, who are living in constant fear in Pakistan. In this context, their extensive coverage of Momika’s Quran-burning in Sweden makes no sense. The Pakistani media’s attitude to this topic shows clearly that their agenda is to stir up intolerance and hatred at home.

Yet this is not only the case in Pakistan. The media in other Muslim countries follow the same trend. The Iranian media are an example. I tried to search news about Momika in Tehran’s Times of Iran. I found that the incident was being reported in a disturbing way. The paper reported that the Iranian government had asked Sweden to deal with Momika and other culprits or extradite them to Islamic states. In another news item, it described Momika as a member of Israel’s spy agency, and alleged that he was on a mission to deflect attention from Israeli crimes in the West Bank.

In contrast to the Tehran Times, the reporting of these incidents by Bangladesh’s Daily Star was quite balanced. It described the incident and the outrage of Muslim world about it without accusing Momika himself of anything. Its coverage of the incidents lacked vivid details about protests or retaliation. This more measured agenda-setting subtly discourages intolerant sentiments from dominating public discourse in Bangladesh. This is probably because of the more secular political environment of the country and the less stringent blasphemy laws, which together allow media organisations in Bangladesh to adopt a balanced approach in their journalism.

In Nigeria, the country with the biggest Muslim population in Africa, the media followed the line taken by the Tehran Times in their coverage of Momika. The country’s leading English newspaper, Vanguard, used words like ‘provocative’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘abominable’ and ‘heinous’ to describe his action.

This type of inflammatory rhetoric and narrative framing reinforces perceived grievances and breeds intolerance among the mass audience of these media outlets. It fuels a sense of collective outrage and offence by portraying incidents like this as intentional affronts to all Muslims, rather than as isolated acts with a specific political agenda, such as protesting against Islam (rather than aiming to attack Muslims). In contrast, the more responsible reporting from outlets like Bangladesh’s Daily Star resists overblown narratives that could incite a backlash.

These examples suggest that the media in Muslim countries face systemic disincentives that hinder responsible reporting on issues that could be considered blasphemous by local laws and society. These countries have zero tolerance for questioning religious dogma. Their journalists often internalise the biases of wider society. There also exist commercial pressures to cater to audience outrage and increase viewership by sensationalising events like the recent Quran burnings.

Despite these constraints, however, building a culture of ethical journalism remains critical. While overnight change is unrealistic, attitudes can gradually be shifted through training journalists in objective reporting, diversifying newsrooms, and cultivating connections with progressive civil society groups.

There is an urgent need for the media in Muslim countries to develop a code of conduct on reporting incidents deemed blasphemous under their laws. They need to make guidelines to ensure balanced, ethical coverage of those incidents, otherwise their hyped-up reporting will endanger lives both at home and abroad. The media have a moral responsibility to address internal biases and overblown narratives when covering such incidents. They must develop a mechanism for internal reflection on such biases, and must clarify and enforce standards to promote ethics in their coverage of these issues. Only then can they cover religious offence responsibly without compromising human rights and bringing any danger to any community locally or internationally.

Every person has the right to protest, but it should be capable of being practised within safe limits. Desecrating the Quran is a dangerous act that some people carry out to express frustration and anger towards Islam, despite the offence that it causes to Muslims. The media’s sensationalised reporting of such incidents often intensifies this danger for protesters. The media also deliberately ignores the perspective of the protester and the challenges they face afterwards.

As a result of the enormous hostility to acts of protest against Islam, whipped up by the media in Muslim-majority countries, even liberals who would theoretically support the protesters’ right to burn the Quran prefer to stay silent, so as to avoid putting their own lives in danger. Thus a culture of fear is created in which all possibility of reasonable discussion and criticism is suppressed.   

No doubt, the road to unbiased coverage upholding human rights in Muslim world will be long. But it must begin with media houses themselves taking an introspective look at how their rhetoric could prove harmful in a long run.

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The post The power of outrage appeared first on The Freethinker.

On 26 October 2018, Ireland voted to remove the archaic criminal law of blasphemy from its constitution. Almost one million people (64.85 per cent of participants) voted, in what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called a ‘quiet revolution’, to remove the word ‘blasphemous’ from article 40.6.1.i of the Constitution. This had previously stated that ‘the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.’

The bill to remove blasphemy was signed into law by the president later that year. However, just three years later, the Irish government are introducing a new, even more authoritarian bill that will severely limit free speech, and has the potential to criminalise modern blasphemers. Barring amendment or rejection, this bill is set to become enshrined in Irish law.

Currently being debated in the Seanad, the upper house of the Irish parliament, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 would update and expand Ireland’s hate speech laws to include incitement to violence or hatred against persons or groups on the basis of protected characteristics, including religion, race, disability and gender. 

The bill contains many provisions that will make the average liberal or civil libertarian’s blood run cold. Under this bill, existing crimes such as assault and vandalism could lead to longer prison sentences if hatred is found to be the motive. According to Section 7, the mere possession of material that the state deems ‘hateful’ could result in citizens being sent to prison for up to five years if their actions are held to be ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person with protected characteristics. Should the bill it find its way onto the statute books, then, despite the government’s insistence that it includes a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression’, there is little doubt that Ireland would become the ignominious holder of one of the most comprehensive ‘hate speech’ laws, if not the most totalitarian, in Western Europe. 

In April, the bill passed through the Dáil (Ireland’s equivalent of the House of Commons) relatively unscathed. Only 14 of the 160 Dáil members voted against the proposed amendments. Yet its provisions are comprehensive and authoritarian.

The Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who was responsible for the bill, argued that it was necessary in order to discourage the targeting of those with protected characteristics. Her comments were echoed by Pauline O’Reilly, a senator of the Green Party, who told the Seanad that restrictions on free speech were necessary to protect vulnerable people from ‘such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace’. The senator is also reported as saying, using highly emotive language, that ‘the dirty, filthy underbelly of hatred in Irish society’ necessitates ‘the restriction of freedom’.

On the face of it, these proposals may sound like a good idea. Few would oppose laws that protect the rights of individuals, especially if the individual belongs to a persecuted or marginalised group. No ordinary, sensible person would tolerate despicable acts such as racist or misogynistic violence. 

Except that words are not violence. Verbal abuse is not the same as physical abuse. According to those who support hate speech legislation, living in fear of being ‘attacked verbally’ is a restriction on one’s freedom. A rhetorical question commonly deployed by opponents of free speech in this debate is, ‘why is it acceptable to protect freedom of speech for everyone when doing so harms the right of some people, in particular, those with protected characteristics, to live in peace?’ The question is what conclusion should follow from this. Those who support the severe limitations on free speech proposed by the bill would say that it is justified by its alleged ability to protect vulnerable people’s right to ‘live in peace’. But the alternative conclusion would be that everyone has to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble, and that no one’s ideas are above criticism. Sometimes, words can even act as a bulwark against physical violence – against which every liberal democracy has numerous laws to protect people.

Clarification is essential when it comes to the application of laws, especially those relating to civil liberties. But tyranny likes grey areas. The bill’s current definition of hatred (clause 2(1)) is vague and tautological:

‘“Hatred” means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.’

This non-definition – ‘“hatred” means hatred against’ – led Thomas Pringle, the Independent TD (MP) for Donegal, to criticise the bill. He noted in a debate in the Select Committee on Justice that one ‘remarkable’ feature of the bill was that ‘hate is not defined in it’. Fundamentally, it is difficult to see how ‘hatred’ or ‘hate speech’, where it does not cross the line into existing criminal offences, such as harassment, libel, death threats or incitement to violence, could really mean anything more than ‘offensiveness’. But whatever the Merseyside police or hardline progressives might think, the idea that being offensive might be worthy of criminalisation is well beyond the current laws of either England or Ireland, and would be an extraordinarily illiberal step. 

Failure to define a crime can potentially lead to anyone being found guilty. When such vague definitions serve as the basis for a conviction, courts often have to base their sentence not only on a person’s actions but also on their beliefs. 

Consider the idea brought forward in the UK by Stella Creasy to make misogyny a ‘hate crime’. For several years the Labour MP has sought to make being motivated by misogyny an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing—with a potential prison sentence of up to seven years if it was determined that the crime was committed by someone with a hatred of women. We already have laws that deal with the most serious of misogynistic crimes, such as sexual assault and domestic abuse. Yet it is strange to think that a violent crime against a woman where the defendant was not motivated by misogyny should automatically be punished less severely than one where he or she was so motivated. If the harm done to the victim is the same in each case, there are real concerns with arguing that the law should categorise specific kinds of beliefs, when they motivate a crime, as making that crime liable to more severe punishment than it would be, had the defendant not been motivated by those kinds of beliefs.

McEntee and other supporters of the bill claim it is necessary to protect minority groups from actual verbal abuse. However a provision deeply buried in the bill indicates that its effects would reach much farther than that. Under Section 10 of the bill, the preparation or possession of material ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against people on account of their protected characteristics is a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, when such preparation or possession is ‘with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by [the defendant] or another person’, and ‘with intent’ to incite hatred or violence or ‘being reckless’ as to whether they are incited.  In other words, if you privately possess material that might incite, not even violence, but the more nebulous response of hatred, and you are ‘reckless’ about whether hatred is incited if the material is shared publicly, then you could be guilty of a criminal offence – regardless of whether the material actually results in anyone’s being abused.

An even more chilling provision is then introduced (clause 10(3)): where the defendant is found to have possessed such material, and ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for [his or her] personal use’, it is to be presumed ‘that the material [is] not intended for personal use’ unless he or she can prove otherwise. Thus, if the defendant is found to possess material likely to incite hatred, then, if it is reasonable to assume it was not for personal use, then they would be required to prove that it was, in order to escape conviction. In other words, this section, a little over 30 words long, effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence. The burden of proof will shift from the prosecutor to the defendant, on the grounds not of a proved intention, but of what it is ‘reasonable’ to assume the intention was.

As the ‘possession’ clause suggests, this bill, like other hate-speech laws around the world, such as Scotland’s infamous Hate Crime and Public Order Act, does not seek to protect vulnerable people from abstract definitions of hate, but rather is intended to limit what you can say or write. As such, it will curtail legitimate debate and pose a serious threat to free expression. Anything that prevents people from freely holding beliefs not sanctioned by the state, or viewed by the law as ‘dangerous’, is a threat to a free and liberal society. The idea of an informed citizenship is anathema to authoritarians.

As noble as they sound, laws against hate speech do not promote equality. They give victims an artificial sense of justice, but in reality, they do little to address the issues that have led to the supposed crime in the first place. If Irish lawmakers want to reduce prejudice against protected characteristics, they must abandon this bill and focus on education. Knowledge increases tolerance and acceptance. The irony is that this can only be achieved through the free exchange of ideas – which is exactly what this law is intended to prevent.

In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out that people are unaware that they are complicit in acts of wrongdoing because dogmatic adherence to an ideology seems to justify their actions. In the case of Ireland, an ideology of identity that promises to protect minority groups from offence is allowing its adherents to hide their illiberal behaviour under the guise of moral righteousness. 

If Ireland is to remain a free country, it is essential that this bill be rejected in its entirety. A copy of Solzhenitsyn’s book should be left on the desk of every member of parliament. 

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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