Humans are a very disagreeable species.

Therefore, it is important when speaking about the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ to separate these two things:

1. The material reality that any society formed of humans will be a society in which a variety of ideas will proliferate, humans will perpetually try to convince others of their ideas, disagreement about these ideas will nonetheless persist, factions will form around those disagreements, and conflict between these factions will ensue, resulting in constant cultural change and, often, bloodshed.
2. The liberal system for managing that conflict, minimising the bloodshed, and steering inevitable cultural change through pluralistic (live and let live) norms and democratic systems by protecting freedom of belief and speech, disallowing authoritarian coercion, and encouraging open debate with an expectation that arguments will be honest, civil, reasoned, and evidenced.

It is important to distinguish these two concepts because there are always some people who believe that, if they do away with the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas, they will also somehow do away with viewpoint diversity itself. This is utterly false. Unless homo sapiens somehow changes radically from the big-brained, combative, cooperative, tribal, territorial, social mammals that we are, we are stuck with the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. From school children negotiating the scope of an imaginary game to leaders of political parties trying to win voters, we will always be in the business of selling ideas and deciding which ideas to buy into. We cannot help ourselves. I’m doing it right now and so are you.

The liberal system of the Marketplace of Ideas can, of course, be changed. It has not been in operation at all for most of recorded history, is not in operation in many places even now, and has never been upheld perfectly anywhere. Liberal democracies that seek, in principle, to protect freedom of belief and speech, value viewpoint diversity, and actively encourage the free exchange and critique of ideas with an expectation of rationality and the use of evidence are relatively new developments of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) societies. WEIRD countries have always struggled to do this fully in practice, although their attempts have resulted in greater advances in knowledge and human rights than were known previously or that exist in countries that have not attempted any such system. It has been much more common for a dominant ruling power to decide what may or may not be said and by whom and to penalise disobedience under concepts like ‘treason’, ‘heresy’, ‘apostasy’, and ‘blasphemy’.

It may well be that it is fundamentally counterintuitive for us to allow other people to be morally or factually wrong or to see anything to be gained from having a variety of contradictory viewpoints or having these viewpoints do battle with each other when we think we know what is true and good. Even when well-established liberal democracies are doing comparatively well at remaining open to viewpoint diversity, we are always having to fight against people who want to make some things unspeakable and some truth claims unquestionable. They often do so with the best of intentions: to eradicate ideas that are hurtful or untrue and to stop them from being circulated in society and doing harm to people.

If you are a compassionate human being who is absolutely sure that God exists and that the consequences for being wrong about that are an eternity in Hell, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to stop the contrary from being argued? You will be saving lives—more, you will be saving immortal souls. Alternatively, if you see absolutely no reason to consider the proposition that God exists as a serious one and much evidence of harm being done by people who think otherwise, why allow them to continue spreading that belief? Surely trying to stamp out the conviction that one knows the divine will of the creator of the universe is what will really save lives?

Or: ‘Why allow people to misgender a trans person when it is so easy to just use their stated pronouns and could make all the difference to the emotional wellbeing of a vulnerable minority group and even reduce suicide? It costs so little to the speaker to use certain words, while having one’s gender identity recognised means so much to the trans individual,’ a trans activist will argue. Alternatively, a gender critical feminist may ask, ‘Why let people use wrong sex pronouns when it is this very failure to consistently recognise biological sex classes that underlies very real threats to women’s spaces and sports and children’s mental and physical health? Protecting people’s right to choose their own words comes at the cost of protecting safety and fairness for women and obtaining evidence-based treatment for gender-confused kids.’

‘Fine’, some dogmatic materialists will argue, ‘but the whole God thing has never been definitively established and the sex/gender issue includes political disagreements about whether to acknowledge a self-professed gender identity or insist on identifying people by biological sex. To some extent these can be considered open questions or matters of opinion. What about when people are saying things that are just straightforwardly untrue? What is there to be gained from letting people deny the Holocaust? We know that happened and remembering it is essential to ensuring it never happens again. Why let people claim the world is 6,000 years old and humans were created as humans when we know it is far older and that we evolved from earlier species as surely as we can know anything? Vital fields of science rely on these basic realities about the physical world and biological organisms. Why let people claim that vaccines cause autism when the problems with that original study have been demonstrated so clearly and further evidence refutes this claim as decisively as it is possible to refute anything? Why should freedom of belief and speech include the freedom to misinform others in ways that put children’s lives at risk?’

There are three reasons to protect freedom of speech and belief and keep the liberal system known as the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ open to ideas that are subversive, hurtful, and untrue.

Firstly, we can never be entirely certain that we know what is true. Even when something is supported by mountains of evidence so vast that it is incredibly unlikely that it will ever be falsified, we must always keep open the opportunity for someone to falsify it, because every so often, they do. In an example contributed to my and James Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories by Alan Sokal, we cite John Stuart Mill making the argument that we can only be so confident of the truth of Newtonian physics because it has withstood so many attempts to find flaws in it. Less than 50 years after Mill made this argument, Albert Einstein found flaws in Newtonianism and introduced us to special relativity (soon followed by general relativity). We must leave that door open, on principle.

Secondly, we can never know how the power to make exceptions to laws and social norms for freedom of belief and speech will be used in the future as different governments take power and different ideologies rise and fall. The only way you can protect yourself from censorship if a shift occurs in which your own ideas are considered appalling and deemed unspeakable by those with legal or social power is to consistently protect the right to express ideas that you find appalling. Atheists and religious and sexual minorities are among those whose expressions of views or attractions have been deemed most appalling and penalised most severely, so it is particularly disappointing when they justify censorship on the grounds of offence.

Thirdly, even if it were ethical to shut down freedom of belief and speech in this way (it isn’t) and even if wannabe censors could be trusted to identify, correctly and consistently, bad or false ideas (they can’t), this simply won’t work. No attempts to regulate free thought have ever been successful. That is why we have 45,000 denominations of Christianity even though Christian authorities have been among the most stringent in enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. Having ideas and disagreeing about them is what humans do. I repeat: we cannot close down the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. We can only close down the liberal system for managing it in ways that make it maximally productive and minimally violent. When people attempt to shut down certain ideas by making them unspeakable, either socially or legally, we see the emergence of alternative marketplaces of ideas, including black markets where the ugliest and most hateful ideas can fester unchecked.

When attempts to ‘cancel’ certain ideas from mainstream society and make them unspeakable or ‘not up for debate’ are imposed socially rather than legally and there are enough people who hold them, we will see the growth of alternative media. We saw this with the Critical Social Justice ‘woke’ phenomenon. As those who held views that ran counter to Critical Social Justice were removed from mainstream institutions and platforms for airing opinions and debating ideas, a complex network of alternative media began to form and grow—an Alternative Marketplace of Ideas. Podcasts, talk shows, think tanks, magazines, and even an academic journal and a university all dedicated to airing the ideas that could not be discussed in mainstream outlets proliferated at an astonishing rate.

While some of these were and are very good and provide thoughtful and balanced coverage of issues and attempt to include a wide variety of ideas, including Critical Social Justice ones, the cultural problem that drove their formation resulted in serious limitations. Fear of being ‘cancelled’ or of ‘guilt by association’ limited the range of guests such alternative outlets could attract and consequently the conversations they could have. Critical Social Justice activists who took a ‘not up for debate’ stance would certainly not come. With the best will in the world, echo chambers formed as various clusters of alternative media could only attract certain ideological subsets of guests and had great difficulty in including enough viewpoint diversity to balance and challenge each others’ ideas effectively.

In addition to this problem, many platforms did not operate with the best will in the world but deliberately chose highly biased and partisan speakers who would reinforce and escalate each other’s ideas to new extremes. Much of this was exacerbated by the funding structure required to operate this kind of alternative media, which incentivised ‘audience capture’ as platforms needed to feed increasingly biased and partisan audiences what they wanted to hear so they could remain solvent. All the ideas that had existed in society still existed and were still accessible, but now they were siloed and people with different views were not speaking to each other. Without checks and balances, political polarisation, tribalism, paranoia, and extremism could only grow. (I recently discussed this problem in some detail with John Cleese.)

When attempts to silence ideas are imposed legally, so as to eradicate them from society, what will then form is a Black Market of Ideas. Historically, these have sometimes been very positive as when gay men, atheists, or religious minorities have used systems of codes and secret meeting places to connect and find solidarity, friendship, or romance. (Suppression was entirely useless at making any ideas or sexualities go away.) However, sometimes the ideas found on the Black Market can be genuinely dark and being forced underground can make them both more twisted and more enticing. The best description of this process, I would argue, is to be found in Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen’s article asking whether censorship would have stopped the Nazis from gaining power. Lukianoff and Strossen track the effect of government censorship on the rise of Nazism, showing how crackdowns on publications and speech enabled the leaders of the fascist movement to use the (failed) attempts to censor them to their advantage:

‘[I]t is not surprising that the Nazis were able to spin government censorship into propaganda victories and seeming confirmation of their claims that they were speaking truth to power, and that power was aligned against them.’

We can see how this mentality manifests in the thinking of extremist groups that exist today, which can find each other much more easily via social media. Very Online conspiracy theorists who post that they are being silenced by global elites who do not want the people to know The Truth and who express radical suspicion of governments and expertise can take this paranoia into existential threat mode in the real world. There, they combine it with pre-existing prejudices to produce a volatile and violent mix of hatefulness, including anti-Semitism and ethnonationalism. Here is just one nasty example of this sort of thing, from a tweet: ‘Actually many Jews are behind the decline of western civilisation through their cultural marxist [sic] degeneracy like promoting Transgenderism [sic] etc. Jews love it when black [sic] & whites are at war with one another.’

We can also see how the least principled and balanced corners of the Alternative Marketplace of Ideas can tip into the Black Market of Ideas. This is a toxic brew of multiple, divided, and polarised marketplaces that is causing significant social dysfunction and escalating tribal tensions to a dangerous degree. It must be noted that attempts to remove ‘problematic’ ideas that run counter to those of Critical Social Justice from mainstream discourse have not caused any of them to go away. Instead, it has forced them into alternative forums where, in some cases, they have morphed into dark, extreme, and twisted variations of themselves due to the lack of productive, collaborative critique (as, in some ways, has happened to Critical Social Justice itself—see, for example, the embrace of Hamas terrorism by some of its advocates).

Those who believe we can somehow ever be without some form of a marketplace of ideas should look outside their ideological bubble and reacquaint themselves with our species. The only choice we have is how to manage the sheer range of different ideas and the need to argue about them that characterises homo sapiens. We could make the same mistake humans have made for most of history and allow a dominant moral orthodoxy to try to dictate an acceptable range of speaking points and socially or legally penalise all others out of existence. This will enable the proliferation of many mini-marketplaces of different groups speaking only among themselves, some proportion of which, without the benefit of counterviews and critiques, will surely go mad and generate highly biased, partisan, and polarising narratives. Meanwhile, extremist groups will be driven underground where they will paint themselves as the brave speakers of truth to oppressive power and attract increasing numbers of those who have gone mad due to being alienated from mainstream society. They will then become a danger to it.

Alternatively, we can decide to uphold the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas that has acted as the best system of conflict resolution and knowledge production that the world has ever known. We can keep a mainstream Marketplace of Ideas open to as many widely held views as possible to act as checks and balances to each other in a spirit of civil but robust debate. Society will benefit from the knowledge generated by this process, a process conducted with an expectation of evidenced and reasoned argument and through which institutions can be reformed via democratic processes and human rights and freedoms can be protected and advanced. Alternative media for special interests will still always exist but, without the pressure of cancel culture or guilt-by-association, it will also be able to attract and benefit from a wider range of views and thus be of additional value. At the same time, we can keep fringe and extreme views legally expressible where we can see them, get at them, counter them, and deny their advocates the glamour of claiming to be censored for speaking the truth that the powerful don’t want you to know. We can arrest those who threaten or commit violence and allow the rest to be clearly recognisable as pitiful fringe lunatics.

I strongly recommend we take the liberal route.

Further reading

Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? by Julius Weinberg

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

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

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

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

The return of blasphemy in Ireland and Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman, by Emma Park

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’: liberty and licensing, by Tony Howe

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

The post The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to work with it. appeared first on The Freethinker.

Six months on from 7 October, the Israeli war on Gaza continues. The recent withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza should not be misunderstood. It is a tactical decision, made in response to the ongoing hostage negotiations taking place in Cairo, as well as growing international pressure on Israel to temper its bellicosity towards the civilian population.

Last month, Israel killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK). These deaths brought the number of aid workers killed in Gaza to over 196, but since then the number has risen to 203. Israel apologised for the strikes on the WCK convoy, declared them to have been a mistake resulting from significant errors and protocol violations, and removed two senior officers from their posts. However, there is reason to think the strikes were a deliberate targeting of the aid convoy as a means of undermining humanitarian efforts in Gaza. Firstly, the WCK convoy had agreed and coordinated its movements with the IDF beforehand. Secondly, the IDF launched three separate strikes on the WCK vehicles in turn. Finally, the convoy was marked with the WCK logo, and all the passengers were civilians. Another example, taking place earlier this year, illustrates why this incident cannot be considered in isolation.

In January 2024, Israel made unsubstantiated claims about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); Israel claimed that a dozen or so employees of the agency were members of Hamas. The US, alongside the UK and several other Western countries, decided to suspend their funding to UNRWA based on Israel’s word alone. Even if the accusation against UNRWA was true, the organisation employs 30,000 people across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The complicity of a negligible amount of people in atrocities would not justify the suspension of funds to an organisation responsible for the provision of humanitarian relief to millions of people.

The United States admitted its inability to verify Israel’s claims. Moreover, the EU’s humanitarian chief said in March that there was no evidence from Israel to back up its claims about UNRWA. A UN-led review likewise found no evidence to support Israel’s claims, but, as the title of Julian Borger’s Guardian articles ruefully notes, the ‘damage to [the] aid agency is done’. Most recently, the German government announced that it would resume the funding to UNRWA that it had suspended. This is especially telling, given the virtually unconditional support Germany has otherwise provided Israel.

We therefore find ourselves in a situation in which Israel is responsible for the destruction of the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza and makes unfounded claims about the only relief agency able to provide significant help, while simultaneously urging its allies to suspend funding to this very same agency. In doing so, Israel has denied itself the right to be trusted when it declares that attacks against aid convoys are mere accidents. The BBC reported on 5 April that:

‘The Erez Gate in northern Gaza will be reopened for the first time since the start of the war, and the Israeli container port of Ashdod—which is close to Gaza—will accept humanitarian supplies. More aid from Jordan will also be allowed to enter via the Kerem Shalom Crossing.’

If Israel could reopen the Erez crossing and begin to use the port of Ashdod before, and had chosen not to do so, despite the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians, the logical implication is that it has been intentionally withholding aid. A Palestinian physician, Dr Duha Shellah, commenting on the distribution of aid into Gaza, told me that the ‘Volunteer committees responsible for coordinating and delivering aid have been targeted by the Israeli military.’ Likewise, hearing from colleagues, family, and friends, she speaks of ‘people eating grass, animal food, anything to survive.’ Israel’s claims about UNRWA led to $450 million worth of funding being suspended; in light of the dire plight of many Palestinians, this shows the fatal consequences of false—or at the very least unfounded—claims.

Recent revelations about the Israeli military’s application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the war on Gaza by the IDF also provide a sinister window into how Israel has been conducting its war. The Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, writing for +972 Magazine, has reported that ‘The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. The system is called ‘Lavender’ and its existence and use in the current war was revealed by six Israeli intelligence officers. The obvious question arises—are these Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants being targeted? And, even if they are, would using AI to target them be justified?

Well, Abraham reports that the six Israeli officers say ‘the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity.’ The explanation for this was simple. One of the intelligence officers declared that ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

In The Guardian’s report, one Israeli officer said that, in using Lavender, ‘I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.’ In the field of AI the idea of the ‘human in the loop’ is a cornerstone of ethical and practical thinking. The idea is that human beings, informed (and constrained by) their reason and ethics, can be accountable for the actions of AI. The essential negation of the human in the loop in the use of Lavender shows the depths of callousness the IDF have reached in their war on the people of Gaza.

The figures for the dead in Gaza are unlikely to be exact. However, given the ID numbers provided to residents in the small enclave and the corroboration of figures from various sources, it seems probable that the figure of over 30,000 dead is accurate. As of April, Save the Children reported that over 13,800 children had been killed in Gaza. In the face of this catastrophe, what role have Western powers played?

It is without a doubt true to say that virtually unanimous and unconditional support has been provided to Israel, particularly from the United States. A recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documents that ‘The US has approved more than 100 weapons transfers to Israel since October 7, and exported 8,000 military rifles and 43,000 handguns in 2023’. The BBC, in an article documenting where Israel gets its arms from, reported that ‘The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.’

The exact percentage figure of Israeli imported arms coming from the US is 65.6%. Trailing in second place is Germany, responsible for 29.7%. Although the United Kingdom does not provide as much as the other two powers, it nonetheless sold £42 million worth of arms to Israel in 2022 and since 2015 has granted arms export licences to Israel worth £442 million. This includes helicopters, aircraft, missiles, grenades, armoured vehicles, and tanks. Whatever drop in the larger ocean this constitutes, the UK has armed Israel and continues to provide it with diplomatic and political support at the United Nations.

Apologists for Israel tend to recycle the well-worn phrase that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. Ahmed Benchemsi, the MENA spokesman for HRW, however, described the situation differently to me: ‘What is happening in Gaza now is more like a mediaeval siege, in which the whole population is punished in retaliation for crimes committed by a small minority of combatants.’ Collective punishment is illegal under international law, so all of Hamas’s crimes on 7 October notwithstanding, Israel’s actions against the population of Gaza are illegal. A recent HRW report covering the West Bank also noted that:

‘Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools under the cover of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza.’

This is corroborated by Dr Mahmoud Wohoush, a doctor working in the West Bank, who told me that ‘Settler violence in the West Bank tremendously increased after Oct 7th and…the Israeli forces protect them [the settlers] and provide any needed support as many of the settlers are their relatives and friends.’ He goes on to say that ‘This escalation has been fostered by the politicians, particularly the extremists in the current right wing government. They are following the instructions from their religious leaders to kill the Palestinians to uproot them from their land.’ We often hear of the fanaticism of Hamas, sometimes generalised to the Palestinians at large, yet how often do we hear on Western airwaves of the fanaticism of Israeli settlers in the West Bank who think, by divine right, that the land of ‘Judea and Samaria’ should be granted to them alone?

These accounts, by HRW and by Palestinians on the ground, are crucial to note for two reasons. Firstly, the Israelis are committing crimes in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, nor any seriously organised armed Palestinian resistance group fighting them. Secondly, the war in Gaza is giving cover to the dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank, something which has been ongoing for decades, long before 7 October.

The war in Gaza represents—and is—a war on the Palestinian people. The high civilian death toll, combined with the suspension of funding to UNRWA, the application of AI, and increasing settler violence in the West Bank, prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Further reading

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

The post Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people appeared first on The Freethinker.

Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Christian nationalism in the US

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

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

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

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

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

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

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

What role does religion play in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Two contrasting views have recently appeared in the pages of the Freethinker. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that ‘[a]t the heart of the ongoing conflict…is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory’. Meanwhile, the liberal imam Taj Hargey took the opposite view in an interview with Freethinker editor Emma Park: ‘[T]he root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight.’

The land where so much blood is currently being needlessly spilled is the Holy Land, sacred to the faithful of all three major Abrahamic religions, who exalt it within their respective spiritual and theological practices and traditions. Moreover, religious fundamentalists on both sides—whether in the hard right Israeli government and the fanatical religious Zionist settler movement or the Islamist outfits of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—continually invoke their sacred texts to justify their exclusive rights to the Holy Land. There is also a great deal of sensitivity when it comes to the use of religious sites like the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa. Given all this, it would be naïve to disregard the important part religion plays in this conflict—and it is easy to see why, in the face of such zealotry, one might see it as nothing more than a religious dispute.

Fundamentally, however, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a holy war. Its roots lie not in supposed ancient hatreds or Quranic enmities but in modern and secular conditions. In essence, I would argue that the conflict is not, as Shahid claims, about different religious groups fighting for exclusive control of the same territory. Rather, it is a quarrel between two nations of roughly equal size—one Hebrew-speaking and predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish, and one Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, but with a significant and influential Christian minority—over who should be the undisputed master of the whole land.

In the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the words ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘homeland’ and ‘nationalism’ form a consistent motif. It does not refer much to religion, except in vague and ecumenical terms – in contrast, Hamas’ 1988 charter is replete with religious references. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent Palestinian nationalist outfit after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was the ostensibly Marxist-Leninist (though ‘Stalinist’ would be a more apt description) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Founded by George Habash, who came from a Christian background, many of the PFLP’s members were very secular-minded; many were even avowed atheists. It is mostly forgotten now, but when Hamas first arose in the 1980s, they would frequently clash with PFLP members, who they condemned as ‘apostates’. At that time, Israel, playing at the old imperial game of divide and rule, also implicitly backed Hamas, seeing it as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian groups.

The goal of leftist Palestinian nationalism is one secular democratic socialist state. This has been criticised as a Trojan horse for Arab ethnonationalist domination, but even if this was true, it would be an ethnonational, not religious, domination. It was only in 2003, under Arafat’s autocratic rule, that the constitution of the Palestinian Authority was amended to proclaim that Islam was to be the sole official religion of Palestine and sharia was to be ‘a principal source of legislation’.

On the other side, the founders of the Zionist movement, from Moses Hess to Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion, were, likewise, extremely secular, even anti-religious. ‘We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples’, Herzl wrote in his infamous cri de coeur, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. Zionism originated in 19^th-century romantic nationalism. It understood the Jewish predicament in a very particular sense. Jews were a nation in the abnormal condition of being the ‘stranger par excellence’, as the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker put it in 1882: ‘They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home … [T]hey are everywhere aliens … [and] everywhere endangered’. Therefore the answer to the so-called Jewish question was to create a Jewish national home that would morph into a Jewish state in what they saw as the organic homeland of the Jews: Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whether it advocated for a Jewish nation-state or a Jewish socialist commonwealth, early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people.

Zionists heartily invoked traditional Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language, but these were subordinated to their project of national renewal. Among the first and most ardent opponents of Zionism were religious Jews who railed against the Zionist prescription of a Jewish state as a blasphemy against the Torah; in their eyes, only the Messiah (who was, as yet, still tarrying) could establish a true Jewish state. As the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has put it, ‘[S]ome of the main Zionist thinkers saw Zionism as a Jewish revolt against Judaism.’

Many Palestinians and Arabs find the notion of Jewish nationhood hard to swallow. To them, Judaism is just a religion; it does not denote a nation or a people. This position is also expressed in the PLO charter: ‘Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…’ To acknowledge the secular fact of Jewish peoplehood and the depth of the historic and cultural attachment to Eretz Israel would be, to them, tantamount to legitimising Zionism, and, thus, the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and onwards. The Israeli state’s own lack of clarity as to whether it sees Jewishness in either ethnic or religious terms exacerbates this confusion.

Zionism is not particularly unique in using religion as the external badge of nationhood. One can find a parallel (as Shahid astutely notes) in the Pakistani nationalist movement. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founding father, was firmly irreligious, and he argued that the Muslim population of South Asia was a particular nation that could not live as a minority under an India where the Hindu ‘nation’ was the majority. Therefore, Muslims required their own state.

Understanding the national foundation of the conflict means having a more nuanced understanding of the enmity towards Israel. Shahid claims that Islamic anti-Semitism is the ‘predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel’. No doubt there is an element of truth to this. Religiously-motivated anti-Semitism has proliferated across many Muslim countries, as Hina Husain, for instance, has described in an article on her Pakistani upbringing. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposition to Israel really is about ‘Muslim imperialism’, as Shahid puts it. They do not care about Palestinian nationhood; for them, Palestine is nothing more than a province in a lost empire that they wish to resurrect.

But it would be wrong to see all Arab opposition to Israel as a result of eternal anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab enmity towards Israel, in particular, is rooted in the concrete reality of what Zionism in practice has meant for them: the takeover of their land by newcomers, guarded by an external imperial power, to create a new political order that they would be excluded from, thus necessitating their extirpation. In other words, settler colonialism.

‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (& indeed after 1967 as well)’, observed the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. This antagonism would have been present whatever the identity of their dispossessors—because it is a rational and materially-based antagonism, rather than a result of hideous prejudice. This is not to say that genuine prejudice has not emerged among Palestinian Arabs, just that not all of their opposition to Israel can be dismissed as such.

In this sense, Taj Hargey is right to make his parallel with settler colonialism. But this point, rather en vogue at the moment, needs more nuance. Zionism is a peculiar form of settler colonialism, because it was also a national movement of an immensely persecuted people, who were not regarded as ‘of’ European civilisation. The means of settler colonisation were used to attain the end of an independent ethnonationalist state, and the Palestinians paid the price for that.

It is also true that in recent decades, the conflict has acquired a more overtly religious character. On the one hand, we have seen the rise of religious Zionism, culminating in the ascension to power of the increasingly sectarian Benjamin Netanyahu, and, on the other, the ‘degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ (as Christopher Hitchens put it in 2008). But even this does not negate the national basis of the conflict. It complements it. Nationalism, like religion, can be extremely irrational; it too can create ahistorical ‘sacred’ mythologies and inspire all sorts of horrors.

In essence, the Israel-Palestine question is partially an issue of settler colonialism and partially an unresolved national question. Religion is an exacerbating, toxifying factor. With the parties of God holding a veto—and exercising it liberally—over any peaceful settlement, religion has made the conflict even more intractable. One has to understand all of these dimensions as part of a whole to truly grasp the nature of the conflict.

It has become a truism to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as ‘complex’, defying simplistic narratives. Certain things, though, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas/PIJ commandos on 7 October, or the obscene bombardment Israel has inflicted on Gaza since that date, or the tyrannical Israeli occupation of the West Bank, are, however, very simple to understand and easy to take a clear position on. Still, this conflict demands a subtle yet principled approach that forthrightly opposes all racist chauvinism and religious demagoguery, whatever form it might take. Standing Together is a great civil society initiative within Israel, organised by Jews and Palestinian Arabs, seeking to promote Arab-Jewish solidarity and opposing both the occupation and extremism on all sides. This is a movement that any humanist could and should support.

Edward Said’s remark that the Palestinians are the ‘victims of the victims’ encapsulates much of the emotional intricacy underlying the conflict. In the 2015 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which concerns itself with another protracted and deadly war, there is a passage that also sums up for me the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.’ The scars of the Israel-Palestine calamity are very deep. They will not be healed any time soon. But the fact remains: Jews and Arabs are tied to a common future in the Holy Land—a land which both belong to. The task of creating a common civic society, in which both can live as free people on a free land, may be arduous. But that does not make it any less necessary.

The post Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? appeared first on The Freethinker.

The blood-soaked holy land

The Israel-Palestine conflict today involves a tangled and tragic web of disputes, but it is ultimately rooted in competing religious ideologies. So long as fanatical Jews, Muslims, and Christians see Palestine as their personal holy land, it is hard to see how the conflict will ever be resolved.

In such a politically complex dispute, with so many historic grievances and so much suffering on both sides, it is hard to understand what is really happening on the ground, let alone get any sense of how the conflict could or should be ended. Some form of the old two-state solution, moribund as it seems now, is probably still the only viable path to peace. So long as bigotry and fanaticism reign on all sides, however, that outcome is unlikely to be realised.

Even if a compromise is reached, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argues in his essay on Hamas and Islamist-leftist extremism, ‘the solution is still set to be as arbitrarily imposed as the problem was.’ We hope to offer further reflections on the conflict from different perspectives in the coming weeks.

A heroine honoured

In other, somewhat brighter, news, the Iranian feminist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 6 October. Unfortunately, Mohammadi is currently languishing in a Tehran prison for her anti-regime activism, particularly her opposition to the hijab. The Iranian mullahs are the paymasters of Hamas and are almost certainly responsible for the attack in Israel – which was, coincidentally, launched the day after the Nobel was announced. But Mohammadi represents something very troubling for the mullahs: the growth in Iran of a mass movement for secular democracy and equality between the sexes. Let us hope this movement succeeds sooner rather than later.

An Islamic party pooped

An application to form a Party of Islam in the UK was rejected by the Electoral Commission last month. The application, sent just days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, seems to have been put together rather shoddily. As EU Today reported:

‘In its official application, the Party of Islam states “We are a party who has been created to help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice.”

The Party of Islam has also stated its intention to “help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice,” further stating: “We will make sure that all problems which lingure (sic) in the great country of Great Britain is defeated.”’

Everyone should be free to set up political organisations of whatever stripe they want, of course, but one does wonder what exactly the Party of Islam would stand for.

Would a PoI prime minister disestablish the Church of England? Would there be a Mosque of England in its place? Would blasphemy laws be reenacted? What stance would the party take on, say, the Batley Grammar School teacher who is still in hiding after displaying an image of Muhammad in his classroom in 2021? What would their social policies look like?

Given that another, now defunct, Islamic political party wanted to bring back the death penalty for homosexuality, is it too far-fetched to wonder whether such parties are really just Islamist outfits exploiting the language of inclusivity to further their theocratic agenda? Surely not! But who knows? Perhaps, just in case, it is time for Britain to adopt something like the First Amendment and become a properly secular country…

Christians against…sponges?

On 4 November, Freethinker contributor and National Secular Society historian Bob Forder gave a lecture at Conway Hall entitled ‘Condoms, Sponges and Syringes: The 19th century pioneers of family planning’. Curiously for a lecture unrelated to abortion, it drew the ire of an evangelical ‘pro-life’ group, who turned up to protest, parading some gruesome images.

A strange turn of events, to be sure, but the anti-spongers are entitled to their freedom of speech, and they caused no serious disruption. As Bob Forder told The Freethinker, ‘there were no interruptions apart from some raucous hymn singing when they left.’

Yet another gay orgy scandal for the Catholic Church

Finally, it is always amusing to have new additions to the ancient canon of stories about debauched and perfidious priests. Grzegorz Kaszak’s resignation from his post as bishop of the diocese of Sosnowiec, Poland, was accepted by Pope Francis late in October. No reason was given for the good bishop’s resignation, but it is curious to note that, under his reign, Sosnowiec has seen more gay sex scandals than the sweetly innocent might expect from a diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 2010, the acting rector of a Sosnowiec seminary got into a fight in a gay club. This August, one of Kaszak’s priests was arrested for trying to prevent paramedics from entering his apartment after a man, having overdosed on erectile dysfunction pills during a gay orgy, collapsed. The priest later said, ‘I perceive this as an obvious attack on the church, including the clergy and the faithful, in order to humiliate its position, tasks and mission.’ Well, of course!

Sexual scandal is hardly new for the Catholic Church. Gay orgy scandals, in particular, seem to be as popular among priests as poppers are at…well, gay orgies. Or take another example, just for fun. In 2017, Luigi Capozzi, private secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, was arrested by the Vatican police for snorting cocaine during another such orgy in the cardinal’s apartment (the cardinal, it should be noted, was not present).

The church continues to claim divine authority to pronounce on morality and condemn gay people while running an organised system of child sexual abuse—another thing that would be funny if it were not true.

As for the hypocrisy of its priests, who uphold anti-gay doctrine while bedding half the men in their dioceses—well, let them have their fun. They could, after all, be doing much worse things—like preaching. Though if you need a supply of erectile dysfunction pills for your orgy, you probably have no future in the business.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Islamist ideology and anti-Semitism

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem?, by Khadija Khan

Iranian resistance to theocracy

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

Batley Grammar School case

Blasphemy in the classroom, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? – Freethinker

Abuse in the Catholic Church

The Pope’s Apology, by Ray Argyle

The post Faith Watch, November 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.