Religion, terrorism and free speech

Religion can be taken to refer to an organised form of maintaining, promoting, celebrating and applying the consequences of engagement with what is taken to be ultimately defining, environing, totally beyond, totally other, and yet profoundly encountered within life. These activities are usually done by or in association with a group, an organisation and/or a community.

So far as the AHRC is concerned, that definition encompasses the three main monotheistic religions. It is clear enough, however, that its failure to refer explicitly to belief in a supreme being or an afterlife is incompatible with each of them. It needs to be noted that the monotheism of those three belief systems transcends class, clan, tribe, language, ethnic and geographical attachment, race, sex, nationality and the amorphous catch-all attribute, "culture". The teachings of each such system asserts, in its own unique way, that it is the one divinely revealed (or divinely inspired) complete system of truth governing the entirety of earthly life.

To assess a claim that any given episode of violent human behaviour has "nothing to do with religious faith", it at least needs to be recalled that, down the ages, religion has been characterised by (a) dogmatism and fanaticism, (b) endless disagreements about what sacred texts mean, permit, require, and prohibit (and about who is entitled to opine thereon), (c) everything on a spectrum of complete unchanging doctrinal rigidity from ancient inception to regular doctrinal adjustment mirroring the advancement of scientific knowledge about the physical universe, (d) messianic competition for adherents and converts, (e) persecution of blasphemers, heretics, apostates and schismatic sects and cults, (f) charlatanism, (g) a tendency for zealotry to produce or exacerbate psychological disorder, (h) a conviction that martyrdom is the ultimate form of religious expression, (i) entanglement with political ideology leading to state religions and theocratic forms of government, and (j) resort to violence against non-believers, both within and between denominations.

Whatever might be said about the positive contribution religion makes to society, at the end of the (modern secular) day, there is no good reason why the content of religious ideas and beliefs (as distinct from the right to hold and express them) should have any preferred claim to legal protection.

On the contrary, if there is any specific category of ideas which ought not be immune from questioning and denigration, it is those which have survived not because of their intrinsic value, but only because they are drummed into the heads of innocent babes on the basis that, when they reach adulthood, they cannot be permitted to think for themselves.

Diversity denialism

The prevailing ideology of multiculturalism preaches a worthy liberating gospel of minority "identity" diversity, but it permits little if anything in the way of criticism that multiculturalism may have insoluble contradictions which produce grave anti-social effects. For example, its exponents have to find a way of dealing with the fact that some religious faiths regard homosexuality as evil and treat women as the inferiors of men.

In contemporary Australia attention is diverted from questioning of the content of such religious ideas by linking them with adventitious typical cultural or ethnic connections of relevant believers. The claim that criticism of religious ideas, beliefs and practices amounts to racism is near the apex of powerful social inhibitors of free speech.

The contemporary disinclination in government and parts of the mass media and academia topermit discussion and debate of the content of religious ideas, beliefs and practices is flagrantly sectarian. It does not, for example, apply to the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion, contraception, priestly celibacy, female clergy, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage which is never far from the front page and is openly condemned and derided.

It would be naïve in the extreme not to acknowledge that some attacks on religious beliefs and practices are motivated by racial/ethnic/national (and religious) prejudice. However, the religious ideas and practices speak for themselves independently of the mind of the bigot and are recorded for all to consider and judge.

Of all the forced attempts to excise mention of religiously-inspired terrorism from the discussion of the events of 15/16 December last, the contention that to make such a connection would cause or contribute to or incite real religiously inspired terrorism takes the proverbial cake for self-deception. This demand for self censorship is a variation on the heckler's veto, but the feared third party heckler is prepared to murderthose who dare to question his or her religious beliefs.

It was this bizarre inversion of causation of the threat to public order that was deployed to disrupt the lawful peaceful street marches of the then infant Salvation Army until an English Court in Beatty v Gillbanks (1882) set aside the convictions and prison sentences of Salvationists for breaching the peace. They had courageously undertaken street matches knowing that their sworn enemy, the Skeleton Army – the real troublemakers – might riotously disrupt the marches.