One doesn’t venture far into The Pit expecting a great deal of intelligent, rational comment. Even so, I’m surprised at how un-thnking some of these responses have been.
We have had a few knee-jerk responses invoking the term ‘fascist’. Either these posters don’t know much about the Chirac administration, or they don’t know what this news story is about, or they don’t understand what ‘fascism’ is. There is nothing in this proposed legislation which has any bearing whatsoever on someone’s freedom to believe in the irrational out-moded mythology of their choice. What the proposed law does support, as I do, is the notion that this is something people can and should do in the privacy of their own homes - much like smoking, or deciding who they want to have sex with. It has nothing to do with me, and I respect their privacy and their freedom to do what they want in the privacy of their own homes (so long as nobody gets hurt). But keep it private.
A few posters have presented ‘racism’ analogies which don’t quite work. The spavined notion of coloring everyone’s skin white was notably dislocated from anything to do with the OP or this proposed law. It is a fact that there are people with different shades of skin. There is no reason whatsoever to support the contention that different so-called religious faiths are about anything ‘real’ at all. There is nothing to suggest that the various and assorted gods, demons, imps, pixies, elves and whatever else people choose to ‘worship’ (talk to themselves in a solemn or meditative way) exist anywhere except in the imagination. Of course, if some people have an emotional attachment to big invisible friends who have, surprise surprise, singled them out for favourable treatment, that’s their business and not mine or Chriac’s. If these people want to believe in fairy stories in the privacy of their own homes, fine. Nobody is stopping them. But in a public place, especially one ostensibly devoted to education and learning to use one’s mind, I think it’s a good idea to ask people to leave their own private emotional delusions back home, where they belong.
It is always surprising to hear religious people play the ‘bigotry’ card. There is nothing more bigoted than asserting that one’s own particular brand of imaginative mythology is the ‘one true religion’ and that the others are somehow inferior or misguided. This is the purest bigotry of all, since it is based on nothing except myth, and irrational, prejudicial myth at that.
Religion divides and categorises people - us and them, the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the non-saved, the right and the wrong, the clean and unclean. I believe we can move on beyond this divisive attitude, and learn to respect and care for and love one another for what we are: one species, sharing one planet. I can see value in eliminating outward and public symbols of divisive bigotry (=religion) in public places. To me, and many others, they represent the perpetuation of irrational mythologies which divide people rather than bringing them together; which create sects and cults and castes rather than allowing us to see each other as one and the same and of equal status; and which have been responsible for much senseless tribal violence and bloodshed in human history.
You want to believe in pixies or gods? You’re welcome. Do it at home. You want to learn to use your mind and your intellect? Good, come to school. Good idea not to mix the two up.
