Recent thoughts on religion and politics
Friday 27 February 2009, 18:00 WST —
Ask me what my religion was, hmm, say about two months ago. I would have said “Agnostic”, however, I’ve recently been thinking about my views on religion. I really can’t remember what made me start thinking about it, I think it was a YouTube clip, anyway, that’s not important.
As a result, I’ve read “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins, followed by “God is NOT Great”, by Christopher Hitchens. I’ve managed to get hold of “Enemies of Reason”, and “The Root of Evil”, documentatries by Dawkins. And again, I’ve been following athiest channels on YouTube.
My views have gone from “Agnostic” (which would have been more correct to say that I was an agnostic athiest, as I’ve never really believed in God), to athiest, to anti-thiest. This is largely due to my reading of Hitchens, a point of view that had recently been firmly resolved by the recent bushfires in Victoria.
How? Simply, because a ministry in Victoria proposed that abortion laws are the reason why God started the bushfires, and recently Fred Phelps has said that the fires are send by God to punish Australia. These are but two recent examples of how the religious will try to use fear of God as a means to push their agenda.
Now you may think, “These guys are pretty fucked up, but, well, it doesn’t really affect me”, and you may be right, for now. The thing is, and what I’ve been starting to notice, is that this religious shit does affect us, there is a religious agenda out there that is trying to establish a control on the population.
For example, take the UN, there has been a resolution, that aims to make defamation of religion illegal. This is pretty old news, from November I think, however I believe at this stage, it’s optional. Australia voted against it, as they should, Australia is a secular government. However, you can see the obvious attack on free speech here, something which you can’t allow a compromise on. It’s a point that I am, unfortunately, not eloquient enough to present an argument for. However, again, Hitchens provides a wonderful speech on from June 2007 on free expression.
Unfortunately, I simply do not know how much free speech we have in Australia, but I think that this is something America has right. All speech should unrestricted, even the fucked up shit like hate speech, because once you make a distinction between what is allowed, and what is not allowed, then you open a door, ever so slightly, for more speech to be policed.
Anyway, here’s some links that I suggest people to check out:
Pharyngula
Refuting Atheistic Naturalism Episode 2 (This kid is like 14!)
Check out the videos by these guys on YouTube:
Thunderf00t
AronRa
AndromedasWake
DonExodus2
cdk007
patcondell
TheAmazingAthiest
C0ct0pus
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