In a free society
Much as I hate to agree with a Tory…
Protests outside a school where pupils were shown a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad are “deeply unsettling”, a government minister has said.
Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said teachers should be able to “appropriately show images of the prophet” in class.
In other words religion is a subject as well as a practice. Comparative religion can be taught in schools, and schools should be able to teach it without protests and complaints and teachers getting suspended.
Mr Jenrick called for the “deeply unsettling” scenes outside the school to “come to an end”.
“In a free society we want religions to be taught to children and for children to be able to question and query them,” he told the BBC.
“We must see teachers protected and no-one should be feeling intimidated or threatened as they go into school.”
That is, in a free society we want children to be taught about religions, which requires freedom to ask questions and discuss.
Kenan Malik observes:
Teachers not only have a right to offend, they have an obligation. Making people think about difficult subjects will offend some. Sooner or later, every student will find one of their sacred cows toppled, at least if the schools are doing their job. My educational career is littered with sacred cows my teachers tipped over, and I am grateful for that. The problem is, now all sacred cows are supposed to remain sacred. That means no cow tipping in the classroom, which means no thinking, which means no education. There are few safe subjects in the modern classroom.
Seems to me that if the beliefs of the offended were strong, they would be indifferent to this. After all, Christians are getting excited about Easter, which is coming up one of these days, but I don’t give a rat’s patootie. They’re welcome to it. I don’t care. It’s not hard!
Back when New Atheism was a ‘thing,’ liberal believers and liberal atheists criticized it for being simply the flip side of religious fundamentalism. New Atheists were attacking people’s faith; New Atheists weren’t making the proper distinction between good religion and bad religion; and, worst of all, they were trying to get people to agree with them. Reasoned debate and rational persuasion on the truth and benefits of religion were lumped in with proselytizing and conversion. It was saying “I’m right and you’re wrong.” The unforgivable sin.
People have the right to be who they are.
A lot of conservative religionists were guilty of manipulative tactics and double standards when it came to attacking faith, granted. But I remember there were plenty of conservatives I’d call “liberal,” in that they played by the rules, respected the doubter, and believed, deep down, that truth mattered. “If you became convinced that Christianity wasn’t true and God didn’t exist, would you want to change your mind and become an atheist?” And in between the epistemic meltdowns, the topic-changings, the gruesome scenarios, and the flat denials of the bare possibility, there were cool voices saying “Of course. And I’d still be me. And I’d still care about the same things. And I could just be wrong about God..”
There’s being a parent (“We must protect the weak”) and then there’s being an adult (“Follow the evidence and be damned.”) I understood some of my opponents better than I understood some of my friends.
It’s somewhat complicated by the fact that Muslims in Europe are immigrants from colonized countries, so there’s a shadow of potential racism or anti-immigrant hostility and similar over the subject. But. It should be possible to separate the two.
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I’m thinking that, compared to a cow, on all fours, an otter’s center of gravity is low enough that it is not going to tip so much as roll. I’ve always been under the impression that rolling is what otters do. So sacred otters are going to be much harder to dislodge or upset. They’re going to be difficult to overturn or supplant. Not to mention their pointier teeth, sharper claws and general slipperiness. It’s not gonna go anywhere it doesn’t want to. Yep, you’re stuck with a sacred otter.