We’ve been arguing over the Secretary General and his advice to temper free expression with ‘respect for all religious beliefs.’ This advice is not new – as the news item said, he ‘reaffirmed his predecessor’s line on cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.’ Let’s revisit some other people in high places who said the same thing back in 2006. There was Jack Straw:

Speaking after talks with the Sudanese foreign minister, Mr Straw said: “There is freedom of speech, we all respect that. But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been

The Secretary-General…

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reaffirmed his predecessor’s line on cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday, saying free speech should respect religious sensitivities. “The Secretary-General strongly believes that freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly and in a way that respects all religious beliefs,” his spokeswoman Marie Okabe told reporters.

That’s asking a great deal too much, even as a ‘should.’ Freedom of expression should be exercised in a way that respects all religious beliefs? If that advice were heeded there wouldn’t be any free expression at all. How can we respect all religious beliefs when we don’t even know what they are? We would miss that slightly mildewed guy in Toadback, Arkansas who believes a can … Read the rest

John Polkinghorne…

[S]cience tends to look at the world and treat it as an ‘it’, as an object; something you can kick around, pull apart and find out what it’s made of – that’s the experimental method, which is science’s great secret weapon. But we also know there is a whole swath of encounters with reality, where we meet it not as an object, as an ‘it’, but as a person. Above all, we encounter God in that way and when we move to that realm, testing has to give way to trusting. If we set traps to see if you are my friend, I’ll destroy the possibility of friendship between us.

Not so fast. Sometimes, when we meet an … Read the rest

The archbishop lets us know he gets it.

Addressing an audience of more than 1,200 people, he condemned the way Islamic law discriminated against women in some Muslim countries. “In some of the ways it has been codified and practised across the world, it has been appalling. In some of the ways it has been applied to women in places like Saudi Arabia, it is grim.”

Yes. So why put in a good word for it in the first place?

Despite acknowledging the concerns raised over some aspects of sharia law, he repeated his assertion that it was “rooted in the sense of doing God’s will in the ordinary things of life”.

Ah; that’s why. Because something that is … Read the rest