You Should Read Freedom of Thought 2012, so I was told by someone last week.
So I read it, unlike some who have brought it up online and in the media, I suspect. Freedom of Thought 2012 is a report issued by The International Humanist and Ethical Union, purporting to show extensive, world-wide persecution of atheists and it does document legal persecution and statutory persecution of atheists in a number of countries. To the extent that it does that accurately and honestly, it's worth while. Though it's hardly news that many contries have laws persecuting religious minorities, atheists included.
Just as with other religious minorities, racial minorities, women and GLBT people, the problem is that there is a limited ability to convince other countries to drop the legal discrimination against any group. Imagine how effective insisting on Iran allowing gay men to have sex without risking a public, governmental lynching would go over. I can't imagine it would do much except putting gay men in greater danger of becoming a public display of defiance. The limits of that are closely related to the ideas and beliefs of the people who live in those countries. Insisting, angrily or even calmly, on them changing their society immediately is most often an exercise in feel good impotence for people not in danger of consequences.
The report does nothing for its credibility through mixing the most serious of instances with the inconsequential and the entirely dubious. The report strains, at times rather absurdly, to find persecution of atheists in a number of countries where discrimination against atheists is, in fact, illegal. If they had concentrated on real incidents and real laws that persecute atheists their report would have been considerably shorter but far more honest.
In some cases the "persecution" is quite bizarrely asserted. For example, in Austria the report says
"Helmut G. was convicted for offending his Muslim neighbor by yodeling while mowing his lawn."
Rather hilariously for this atheist report, the citation given for this terrible offense against atheist rights is a story in Israel National News, an rather extreme Zionist, religious Israeli outfit that runs an illegal broadcast operation. Call me overly skeptical but I would suspect they might not be the strongest possible citation to make in this story.
In looking at other sources of the story it would seem that Helmut Griese was "yodeling" during the Muslim call to prayer in a way that was interpreted as mocking it. I didn't see any mention of it but I suspect it may not have been the first such incident with Helmut Griese and his neighbors. He pled guilty in a court case to a law that is usually used against neo-Nazis who desecrate Jewish graves and disrupt Jewish services and events. I strongly suspect that if Griese's neighbors had been Jewish and it was their religion which was likely being mocked, an Israel National News report might have proved to be less useful to the authors of the report.
Also, rather oddly for its use to pad this report, in nothing I read was Griese identified as an atheist or was there any mention that his "yodeling" was an expression of atheism. Apparently the right being asserted is the right to be a bad neighbor as Griese plead guility.
A number of the other cited "wrongs against atheism" are laws against offending or mocking people on the basis of their religion, especially in European countries with direct experiences of Nazism. Germany comes down for multiple condemnations of its laws impeding that kind of "expression". It would seem that the "Humanists" and "Ethicists" find it horrible a violation of their freedom to mock and denigrate religion. As is often the case in ideology, the meanings of words like "humanism" and "ethics" have undergone a Newspeak style transformation.
I'm trying very hard to remember a legitimate assertion of civil rights that leaned so heavily on an asserted right to mock ridicule and purposely offend other people. I can think of groups that make that assertion in cases such as National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. And while I really don't think the "Humanists" and "Ethicists" would welcome that kind of company, if they're going to assert that German and Austrian laws adopted to limit neo-Nazi activity are an enormous deprivation of their rights anyone is within their rights to notice that fact. The frequently made counter argument that mockery and satire prevent such stuff, that "more speech" will prevent it is made absurd by the history of the brilliant satire that so notably failed to prevent the Nazis from taking power in those countries.
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Being an American I would normally concentrate on what they say about my country, in which atheists are a fully covered class under both the federal constitution and civil rights laws. It is illegal to discriminate against atheists in the United States to the same extent it is women, racial, ethnic and other religious groups.
First and surprisingly, we see the favorite cry of blog atheists that polls show that Americans wouldn't vote for an atheist for president is missing. Which is progress. The idea that anyone, including an atheist, has a right to someone's vote is absurd. The easiest way to show the problem with this most frequent of atheist complaints is to ask if a Darwin denying, biblical fundamentalist has a right to the votes of atheists. Is it discrimination for atheists to refuse to vote for biblical fundamentalists? I don't think a fundamentalist has a right to my vote and there are lots of reasons I'd be very reluctant to vote for materialists of any kind.
No one has a right to someone's vote. People are entirely free to vote for or against anyone they choose to. One of the things that can lose someone votes is to insult or mock large numbers of people or to be associated with a group that insults and mocks people. As can be seen in the context of this post, atheists would seem to want it all, to mock people and to demand the votes of people they mock.
And here we see the problem for assertions of rights that so strongly stress the supposed right to mock and ridicule large numbers of people. There is a difference between legal rights, protections from illegal discrimination, and forms of discrimination that aren't illegal and which can't be controlled by law and through the courts.
The legal discrimination against atheists is already prohibited in the United States. Without much to argue with on that count, the section of the report on the U.S. begins:
Yet while the rights of all Americans to freedom of religion and speech are protected, the U.S. has long been home to a social and political atmosphere in which atheists and the non-religious are made to feel like lesser Americans or non-Americans. A range of laws limit the role of atheists in regards to public duties, or else entangle the government with religion to the degree that being religious is equated with being an American, and vice versa.
Since the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws ensure the legal protection from discrimination for atheists, a number of offensive, though moot laws against atheists on the state level are cited as are a few instances of violations of those laws. Well, laws get broken. The only thing the law can do is to provide for relief and punishment and the law in the United States does that.
But the atheist complaint that lots of people don't like atheists is nothing that the government can address in the United States, the European Union or anywhere. The government can't make people like atheists, it can't make people vote for atheists. It can't change that atheists and atheism turn off a lot of people. Demanding that it do that is irrational and impossible.
The people best situated to change the situation that lots of people don't like atheists are atheists. Atheists have no alternative but to try to gain peoples' trust and acceptance and in that effort atheists are taking about as perfectly counterproductive a track as could be imagined. The insistence of this report on the "right" to offend people on the basis of their religion is a demand to make atheists even less trusted and accepted. Given the extremely offensive and constantly made assertion that atheists are smarter than religious people, their not being able to see this problem makes them seem dense as well as rude.
NOTE: I have written on the problem of the frequently made assertions of atheists such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and others, going back well into the 19th and 18th centuries that things such as equality, inherent rights and moral obligations to respect those rights are delusions. I have voted for at least two atheists I'm aware of, I worked on the campaign of one atheist, though he has since said he is more convinced by an agnostic position. That was before I read a lot of atheists asserting things like that. That widely held position of atheists that inherent rights and moral obligations aren't real, would make it a hurdle to gaining my support in future elections. That isn't a matter of discrimination, it is a rational response to an ideological holding. I wouldn't vote for biblical fundamentalists for similar reasons. I wouldn't vote for a Democrat who thinks people do not have a right to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Having a legitimate reason not to vote for someone is not discrimination, it's how people decide who to vote for.
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