Back to the Future

Building Bridges to the Middle Ages

Washington

World leaders gathering at the United Nations this week for a special session of the General Assembly to advance interfaith dialogue should have no illusions that their efforts will miraculously promote mutual respect between religious communities or end abuses of religious freedom.

Saudi King Abdullah, who initiated this week's special session, is quietly enlisting the leaders' support for a global law to punish blasphemy – a campaign championed by the 56-member Organization of Islamic Conference that puts the rights of religions ahead of individual liberties.

If the campaign succeeds, states that presume to speak in the name of religion will be able to crush religious freedom not only in their own country, but abroad.

The UN session is designed to endorse a meeting of religious leaders in Spain last summer that was the brainchild of King Abdullah and organized by the Muslim World League. That meeting resulted in a final statement counseling promotion of "respect for religions, their places of worship, and their symbols ... therefore preventing the derision of what people consider sacred."

The lofty-sounding principle is, in fact, a cleverly coded way of granting religious leaders the right to criminalize speech and activities that they deem to insult religion. Instead of promoting harmony, however, this effort will exacerbate divisions and intensify religious repression.

... the rest from the Christian Science Monitor.

My comment: Just a sde thought .. a little off topic ... Is there some irony here? Certainly there's an an oxymoron ... Is there such a thing as Christian Science? Does that mean the rules that apply to science in general somehow don't apply to Christian science? I know that science in general is pretty much the antithesis of religion. After all faith does not require proof. If it required actual proof, it wouldn't need to be faith. It could be science ... which actually does require proof.