This morning the UN human rights council passed a resolution condemning "defamation of religion" as a human rights violation. The resolution was introduced by that well-known champion of human rights, Pakistan, and supported by that bastion of freedom The Organization of the Islamic Conference. The law as it stands is wholly unworkable, purposely vague and seems to outlaw everything from saying that any given religion is wrong on any given issue, to pointing out that the Islamic world has a terrible human rights record. However, this is not just a matter of politics to me.
I am a mouthy drunk who makes my living thinking, writing and talking about religious questions and my girlfriend is a pornographer trying to deal with the trauma of a Pentecostal upbringing, So to me this is deeply personal.I know I shall write more on this topic soon, but for now I just want to mark this momentous day by telling all the would-be little theocrats of the world that I will not be spoken to in this tone of voice.
I stand as the inheritor of the only movement to ever change the world for the better. I stand the heir to the free thinkers, agnostics, atheists, backsliders and doubters, and those who rejected authority and dogma, in favor of rational inquiry and speculation, Starting not with Paine in the 1700s but with Diogenes, Democritus, Epicurus, in the fifth century before Christ and stretching through Galileo, Diderot, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Trotsky, Marx, Robert Green Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Oscar Wilde, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Karl Popper, Sigmund Freud, Darwin, George Orwell, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan
I stand as a partisan in the eternal war for the modern world, and the march of free speech, the equality of the sexes, reproductive freedom, the rule of law, the humanity of women and children, pacifism, democracy, internationalism, anti-imperialism,irony, feeling and empathy and the universal and inviolable solidarity of all peoples against the forces of dogma and repression and theocracy.
As such I will be damned before I lie down and allow these nihilistic totalitarians take away my right to say what ever the fuck I like. Thus, as a little fuck you to the amassed forces of half retarded Iron Age lunacy I see arrayed before me, I offer this short film by Dutch MP Geert Wilder.
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