Irish atheists fight new blasphemy laws

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This past summer, a new law passed in Ireland which made blasphemy, the simple act of challenging or offending a religious belief, a punishable crime with a fine of up to €25,000 ($35,810). The scientist and religious critic, Richard Dawkins, called this a “return to the middle ages.”

As of yesterday, the law officially went into effect.

In a truly weird twist of logic, justice minister Dermot Ahern says the law is necessary because immigration has brought a growing diversity of religious faiths to Ireland, and yet the 1936 constitution extends religious protection to only Christians. So clearly, instead of protecting the rights to religious expression for all worshipers, Ireland needs institutionalized censorship.

Now, secular activists have defied the law, which officially came into force yesterday, by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.

Atheist Ireland, a group that claims to represent the rights of atheists, responded to the new law by publishing 25 anti-religious quotations on its website, from figures including Richard Dawkins, Björk, Frank Zappa and the former Observer editor and Irish ex-minister Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Atheist Ireland’s chairman, Michael Nugent, calls the law “both silly and dangerous.”

It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

Nugent is referring to when Pakistan and a group of Islamic states (the Organization of Islamic Conference, or “OIC”) used the language of the Irish blasphemy law to press the UN Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards to recognize the so-called “defamation of religions” as a new normative principle of international law.

This is a clear illustration of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous statement, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Ireland sets a dangerous precedent with this strikingly oppressive law.

I’m glad to see a group fight this. In times of economic tumultuousness, societies tend to become more authoritarian. Suddenly, the cause of all suffering is the fault of the immigrants, or the gays, or liberalism. Everything can be fixed with a slew of shiny new laws designed to suppress freedom of expression. We just need to get these damn ingrates under control.

Of course, it never works. Censorship breeds resentment and discontentment. People don’t like being told what they can and cannot say especially by a corrupt, hypocritical institution like the church. They rebel, the laws crumble, and freedom of speech always, always wins.

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Here are some of the quotes Atheist Ireland has posted on their website:

Richard Dawkins: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Björk: “The Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren’t lesser beings, they’re just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists.”

Frank Zappa: “To hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good – and cares about any of it – is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.”