It should be said that if your religion and your faith in it needs protection from criticism, then maybe your religion and your faith in it is not very strong.
Yet, in the UK
CPS gives Scientologists same protection as mainstream religions
The Crown Prosecution Service has decided that anyone who attacks Scientology can be prosecuted under faith hate laws.
The move will for the first time provide the controversial Church of Scientology – described by some as a cult – the same protection as other mainstream religions.
Critics of the organisation, whose members include Tom Cruise and John Travolta, attacked the decision last night, saying it would encourage Scientologists to push for official recognition in Britain.
Lovely.
Next they’ll be asking for their very own version of UN Res.62/154
The Muslim religion makes unusually large claims for itself. All religions do this, of course, in that they claim to know and to be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being.
But Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God’s word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of “the recitation”, or Koran.
If there sometimes seems to be something implicitly absolutist or even totalitarian in such claims, it may result not from a fundamentalist reading of the holy book but from the religion itself.
And it is the so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the UN that Islam not only be allowed to make such absolutist claims, but that it be officially shielded from any criticism as aresult.
Although written tongue-in-cheek in the language of human rights and of opposition to discrimination, the non-binding UN Resolution 62/154, on “combating defamation of religions”, seeks to extend protection not to humans but to opinions and to ideas, granting only the latter immunity from being “offended”.
AllahHu Zenu!