AC Grayling wrote in the Guardian over a year ago that,
Facts speak for themselves. Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, 29, a journalist and blogger,has taken his own life in Evin prison in Iran, where he was serving a two-year sentence for "insulting Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei", and awaiting further trial for "insulting sacred values", which would have meant more years in prison.
He was a sensitive man, who blogged mainly about music and the arts, and imprisonment was a hellish experience for him; he was reported to be profoundly depressed and anxious.
Safayi is yet another victim of religion.
Safayi's fate was atrocious and all humane people should deplore it.
Yet Grayling's view of 'religion' killing Safayi comes from the same propaganda mould deployed by Nick Cohen and other missionary atheists who belive that there is some monolithic 'Islamic fundamentalist' threat to 'the West' and the spread of its supposedly always superior values across the globe.
Not least with regards its universalist ideas of freedom of expression and speech, human rights and tolerance of ethnic minorities and that this sinister global Islamofascist threat is co-ordinated by a rogue regimes, terror cells, and radical Imams and 'appeased' by spineless woolly minded thinkers
That is those who have forgotten a history of inquisitions and exterminations and so on.
No doubt the OIC is trying to push the 'defamation of religion' issue but there is hardly any real chance that this is going to lead to
'....a universal gag on free speech, blocking the right of anyone to criticise the too frequently negative effects of religion on individuals and society'
Grayling comes close to Cohen, who wrote during the furore over the Danish cartoon of Mohammad, that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman was 'appeasing' Islamism when he commented that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly and in a way that respects all religious beliefs'.
The UN Assembly has only moved towards formulating declarations respecting religious beliefs and then Grayling fulminating about the potential for a 'universal gag order' whilst Cohen uses somewhat hysterical phrases like 'universal blasphemy law' or even 'super-blasphemy law'.
Missionary atheists of this ilk thus reveal themselves as grotesque invertions of those who want to convert the world to one universal religion and with others subsumed within its framework of dominion. For there is for Grayling only 'the Enlightenment' on the one side and 'religion' on the other.
This belief system derives from very Protestant ideas of Progress and Providence which have over time become secularised in Britain and the USA but hold that the world will converge towards the destiny mapped out over the past 400 years by the Anglo-Saxon democracies. It's a pure Whig version of History.
Grayling opines,
The UN Assembly has only moved towards formulating declarations respecting religious beliefs and then Grayling fulminating about the potential for a 'universal gag order' whilst Cohen uses somewhat hysterical phrases like 'universal blasphemy law' or even 'super-blasphemy law'.
Missionary atheists of this ilk thus reveal themselves as grotesque invertions of those who want to convert the world to one universal religion and with others subsumed within its framework of dominion. For there is for Grayling only 'the Enlightenment' on the one side and 'religion' on the other.
This belief system derives from very Protestant ideas of Progress and Providence which have over time become secularised in Britain and the USA but hold that the world will converge towards the destiny mapped out over the past 400 years by the Anglo-Saxon democracies. It's a pure Whig version of History.
Grayling opines,
The OIC has yet to appreciate that if it succeeds in its effort to protect Islam from legitimate challenges to its less attractive doctrines and practices – to say nothing of Islamism with its murderous extreme –the relentless antisemitism from its own side of the street will have to stop too.
Yet the OIC is not 'Islam'. Again Grayling writes as though Islam were as monolithic as one singular totalitarian creed with Islamism as merely the far extreme end of a spectrum of belief defined by some organised body of scholars or protectors who could just reign in the fanatics if they chose.
Islam does not act in a way where less attractiveand repugnant interpretations can not be condemned by any corporate body such as 'the Church'' ( which is not to say that prominent clerics should not condemn terror in the name of Islam ). There is no 'it' that can do so.
But Grayling shows he is incapable of distinguishing Islam from Islamism where it matters: Islamism is a politicised interpretation of certain parts of the Qu'ran adapted to modernistic Western revolutionary ideologies. Islamism is a product of the West and of increased contact with it.
Nothing the UN has done has appeased some barbaric global 'Islamist' threat. The position of the UN General Secretary and many of those attempting to frame its declarations on toleration is that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly' and not that it 'must'. In short no law or gag order has been passed.
There is no sense in which a legitimate criticism of a a political interpretation of religion that is illiberal or tyrannical could not be made but merely that there should be no demonisation of people who hold different religious beliefs because the condition for toleration and co-existence would be destroyed if it were.
Sensible and sophisticated political philosophers in the Western liberal tradition such as Thomas Hobbes knew that when he wrote Leviathan in the seventeenth century, at a time when intractable political conflicts were exacerbated by religious fervour, the feelings of collective persecution and self righteousness.
That kind of mutual atavistic hatred we see today with Hamas and the Israeli Likud over the issue of Palestine.
That principle of universiality is presumably one that is meant to be at the heart of the UN's view of the world and defence of the notion that one should be free to have one's religious beliefs and not, as Cohen does, to conflate them with an enforced political affiliation or some brainwashing which clearly does not refer to all forms of religious belief.
Islam like all world religions is 'multi-vocal' and contain very many contrasting traditions and strands within them, no less than Christianity did in seventeenth century Britain when the modern idea of human rights and liberal democracy began to be developed in its nascent form from the Bible.
Different interpretations of religious scripture and authority can produce very different political doctrines and ideas about political order, the basis for sovereign power and legitimacy. Islam is no exception, though Grayling never bothers to look into it because the Progress of the West has made all religion a redundant relic of modern mankind's prehistory.
Grayling should stick to Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein because his grasp of political philosophy is weak and his view of religion a vulgarised one that can only see Muslims as benighted people capable of civilisation but as yet incapable of throwing off their mental shackles.
Islam does not act in a way where less attractiveand repugnant interpretations can not be condemned by any corporate body such as 'the Church'' ( which is not to say that prominent clerics should not condemn terror in the name of Islam ). There is no 'it' that can do so.
But Grayling shows he is incapable of distinguishing Islam from Islamism where it matters: Islamism is a politicised interpretation of certain parts of the Qu'ran adapted to modernistic Western revolutionary ideologies. Islamism is a product of the West and of increased contact with it.
Nothing the UN has done has appeased some barbaric global 'Islamist' threat. The position of the UN General Secretary and many of those attempting to frame its declarations on toleration is that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly' and not that it 'must'. In short no law or gag order has been passed.
There is no sense in which a legitimate criticism of a a political interpretation of religion that is illiberal or tyrannical could not be made but merely that there should be no demonisation of people who hold different religious beliefs because the condition for toleration and co-existence would be destroyed if it were.
Sensible and sophisticated political philosophers in the Western liberal tradition such as Thomas Hobbes knew that when he wrote Leviathan in the seventeenth century, at a time when intractable political conflicts were exacerbated by religious fervour, the feelings of collective persecution and self righteousness.
That kind of mutual atavistic hatred we see today with Hamas and the Israeli Likud over the issue of Palestine.
That principle of universiality is presumably one that is meant to be at the heart of the UN's view of the world and defence of the notion that one should be free to have one's religious beliefs and not, as Cohen does, to conflate them with an enforced political affiliation or some brainwashing which clearly does not refer to all forms of religious belief.
Islam like all world religions is 'multi-vocal' and contain very many contrasting traditions and strands within them, no less than Christianity did in seventeenth century Britain when the modern idea of human rights and liberal democracy began to be developed in its nascent form from the Bible.
Different interpretations of religious scripture and authority can produce very different political doctrines and ideas about political order, the basis for sovereign power and legitimacy. Islam is no exception, though Grayling never bothers to look into it because the Progress of the West has made all religion a redundant relic of modern mankind's prehistory.
Grayling should stick to Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein because his grasp of political philosophy is weak and his view of religion a vulgarised one that can only see Muslims as benighted people capable of civilisation but as yet incapable of throwing off their mental shackles.
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