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How do atheists react to laws supressing freedom of religion?

This is from the WSWS, about a proposed legal ban on the Burka.
I am of two distinct minds on this:
The Freethinker in me abhors the legal suppression of any form of expression,
yet the militant atheist in me applauds the suppression of religion.
Granted these laws are only about a specific article of clothing, and larger issues of immigration in Canada and France, which would hardly survive a constitutional challenge in the U.S., but, those things aside: atheists do not accept the tacit promotion of Christianity as opposed to Islam, which our governments do all the time. All the flavors of theism taste rather foul.
To my mind, all religions need to go irrevokably into the dustbin of history. But is it right to pick them off one at a time? And who gets to decide? They erroneously consider atheism a religion as well. Should we be concerned that we're next?
Does anyone else see this as big a dilemma as I do?

Tags: Quebec, World Socialist Website, burka, immigration

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by david perry on October 29, 2010 at 8:39pm

I heard too many talking heads say that about the Middle East and the European enlightenment. Accusing them of beings backwards because they didn't have some intellectual fad a couple centuries back is absurd. The "enlightenment" for western civilization blew a fuse some time ago. The opening few sentences of one of my favorite books(Dialectic of Enlightenment) says it better than I've read anywhere else:

"In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."

As if Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck weren't enough to prove that point.

Permalink Reply by Jason Spicer on October 30, 2010 at 12:06am

Er, david, which fully enlightened Earth do you suppose the author was referring to? Surely you're not remotely accusing Beck or Palin of being enlightened? The problem is not the Enlightenment. The problem is the failure of a sufficient percentage of humans to embrace Enlightenment values.

Permalink Reply by david perry on October 30, 2010 at 12:49am

Palin and Beck are certainly part of a disaster though. I think Adorno was being ironic in a way, it's often hard to tell.
The "disaster" is the often aggressive regression from enlightenment values.

It's a great book. I'm surprised the work of the Frankfurt School isn't more popular with the intellectual left.

This is a link to the middle section of the book, which is also more or less the same as his most famous essay on the same subject, and which in an interesting way is very relevant to the tea party, and the media surrounding it, which we've been discussing elsewhere. (it is the correct one, but if you use google, you get another link to it)

Permalink Reply by Phil on October 30, 2010 at 7:05am

An annoying product of the post-modernist/PC mindset is that the the Enlightenment is a Eurocentric model with no more significance that a score of other models. It's that damned "Who are we to judge?" nonsense.
It works, we share our secularism with anyone, and there are millions of takers.

Permalink Reply by Rudy Ruddell on October 27, 2010 at 11:48pm

Where is the news article? Shouldn't this be general blog post?

Permalink Reply by david perry on October 27, 2010 at 11:55pm

Aside from the initial post from the World Socialist Web Site, there have been a few links posted throughout the thread. I think most of them are in the more recent comments here by either myself or Jason.

Permalink Reply by david perry on October 28, 2010 at 4:40pm

Did you know that the word "infidel" is not Arabic in origin?

Permalink Reply by Dogly on October 28, 2010 at 5:18pm