After reading the posted/shared blog, I made a comment on my colleagues's post, that goes something like this:
Why don't we see the Americans and Chinese calling for the ban on Benetton? (one of the other images of the ad features the US President Barack Obama kissing China's Hu Jintao)
Ban Benetton? Ban the Pope, who as recently as December 2010 made a claim that paedophilia was not considered an absolute evil as recently as the 1970s.
To which my colleague replied with a flurry of ad hominems, and his main issue is that my comment did not reflect what the Pope actually said, verbatim, therefore I was out of context. For impartiality's sake, I will put down the Pope's words verbatim here.
"In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.
“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than' and a ‘worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself.
(Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/popersquos-child-porn-normal-claim-sparks-outrage-among-victims-15035449.html#ixzz192TzON8n)
Have I taken out of context what the Pope said on paedophilia? Are my criticisms unwarranted? When you acknowledge a wrongdoing in front of a victim and then cite a rationalization for that act, aren't you spitting on the face of the victim?
And to think, they are the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of morality. If they themselves do not and cannot determine what absolute good and evil are, then to quote Stephen Fry's response to the same on the Intelligence Squared debate, "THEN WHAT ARE YOU FOR!?"
How would you feel if your child/parent/lover in a duel was shot and killed by someone he had a conflict with, then later apologizes for killing your loved one, then adds: "Well, people used to have duels all the time."
I've also brought forth into the argument that this Ban Benetton campaign is just like the overreaction of the Muslims on the Danish cartoon incident, where something meant to be humorous was met with maniacal calls for retribution. To which my colleague acknowledged that yes, the Ban Benetton campaign was an overreaction. However, he follows, I should learn to respect other people's religion. He makes the high and mighty claim that I don't know what respect is, and that arguments on religion have always existed and that the lack of respect for religion has caused the numerous religious wars in human history.
I have 3 things to say about my colleague's call for respect towards religion.
First, is the 1st ammendment of the US constitution, which our own Philippine constitution is based upon, which states in part the following: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"
Secondly, in April 2011 in the UN, an anti-blasphemy bill being pushed by mostly Islamic countries was finally crushed. (Read more: http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2011/04/01/good-news-un-anti-blasphemy-measure-laid-to-rest-a-battle-for-freedom-won-nina-shea/)
Lastly, the distinction that religious wars were not caused by people's lack of respect for other people's religion, but by the religious demanding other people to respect their religion. Ergo, here we have a colleague of mine demanding that I respect his religion. Should I? Should respect be demanded and not earned?
These three points I have mentioned tell us this:
In the realm of ideas, nothing is sacred!If it were not, then we would still believe that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth, or that slavery is not immoral. The whole point of higher learning (i.e. the university) is that you have a marketplace of idea where one competes with others, even to the point of ridiculing your opponent's idea, without fear that you might be offending the other person.
Any real idea has these properties inherent to it.
1. It is acknowledged as true by all, regardless of sex, age, race, or religion.
2. It is beyond ridicule, and those that try to ridicule a true idea come out as being ridiculous.
Now, I would give in that to a religious person, someone making fun of their beliefs is being stupid and ignorant, but that point of view is limited only to the religious. I dare anyone of them to try and stand-up in front of a heterogenous religious crowd and make fun of Evolution, and compare that to someone making fun of a belief in a talking serpent (which a number of famous comedians already have.)
I respect my colleague as a person, but his religion does not have the same privilege. This is not intolerance as all ideas must be subject to criticism and do not deserve any special protection from it. To end, I would like to quote Richard Dawkins:
"It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have. I merely give robust expression to views about the cosmos and morality with which you happen to disagree. You interpret that as 'intolerance' because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, which expects to get a free ride and not have to defend itself. If I wrote a book called The Socialist Delusion or The Monetarist Delusion, you would never use a word like intolerance. But The God Delusion sounds automatically intolerant. Why? What’s the difference? I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'. There is a huge difference."
