The Atheist Blogger

An Icon of Freedom of Speech

It’s no wonder so many websites attack atheism, and why an increasing number of newspapers seems to be doing the same thing; we’re probably one of the easiest targets out there. We’re a minority group in most countries in the world, but not only that, we are actively challenging the view of the majority group. In comparative terms, we’re like the British National Party (BNP) in the UK elections. The BNP are a fascist, right-wing, white supremacist political movement which has gathered together the last surviving members of Britain’s racists. They are a small minority, yet they are often one of the loudest; campaigning against every single other party, blaming them for the current state of the government. Unlike other targets that one could attack such as those of a certain race or sex, we don’t have any anti-discrimination laws to protect us, and for very good reasons, we have campaigned against such laws (the ones that would protect us) under the banner of freedom of speech. We don’t want our governments saying that people cannot write hateful things about us, because the whole point about the atheism debate is that there can be a debate.

Freedom of speech is often attacked by the religious, who claim that atheists use it to blaspheme and campaign against their beliefs, even though they are fine when they do the same to us. The point of freedom of speech is that anyone can say anything about politics, religion, art, etc and have their view protected so that others can hear it. The people who agree will state their approval, and the people who disagree or find it offensive in any way can have their say as well, and their response will likewise be protected.

It is this freedom of speech that I execute when I respond to the newspaper articles which lie and misrepresent us. I don’t want the articles to be censored, but I want my right to a fair response. The execution of this right was most recently seen when a Op-Ed piece, penned by Charlotte Allen was published in the LA Times (and then republished yesterday in the Guardian) and spread around the blogosphere. I doubt very many atheists would have wanted Allen’s piece obliterated from the newspaper (shame on you if you did), but the sheer amount of responses it generated from both sides of the debate show the level of disagreement. If you want to read a thorough, well-written objection to Allen’s article, then head over to Shane Croucher’s blog.

I’m sure Allen will put this response down to “whining” as she did in the article and won’t even realize the hypocrisy of her writing, which one could argue is a lot of whining about atheists. I’m sure she’ll continue to criticize us for using freedom of speech to attack religion or belief in god, whilst at the same time using the very same freedom of speech to attack our views. Hers is the one-sided argument; she wants nothing but her views to be made, and she will ignore all objections or file them under the title of “whining”. We’ve seen this kind of behaviour before in so many forms, and if one thing holds true in each of those cases, it is that in the long run, people like Charlotte Allen always lose out eventually.

Opinions will be heard, debate will be had. Long live freedom of speech.