Should I expect pitchforks and tourches?
I have gotten published in Ireland! Like I told you guys earlier this week I have written an article for An Focal, the studentunions paper here att the University of Limerick.
It is a piece about religion and how religious freedom also includes the right to be free to choose not to be religious. If you wanna read it in it's published form you are welcome to click the link.
If you wanna read my unpublished version just scroll down.
So what do you think guys, should I expect pitchforks and tourches any day now?
IS IRELAND A NATION OF CHRIST?
Written by Eric Johansson
THE upcoming results of the 2011 census are expected to show that the percentage of atheists in the Irish population will have increased. The last census, in 2006, showed that about 186.000 people in the country considered themselves atheists.
The increase in non-religious beliefs raises the question of exactly how much religion should regulate everyday life in Ireland?
I am from Sweden, a country where only 17 percent of the population consider religion as an important influence in their life. Being from what the Westboro Baptist church in Kansas referred to as a “fag nation”, I can see obvious differences in how religion matters here in Ireland and how it don’t in Sweden. The most obvious and serious ones are the differences regulated in law.
The thing with religious freedom is that it also includes the freedom of not being religious. One step to secure religious freedom is to make sure that the country is secular, which means that the church and state should be separated. This is not the case in Ireland.
Religion is ideology. That means religious views should be considered and open for debate as any political thought. Therefore I was quite appalled when I found out that the Irish constitution actually has a ban against blasphemy. Even if the law is not regularly used, it is still there, a constant threat of censorship and putting a gag on the right of free speech. The ban does not exist in Sweden.
Neither does the illegitimacy of abortions.
As you well know, it is illegal for a woman to make an abortion in Ireland unless there is a threat for her life if she doesn’t. The effect is that a lot of unwanted pregnancies are being taken care of in the United Kingdom, at least if the woman got the economic strength to do so. In my opinion the ban against abortion is motivated by unmodern religious thought and has only one purpose: to disqualify women’s right to their own bodies.
I have friends who have made abortions. These girls where not religious and saw it as the right thing to do. But even if they where certain that it was the right decision, it was still not a pleasant experience. The idea that the state could have made it more difficult for them than it already was is sickening to me.
There are more examples of how religious values are regulated in the Irish law but these are two of the more serious ones.
These obstacles stands in the way of letting the Irish people make choices for themselves as freethinking individuals on what they believe in.
Laws are norms that are sanctioned by the state. They communicate which values and culture that are accepted in the nation. The examples above scream that the culture of Ireland so far is a culture of Christ, even if more and more persons are becoming atheists.
