Canada created an Office of Religious Freedom last year.

Should Australia create an Office of Religious Freedom to help protect religious people around the World and give religious people in Australia somewhere to go if they feel persecuted for their beliefs? Just asking...

Pat I've not looked at what the Canadian model is like so comments are not based on specific details.

Generally not overly keen to have yet another "Office of " entity, they seem to have a way of become the problem rather than part of the solution. Eg "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy":

"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."

Secondly freedom from religion should be part of any such protection.

Would people of faith accept having the same limitations placed on their own views and actions? For a humerous take on this see the classic John Safron vs God episode where he goes door knocking athiest views in Salt Lake City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U58wgn-9Y3c

Eg anybody who subscribes to a faith that proclaims that I'm deserving of some punishment for not-being part of their faith has pretty much in my view renounced any protections for their feelings about their faith.

Part of the problem with those sort of programs is some people and groups have a tendancy to try and use them to silence critics while not being so silent themselves.

My gut feel is that such an office would create far more grief than it solved.

R0bert

The ORF in Canada is designed so that everyone is free to follow their conscience, atheists as well. It's basically there to protect the separation of church and state. It could be called the Office for the Freedom of Conscience, I suppose. With the size of government growing ever larger, this Office may be a necessary evil.

"No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.” - Thomas Jefferson.

I'm with RObert on this: an obvious danger would be if such an 'Office' degenerated into a devise for the protection of religions, and from that position, into a means for religious authorities to discipline their own members, regardless of the rule of law and the rights to which all citizens are entitled.

And from there to a demand for different laws for different believers.

Church and state should be kept completely separate. It is not the business of the state to protect any religion from the realities of life in a blooming, buzzing democracy.

Joe

One religion is not compatible with another as it is, without putting them in the same office. I think religion is best kept in a bottle behind the door. Religious people have their churches what would they want one at work for.

@ Loudmouth,

So, even if Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states that

"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance"

You still wouldn't object if a law directly infringed upon someone's right to freedom of religion? And if its not "the business of the State" to stop religious persecution from happening in a society, as you say, whose role is it to protect the religious?

Religion has no place outside the home !

@ Individual,

Haha, why is that?

I don't see the necessity of an Office of Religious
Freedom in Australia. All Australians are free to follow
an religion they choose, so long as its practices do not
break any Australian law. Australians are also free not
to follow a religion. We have a secular government and
no official or state religion. Religious laws have no
legal status in Australia. It should remain that way.

Letting the cat guard the cream?

The state cannot live with religion because its political rulers seek power and want to be above all. How could they possibly bear the thought of God being above themselves?

True, the state may pay God a lip-service (in fact they currently do so every morning in Canberra), but no politician (even including the avowed Christians among them) would ever consider Him seriously to be truly above their laws.

Yes, the state can live with most churches because then they can try to tame and subjugate them, placing them on a slippery-slope which ends in betraying God - lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil!

Are people seeking the protection of the state because they think that "God is so helpless that He cannot save His devotees"?

No thanks!

Religion is nothing but a tool for the brainwashed to disrupt the lives of decent people, that's why it should remain in the home where the harm of further brainwashing is minimised by keeping it off the streets.

Yuyutsu

'The state cannot live with religion because its political rulers seek power and want to be above all. How could they possibly bear the thought of God being above themselves? '

That is a classic. It has not always been the case however. Most of the Western Government's in the early days assisted in setting up schools and hospitals and understanding they were accountable to God. These days many of our pollies live in sin, debauchery and have few morals except for the outward hypocrisy of pretending to care for the environment.

The first ones to run to an Office of Religous Freedom would be the warming alarmist. They are mortified that anyone would question their myths and would have all disenters silenced. An Office of Religous freedom set up by moral relativist would be an absolute joke just like the UN.

You should know better by now, progressive pat.

Altering what another poster says in order to try to force your point across is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Loudmouth stated:

>>It is not the business of the state to protect any religion from the realities of life in a blooming, buzzing democracy.<<

You spun this into a question...

>>...if its not "the business of the State" to stop religious persecution from happening in a society, as you say, whose role is it to protect the religious?

D'you see the difference? Loudmouth said "the realities of life". You said "religious persecution".

It was not a case of "as you say", was it? You cannot change the words, and then pretended that they were Loudmouth's. That's deceitful.

And the answer to your question "whose role is it to protect the religious?" is simple: it is the role of the police to uphold the law.

Dear Runner,

"It has not always been the case however. Most of the Western Government's in the early days assisted in setting up schools and hospitals and understanding they were accountable to God."

I'm afraid I am too young to recall any such days - perhaps Methuselah would.

Externally they build schools and hospitals, and occasionally they even pay lip-service to God, but what's in their hearts when they do so?

- buying votes.
- good jobs for their friends.
- seeking praise.
- seeking to enforce their secular values by competing with religious schools and institutes of healing.

A minority of politicians were (and an even smaller minority still is) loyal to one church or another - but that's superficial at a social level, it doesn't imply that they were loyal to what the church stands for (or in some cases, what it is supposed to stand for).

I appreciate your comment about environmentalists and warming-alarmists.

Yeah, that's what the police are for. If I feel I'm being 'crucified' - so to speak - for what I believe there's already an avenue for me to do something about it. Online, it's irrelevant, I can just choose to ignore the ravings of those who will never understand my beliefs. But at work and such I can do something about it already.

It would just become a PC wagon for the looney end of the religious fringe.

all physical things have their basis...in spirit
dont we have enough god-heads...in this world

now we got
a govt servant..overseeing the things of spirit...[lol]

thank you pope sir humphrey
lord of the over lorders

oh lord save us from them all
god is a servant..you can only find gods good
via service...not sir-vice

my advice is say no!

one power...more...
for those phycopaths...of materialistic[sic*] darkness

in spirit..it indicates the sheep sorting the goats
by licence/order..of the wolf...who issues his bill

pay in blood
here eat his flesh
drink his blood...a thiest

the trinity of 3
officially made 4

lol

a pox o lips
hoarse men

ahhhh men
mene mene

its either or

a theoist
or atheo
list

em-manuel

If there really is a God then he/she would have to be coming down heavily on all the religious hypocrites who go to church on sunday yet for the rest of the week they're out to get as much as they can in materialism.

Thank you, Pericles and Individual.

"Progressive" Pat,

You write: "You still wouldn't object if a law directly infringed upon someone's right to freedom of religion?"

Perhaps this question is a bit hypothetical in the Australian context: of course, I support the right of people to profess to whatever religion they like, provided it does not involve any infringement on the rights of other people, including that religion's adherents, in a democratic society governed by the rule of law, and the separation of church and state.

You have an interesting twist on what I wrote:

"And if its not "the business of the State" to stop religious persecution from happening in a society, as you say, whose role is it to protect the religious?"

A bit of a straw-man argument here in Australia, although of course most certainly an issue in Muslim-dominated countries, wouldn't you agree ?

Yes, I, agree that, unlike in many other countries, especially Muslim-dominated countries, under Australian law, no religion is persecuted, and nobody is persecuted for practising their religion, provided they observe the rule of law and other people's democratic rights, and the principle that the state will not interfere to support any religion over another.

But that's what this is about, isn't it ?

"Progressive" indeed.

Joe

Hi, "Progressive" Pat,

You've got me thinking :) I have to admit that I would not support the banning of many reactionary systems of belief and thought, even the Nazis or the various Communist Parties. Similarly, in my view, reactionary-religious systems of ignorance should not be banned - and therefore neither can they be persecuted without legal impunity.

Of course, if any reactionary belief-system contains, peripherally or fundamentally, mechanisms for the oppression of anybody, including its own adherents (and most likely its female and/or young 'members'), and in that way flouting the rule of law in a democratic society such as Australia aspires to be, then it should suffer the consequences.

'Culture' is often confused with reactionary religious practices - an article in today's Australian Magazine on forced marriages highlights this: religions such as Islam are not the only reactionary systems which oppress women in this way - it appears to relate much more to property rights and inheritance in backward, peasant and ex-peasant societies: Coptic Egyptians and Ethiopians, and Hindu villagers seem to be as likely to perpetuate these evils as Muslims.

But 'culture', after all, is often not much more than the congealed justification for the inequalities within a backward society, inequalities which usually favour males and those older, against the rights of females and those younger. In that sense, 'culture' is very often reactionary in itself, and in stark tension with the rights of citizens in a democratic society, under the rule of law.

How such backward practices would fare in some sort of "progressive" or socialist Utopia is not hard to guess.

As I'm sure you would immediately agree, "Progressive" Pat ?

Cheers,

Joe

I don't think that there is any credible reason why religious beliefs should be given any special privilege over any other form of belief (cultural identification etc).

Why should someone's choice to believe in some concept of god protect them in any way from rules that apply to others wishing to act according to their beliefs?

Either a rule/law is necessary or it's not and should never be the subject of an exemption because a religious belief is somehow considered more important than someone else's reason for wanting to not obey that rule or law.

By the same token it's hard to see a reason why discrimination/persecution on the basis of religious affiliation should have protections that may not be available to other legal affiliations.

R0bert

Dear R0bert,

"Either a rule/law is necessary or it's not and should never be the subject of an exemption because a religious belief is somehow considered more important than someone else's reason for wanting to not obey that rule or law."

Which is the very reason why there should be no rules and laws.

Religious reasons ARE more important than other, selfish, reasons: serving God is well superior than serving oneself, the state, society or any other body - but here is the catch: how do you tell whether one indeed serves God in their actions and not just themselves, their own ego in the guise of religion?

Obviously, no government, how much more so a secular government, can possibly ever be able to tell which actions are religious and which are not. How could they possibly distinguish between true religion and false religion? No volume of legislation can detail the differences.

It is therefore necessary that for the protection of religion, all rules and laws must be scrapped!

While scary and inconvenient, this is the logical conclusion. When considering the legalisation of God's will, the loss of the relative personal-safety that comes with the rule of law is a but small price to pay.

However, as a human society, we are cowards who cling to safety, we are not ready to have faith in God alone so we want to rely on our own devices. In that case, let us have only the minimal laws that are required for our personal safety, nothing else. Even for these we will pay the dear price - read in Samuel-I, chapter 8, verses 4-18 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Samuel+8) about the fate of those who seek to be ruled over by other men.

Yuyutsu,

You suggest:

" .... no government, how much more so a secular government, can possibly ever be able to tell which actions are religious and which are not.....

"It is therefore necessary that for the protection of religion, all rules and laws must be scrapped!"

In the first place, it is not the business of governments - at least in secular democracies - to persecute OR protect any religion. In the second place, I shudder to think what you would recommend in place of those rules and laws, Yuyutsu.

Many reactionary societies such as Saudi Arabia haven't yet gone through the process of separating 'church' and state, although even there the identity of the two may be more the work of the extremely backward forces of Wahabism and the stunted development of the state, and more contemporary forms of such backward ideologies, such as Salafism.

Iran seems to also be going through this process of coming to grips with the need to differentiate between the temporal responsibilities of the state, and the conceits of the mullahs to bring together state and 'church' responsibilities under their control.

Many adherents of religions have great difficulty coming to terms with the fact that we all live in a temporal world with its real day-to-day issues, while their particular book dictates that they - indeed the entire world - should logically live under its strictures, by persuasion or the sword. In such backward societies, the primary role of any proto-state is in fact to promote religion, their religion.

But it is more than eight hundred years in Western Europe since the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope came to an agreement over the separation of the powers and responsibilities of the state from those of the church. I hope that it won't take as long for people in Muslim-dominated societies to follow suit, but I am not optimistic about it happening in countries currently, or soon to be, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The democratic revolution promised by the Arab Spring may have to endure the dead hand of a second Muslim Winter.

Dear Loudmouth,

"I shudder to think what you would recommend in place of those rules and laws, Yuyutsu."

Rest assured, I do not recommend anything in place of those rules and laws.

You and I fully agree that religion and state should be separate, albeit for different reasons: Your concern emphasizes the possibility of false-religions impinging on secular rights, while my concern emphasizes the possibility of secular laws impinging on true religion.

"In the first place, it is not the business of governments - at least in secular democracies - to persecute OR protect any religion."

Indeed. Yet a bit sideways from this topic, if the government has any business at all, then it includes the protection of religious individuals, families and communities against violence.

Perhaps I didn't make it clear enough: when I mentioned "for the protection of religion", what I meant was protecting religion from the state itself and its laws. Australian laws, so we hope, were never intentionally designed to hinder religion, but they may do so inadvertently when cataloging all human behaviour in the same pigeon-hole regardless of motive.

Australia has a reasonable record of exempting the major, established religious orders from sections of the law that counter their religion. While there is room for improvement I need not worry for them at the moment as they can take care of themselves, but what about smaller groups and individuals with a private religion?

As it is technically as well as profoundly impossible for the state to assess each individual act and decide on a case-by-case basis whether it is religiously or otherwise selfishly motivated; also as even if the above WAS miraculously possible, it would be considered so politically-incorrect and would create a sky-high outcry of "discrimination", the only remaining way to protect religion from the jaws of the law, is to abolish the law - even though it will regrettably also allow people who act selfishly to benefit from the doubt.

Yuyutsu Firstly I don't agree that "Religious reasons ARE more important than other, selfish, reasons: serving God is well superior than serving oneself, the state, society or any other body"

Your choice to believe in a particular concept of god does not make the consequences of that choice more important than my wish to live by a particular set of values which are not based around the idea of a god.

"Which is the very reason why there should be no rules and laws."

How far do you take that? I'll leave aside the issue of things like speed limits, etc. Think we've been down that track before.

Should there be rules against carrying weapon's (or items easily used as weapons) to school? If you have children at school would you be happy to have the bullies in their school armed with knives?

Some time back there was a debate on the issue of knives in school and the desire of one group to have an exemption due to a religious liking for the wearing of concealed knife (apparently generally ornamental in nature).

R0bert

Dear R0bert,

"Your choice to believe in a particular concept of god does not make the consequences of that choice more important than my wish to live by a particular set of values which are not based around the idea of a god."

- I fully agree. Your belief or mine does not matter, what matters is not what we believe or say, but the actual fact (or its absence) that a specific action is made in the service of God. As I just mentioned, no government is able to assess such claims, which is why it is immoral to make laws, which cannot but pigeon-hole the good and the bad alike.

"How far do you take that? I'll leave aside the issue of things like speed limits, etc. Think we've been down that track before."

- In a perfect world there should be no laws, but being imperfect as humans are, the only valid laws should be those needed to protect us from violence and fraud.

"Should there be rules against carrying weapon's (or items easily used as weapons) to school? If you have children at school would you be happy to have the bullies in their school armed with knives?"

- That's up to each school to decide, not the government. Education should not be compulsory in the first place, then if parents do not like the school's policy on knives, they may either plead with the principal to change them, select a different school, or form their own school.

"Some time back there was a debate on the issue of knives in school and the desire of one group to have an exemption due to a religious liking for the wearing of concealed knife (apparently generally ornamental in nature)."

- Again, this would be entirely an internal school policy.

The difference is profound: schools are voluntary while the state is not!