Apathy Sketchpad

Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for January 2009. There are quite a few, so I’ve put one to start off with, then the rest after the fold (i.e., a link at the bottom of the post). They are in no particular order, but they are shuffled to try to keep the Atheist Bus ones separate. (Atheist buses are a goldmine of comedy, I think, so I repeatedly tried different angles on it. I never came up with anything this good, though.)

Christian Scientists Split God

A group of Christian research scientists in Massachusetts announced this week that they had managed for the first time to split God, also known as the Higgs particle although mostly to annoy physicists, into his component parts. God is believed to have existed in the conditions immediately prior to the Big Bang.

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water. A team of 5 priests work round the clock blessing the inbound pipelines. Researchers were able to detect two of God’s components in the debris from the explosion.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The trace from the Holy Smoke Chamber clearly shows a trail for the son particle, which curves gracefully through the chamber for five nanoseconds before ascending into heaven, more-or-less in line with the theory. The father particle’s trace, however, did not agree with calculated predictions. The researchers have admitted that the way the father particle moves is ‘mysterious’, but are confident an explanation will be found. The holy spirit particle was not observed. The Christian scientists believe that this particle passed clean through the chamber like a ghost.

Most Christian scientists agree that the father and son particles could tell us a lot about the universe if we can unlock their secrets. The experiments have been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out life on Earth.

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It has recently come to my attention that a large block of Muslim countries are having rather too much success in forcing changes to UN resolutions to try to outlaw ‘defamation of religion’, where ‘religion’ means ‘Islam’ and ‘defamation’ means ‘any kind of criticism at all’. The whole thing just serves to demonstrate a massive failure to see the point of free speech: the speech that most needs protecting is exactly that speech that will offend the majority of people. Anything else is protected more-or-less automatically, simply because nobody will want to stop it. Moreover, one of the key purposes of a body like the UN is to limit the powers of its member states: like the EU and the Federal Government of the USA, its rules and safeguards prevent a government from abusing its power and taking basic rights such as freedom of speech away from its citizens. If you allow them to abridge freedom of speech in cases of ‘defamation of religion’ then you’re handing them a free pass to censor more-or-less anyone they like, especially when the national religion is as closely tied with the government as it is in an Islamic state. It is precisely those states whose people most need an external, international organisation to protect their rights: there are countries where apostasy is a criminal offence. That is, you can be punished by the law for choosing not to be a Muslim. It’s exactly that kind of thing that freedom of speech as a protected right is supposed to prevent.

Mostly, though, it should  be clear from the title that this is a dumb idea. This is not something that human rights law should be addressing. ‘Defamation of religion’ protects religion, not humans. It should be obvious that you can’t enact a law to protect two contradictory ideas, but that’s exactly what this does. I can’t very well say that Jesus either was or was not the son of God without insulting Islam or Christianity, and since it’s my understanding that both Jesus and God are entirely made up, I’m liable to insult both if I voice my true opinions. Assuming, that is, that they consider calling their religion intrinsically false to be insulting it. Frankly I’m not sure how words slike ‘insult’ and ‘defamation’ apply to abstract concepts like ideas.

Their justification is the standard Victim Card:

Muslim countries say they are only trying to cut down of what they see as extensive bias against Islam in the West…

Let’s see how long that lasts before they start trying to censor legitimate and unimportant critics of Islam, shall we? Go:

Muslim countries say they are only trying to cut down of what they see as extensive bias against Islam in the West. In the lead-up to Monday’s vote, many referred, for example, to the 2005 publication of Danish cartoons that satirized Muhammad, and which touched off riots through the Muslim world.

Zero seconds. Nice work there.

Of course, that article also points out one interesting fact: the legal definition of defamation requires that the statement be false. So I can say ‘it’s little wonder that there’s a bias against a bloodthirsty and backwards religion which subjugates women and tries to stifle all criticism of itself’ and there’s nothing the UN can do about it.