n the last days of his presidency, Barack Obama signed a bill to protect non-religious people from discrimination. This was an important signal to both lawmakers and social communities around the world. Unfortunately the position of non-religious people or ‘non-affiliated’ people is not getting better. This sad news was reported in the 2016 Freedom of Thought report.
In December 2016 the International Humanists published their annual ‘Freedom of Thought’ report in Brussels. I was at that meeting, both as a Dutch Liberal and as the Chairman of the Dutch Humanists.
The Freedom of Thought Report, produced by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), records discrimination and persecution against humanists, atheists, and the non-religious, with a country-by-country assessment. The latest edition of the Report finds that there are laws against “blasphemy” or similar restrictions on free expression about religion in at least 59 countries where it is punishable with a prison term or in some cases by death. There are laws against “apostasy” (leaving from or converting religion) in 22 countries. At least 13 countries provide for the use of the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy.
As Liberals we stand Firm for the Freedom of Religion but people also have the fundamental right to have no religion, and to speak freely about their atheist or humanist ideas. Liberals in the whole world should make policies in favour of equal rights for the religious and non-religious.
Besides this top-down form of protecting human rights, there is also a need for ‘horizontal’. Even in countries where sufficient legal protection is in place, individuals and groups experience problems in informal situations. Many of them decide not to express their ‘real’ beliefs for fear of social exclusion by their family and friends. This happens mainly in orthodox religious environments. At the current time, attention needs to focus on Islamic environments in particular. It will not be possible to ‘fix’ this social problem with new legislation alone.
In other countries, social exclusion is often accompanied by physical violence. Last year several Bangladesh atheistic bloggers were literally hacked to death by members of an extreme Islamic group. The attacks in Paris and those in Beirut, Turkey and Egypt fall in the same category. It is true to say that non-state networks in virtually every part of the world are using brute force to try to impose their interpretation of the Koran on ‘non-believers’. To them, non-believers include atheists and humanists, but also Muslims with views different to those of their own and the supporters of other religions.
In my view liberals should be active in trying to get rid of legislation that is harmful against the non-religious or to the expression of non-religious views. But liberals should also take a stance against social exclusion. Islamic leaders should be encouraged to embrace explicitly the right to leave religion, the way the Roman Catholic Church officially did in 1965. Religious freedom is, indeed, not only about the right to be religious, but is about the right to be free of religion too.
