Please do not offer my god a peanut

My my, what a week.
1: The British government's bill making it an offence to incite hatred on religious grounds is defeated.
2: Muslims protest being caricatured as terrorists by terrorising the western world.
3: BNP leader Nick Griffin is cleared of inciting racial hatred - comments he made to a private audience, unaware he was being filmed.
4: And today, fundamentalist London preacher Abu Hamza is jailed for seven years for similar comments, incitement to racial hatred, murder and terrorism, made in public.

So, what's it all about? It's all about freedom of speech. The Danish cartoons came about originally because a Danish author couldn't find an artist to illustrate a childrens' book about the Koran; they feared a backlash for transgressing the Islamic edict against pictorial depictions of people, animals and especially Allah and Muhammed, in case it inspires idolatry. strictly speaking, Muslims are not supposed to have posters of pop stars, footballers, etc, on their walls. The call for the cartoons was part of a debate on self-censorship in the eye of sensitivities to other faiths.

Were they funny? No. Were they sensitive? No. was the Jyllands-Posten right to publish? Perhaps not, but that's actually not relevant. Were papers in Germany, France and 10 or 11 other European countries right to republish? Absolutely.

Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland (nominally, and much more so these days), Britain (despite its lack of constitution) and other members of the EU are secular states. The separation of church and state is absolutely vital to modern life. For one; faith is a choice, like which football team you support. It's a ludicrous basis for making decisions about people's lives. It's a hobby, as Eddie Izzard once said of the Church of England faith. Secondly, and more importantly, if the church, any church, is allowed to influence state actions, you get human rights abuses, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Mother-and-Baby scandal of 1950s Ireland. The bottom line here is that religions are evil. More than any capitalist organisation, they distribute wealth and power upwards and enslave the weak, facilitating child abuse, political massacre, dismemberment and plague, not to mention bog-standard poverty, guilt, hate and backwardness.

With this in mind, it's essential for your continued freedom and mine that religion learns its position in the world: we will not be enslaved. We, the human race, are free people and we will not be told who to talk to, who to love and who to hate, what to read, what to eat, where we can and cannot go, what we can and cannot have, what we can and cannot think. Women's bodies, lives even, will not be commandeered to make babies. The poor will not die of terrifying, withering diseases in exchange for a crust of bread. The young and vulnerable will not be imprisoned and tortured in the name of nurture and protection. Moreover, religion truly is the opiate of the masses; it robs them of their potential and denies humanism.

Christianity, thankfully, has learned this lesson. Whereas 40 years ago, people burned effigies and images of a pop band who joked that they were bigger than Jesus, whereas 25 years ago, a group of comedians received death threats for making a film about someone who was born in the shed next to Jesus, last year a far more overtly blasphemous operetta saw protests by, at most, 100 middle-Englanders who muttered 'down with this sort of thing' and burnt the receipts for their TV licences. The world munched its cornflakes and turned to the horoscopes.

Of course people are wary of offending Muslims, or appearing to sing from the same hymn sheet as the BNP. There's a school of thought that we should be sensitive to Muslim concerns because, after all, European secularism is merely a belief system, just as is Islam; how can you weigh one as more important than the other when so many people believe in it so fervently that they will lay down their life for it? Who hasn't, in the last week, quoted, or at least thought of the Voltaire aphorism: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?

However, such seemingly benign relativism is in fact a betrayal of the principals which allow you to enjoy your life as you please, the politics - for which people have suffered and died - which give you the freedom to live as you choose; to drink, smoke, dance; to listen to music, watch TV; to say what you like, to go where you want, live where and how you wish; to see, talk to, sleep with and love who you like; to speak which ever language you choose; to write whatever you want with whichever hand you feel most comfortable with, and even where to go and pray of a Sunday morning. People have worked, fought and died for those liberties, and to put secularism on a par, to give it an equal footing, to make it a mere accident of birth, as religion, any religion, which subjugates people to the will and whim of the self-appointed interpreters of ancient, liberally interpreted, selectively read, writings, is to give up those hard-won, hard-kept liberties.

With liberties and rights come responsibilities - firstly, the responsibility to protect those liberties and rights, as mentioned above, by not giving in to those who wish to censor us. Secondly, to use those liberties and rights responsibly. There are some who say that freedom of speech is not absolute, that there are necessary strictures that we have to observe to all live together in harmony. No. There is an obvious courtesy one should observe when possible so that we can all live in harmony, but sometimes such courtesy comes second to the necessity of speaking out. The Jyllands-Posten didn't have to publish those cartoons - the point they made by doing so was a rather weak, badly made one - but the subsequent publications were absolutely necessary, just as 'The Life of Brian' was necessary; change and progress does not come from placating those who would censor us. Any freedom is not a freedom if it is limited; otherwise it is a mere allowance given to us by those who do the limiting, and just as you let them give, you let them take away.

Unfortunately, there are always those who will abuse their freedoms (which is not, of course a reason not to have them). If I am to have absolute freedom of speech, then unfortunately so must far-right groups and fundamentalist preachers. For their speech to be curtailed, there must be a curtailer. In a classic "who will guard the guardians" case, it's better to have anarchy than slavery. Hence the British government's defeat on the Racial and Religious Hatred bill this week. Liberty prevailed over regulation. It's worrying, of course, to think of the BNP with free reign to spread their hate and lies, but, and this is where the Abu Hamza conviction is interesting. There are laws already covering public order offences, assault and incitement which can be used to police them, without ever transgressing their right to speak, as Abu Hamza has found out. Nick Griffin is free to talk about whatever he likes in private, with his own friends, however odious, and this is a good thing.

Another reason why the BNP and the like should not be censored is because of how they can twist such censorship to their own aims. It's rather crude, but the air of martyrdom and persecution presents them as freedom fighters and wins them votes. Rather, letting their views stand in the full blast of the oxygen of publicity is the only way of revealing the lies, misinformation and manipulation they use to present their racist agenda. You can't tell a BNP member that immigrants brought a net gain of £2.3bn to Britain in 2003 if you've already silenced the dialogue.

Similarly, you can't address the contradictions of Islamic fundamentalism if you self-censor for fear of causing offence, or, god forbid, for fear of causing riots, building-burning and murder. Seriously, it's like Kristallnacht out there. And this from a body of people whose media regularly caricature and lampoon Jews in the most derogatory fashion. When they're not proclaiming the destruction of Israel and Zionism, of course. Or threatening to "slay/massacre/annihilate those who mock Islam".

Which brings us back to the cartoons. It was right to publish them in the first place, and it was even more right to republish them is support of Denmark and the Jyllands-Posten after the initial outcry. The fact that buildings have been burnt and people killed is scary, but that is exactly what makes it so right - you cannot abandon the principals on which your life is founded simply because because the pawns of an anti-humanist organisation object with fire and bullet when you exercise those principals. Otherwise, what is the point of having them?