Comment 117 by irate_atheist

Wipe the floor wih the sheep-faced loon, Richard.

It's like this: the floor has already been wiped. Fewer and fewer people believe in the myth of the carpenter, and the spiritual beliefs of the Archbishop are generally seen to be quaint and archaic. It's down to belief in belief in belief. The Emperor's nakedness has long been generally recognised by most, but it's thought rude to point out the rude bits.

So, a win here will be difficult, because being harsh on the Archbishop will be reported as cruel, and a win based on reason won't be seen as a win. A win is to win over hearts, not just minds. Somehow, the dangly bits of belief have to be exposed for all to see - the cruelty, the stupidity, the tolerance of harsh tradition for tradition's sake.

comment 13 by NMcC

"This is shocking. Isn't this against the law? It's not the role of the police to make cultural judgements."

It certainly is both of those things. But the real question is: did it happen?

That is indeed a very important question.

comment 2 by Richard Dawkins

I told Maryam that I would like to collect instances of exactly this: British police refusing to take action over Muslim brutality against women, on the grounds that "It's part of their culture." I already know that they turn a blind eye to female genital mutilation because they are terrified of being thought "Islamophobic" or racist.

This is shocking. Isn't this against the law? It's not the role of the police to make cultural judgements.

Jump to comment 150 by greengrove

And now, all of a sudden, a couple of gays being "offended" by a street preacher is deemed more important than insidious propaganda against a people that suffered the largest-scale genocide in history

I'm sure if you were Jewish, and some preacher singled you out and ranted at you about the evil Jews and how the holocaust never happened, you could complain too!

You can complain about the matter of hate speech, but myself and, I think, many others here don't see this as a hate speech issue at all. It's about directed bullying and harassment. Personal attacks.

There is all the difference between someone sending their craziness off into the aether, and focussing a tight beam of bonkerosity at someone specific to the point of making them potentially incontinent with shock. Gays, Jews, or anyone else should not need to go out in protective gear to deflect any laser beams of lunacy, and absorbant underwear in case it fails.

Perhaps this is one way to look at it: words that are broadcast generally follow the inverse square law. Bullying doesn't.

Measure the drop-off with distance and you can see what's relatively harmless and what isn't. It's simple physics.

comment 143 by greengrove

I see nobody has addressed the comparison Holocaust denial. Apparently the right of gays to not be offended is more important than the right of Jews.

That's the trouble with us gays. We use stuff up. One minute we are being accused of wasting the limited resource of marriage in the world, because if we get married then all the straight marriages will somehow be diluted, and now we are using up rights. Let a gay complain and there is less rights around for others.

I must add that I think this is great. There is a real passionate and yet civilized and interesting debate going on here. This is surely exactly what this site is intended to encourage, and it shows the very best of rationalism.

Comment 103 by JamesCopple

The article's premise seems to be that there is something wrong with being a fat dyke. There isn't.

The premise is that it's wrong to use that someone is fat and/or a dyke as a reason to bully.

The problem in that town wasn't that schoolkids were bullying other schoolkids for being gay.

That certainly was the problem.

The problem was that the teachers wouldn't say that it's not wrong to be gay.

That doesn't work in the UK. Teachers say it's not wrong to be gay, but the bullying continues.

It's related to but not the same thing as the subject of this thread.

No, it's exactly the same. Clearly what the girl who committed suicide should have done is laughed off all the religious bullying. She just didn't respect freedom of speech.

comment 99 by JamesCopple

I should be able to walk the streets in peace, and not have some bigoted freak harrass me.

According to whom?

According to me.

The basis of a free society includes freedom of expression. It relies on people being mature enough to ignore ignorant bigots.

No, it doesn't. It relies on people not seeking to find offence. It doesn't rely on them accepting being bullied. The ones standing up for freedom here were the gay couple - what about their freedom to express their mutual love in public?

We learn how to deal with ignorant bigots at school

No, we really don't. Bulling of gay kids is a serious matter, and suicides can and do result. There have been tragic and utterly avoidable cases recently in the USA. Young kids who could take no more precisely as a result of the kind of bigoted religious preaching reported here.

We don't learn to deal with such bigots at school. We learn to shut up and pretend we aren't who we are. We learn to keep out of the way, to hide, to avoid jeers or a beating.

If we don't then we grow up thinking we have a right not to be offended by the words of others. That is a dangerous misconception. If too many people share that misconception, then you end up with a society like the ones in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where people face the death penalty for not believing in God.

This isn't the issue at all. You have confused freedom of speech with freedom to bully individuals.

This discussion here is backwards. The freedom of expression that was challenged was that of the gay people - freedom to act as being in a loving relationship in public just like anyone else. Their freedom of expression was being challenged by a religious bigot.

comment 97 by JamesCopple

OK it's a fantasy conversation, but it shows that there is a way to stand up for yourself without having to resort to the law courts.

This is a false dichotomy. I'm not saying this should have got to the courts, but why the hell should I have to stand up for myself in such a situation? I should be able to walk the streets in peace, and not have some bigoted freak harrass me.

comment 94 by JamesCopple

Humor is indeed lost when we fail to discriminate belief from knowledge.

So, if some bigot rages in the street at a passing black couple that they deserve to be slaves, that should be laughed off, because, after all, it's only a belief, and that couple clearly aren't slaves.

There are facts about beliefs, even if those beliefs aren't true. Such facts can include hatred, bigotry, a subtext of violence.

I know this case may have been mild, but it's naive to reject that expressed beliefs can be both frightening and threatening, even if those beliefs are false.

I'm all for freedom of speech, I really am. But I'm passionately against bullying. Sometimes public laughing off bullying can cover private fear.

This isn't a laughing matter, it's bigoted hatred, personally expressed, and individually targeted.

Comment 31 by rationalmind

Rowan Williams accepts evolution.

But, as Sean Carroll has to clearly explained recently, believers like Williams don't accept physics. He doesn't accept really basic, well-established physics. His is not a trivial rejection, it's a rejection of fundamental principles, including causality and conservation.

Evolution is a diversion, in that we do tend to consider believers as relatively harmless if they accept that the Earth is billions of years old and that species have changed. For Williams, reality runs on magic. Evolution is not the natural selection of random mutation, but a supernatural plan to make Man. He's a cosmic conspiracy theorist.

Also, for Williams, the human body is not biochemicals behaving according to centuries-established rules of physics. There is no conservation of matter or energy, as there cannot be if we have spiritual experiences. His beliefs really are that crazy, and should not be treated as any less so because they are so common.

"There must be more" may be one of William's defences against materialism, to which the answer should be for him to go the the LHC and take a look for himself.

There is morally moderate theism. But there is no scientifically moderate theism. It's all quite barmy, and utterly detached from scientific reality, even if there is some nod towards evolution.

Comment 81 by cynicaloptimistrealist

Maybe there's something strange going on where I am from, but a street preacher on the streets of Dublin is generally treated like an unskilled stand up comedian. A crowd gathers, usually to heckle the man or laugh at his fervour and the more he mentions hell, the more hilarious it seems to become.

Things clearly do depend on the situation, the culture. If street preachers are a common figure of fun, then someone who knows they are a common figure of fun would not be expected to get upset or scared. However, it's easy to look at such a situation from the outside and believe that others should laugh these things off, or get a grip.

I think we are losing the sense of what this is about here. I refer back to posts which have asked what we would think if some preacher were saying how wicked and condemned black people were, and picking on individuals.

One aspect of this I think has been forgotten is that this is more than about any freedom of speech for preachers. Much more. It's about freedom of sexual orientation. Gay people should be free to walk in public without being subject to any kind of harassment because of their sexual orientation. This is not like holding a political view or religious view, this is not about someone's freedom of speech to challenge beliefs, it's about hatred of people for who they are, not what they believe.

If I may winge a bit - homophobia seems to be a relatively acceptable prejudice these days. The Church of England is considered relatively harmless because it only contains homophobic prejudice (along with some against women, but not as much), when if it contained widespread racism, there would be no end of justified outrage. So, stop the cultural relativism, I say - bigotry and hatred against gay people is no less serious than racism - there is the same suffering, the same hatred, and the same violence.

Comment 13 by TrickyDicky

I am trying to think of when, during the last 1500 years, British Christians have had to fight for the right to worship.

There have been plenty of times when various Christians were prevented from worshipping by other Christians, using some pretty nasty punishments. There is not the slightest case for moaning now.

Comment 42 by Schrodinger's Cat

The singling out is all your really needed to say.....as it is the core of the objection

Yes, good point.

Comment 44 by snail-12

Steve Zara

Can I ask whether you think it is right that the street preacher is prosecuted for this?

I don't know enough about the circumstances. From what little I do know, I would say not. Some kind of warning would perhaps be enough, perhaps along with an apology to those he upset.

Comment 13 by evotruth

Sorry - I missed your comment. I see you had made the same point about race earlier.

Comment 29 by NealOKelly

Hatred is very frightening. But, unless a specific (non-supernatural) threat was made, I don't see that the law should (or can) intervene here.

Yes, I can see that is a difficult matter. If it is persistent and repeated harassment of individuals, then something should really be done.

But, what I was responding to was Richard's view that any reaction to such haranguing (a great word!) is over the top, that this is a matter of freedom of speech.

I have to disagree! I think this is hate-filled bullying of a vulnerable group, who may have good reason to fear such hatred. That should be recognised.

However, as you imply, prosecution for a one-off harangue seems a bit much.

comment 23 by Kilian

The same goes with the bigot who yelled to the couple. Ignore him like we ignore all the assholes and bigots that we encounter in the streets over our life.

That's easy to say unless you are part of a group that had been subject to threats because of bigotry. Then the situation looks different.

If, in an area where there is racial tensions, and racism had led to violence, some preacher had stood in the street and harassed a black couple, shouting how evil black people where, and that they would go to hell, then I have little doubt that this would have not been laughed off, but considered a situation with real menace.

Comment 17 by NealOKelly

It's not clear what the threat actually was. Even if hell did exist, it'd be up to Him upstairs (and not the preacher) to decide whether the couple in question were headed that way. Yes, it's annoying to be accosted in the street, but someone telling you they think you'll end up in hell is hardly a threat.

That's not really my point.

It's not someone saying you will end up in hell. I have heard that said to me and others quite politely, and it's easy to laugh it off.

But there are situations where being preached at could feel very threatening. I have no idea what things are like where this incident took place, but imagine it was somewhere where there had been attacks on gay men. If I were there, walking along a street, and someone singled me out and ranted at me that I would be going to hell because I was gay (quite how they would know I was gay, I have no idea, I don't mince), I would be pretty scared. Firstly, this kind of behaviour doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the sanity of the preacher, and being attacked by a nutcase in the street doesn't appeal. Secondly, I would be scared because of the threat from others in that place if this gays-are-evil attitude was present.

This isn't threatening because of the words, it's threatening because of the hatred behind the words. Hatred is frightening.

comment 14 by Richard Dawkins

I completely agree that threats are another matter. Indeed I said so. My point was that telling people they are going to hell is not a threat (unless it is seriously believed, which seems unlikely).

The threat isn't about hell, but the attitude of the preacher. If I was walking down a street and some preacher yelled at me that I was evil because I was gay, it would shock me and scare me considerably. I would be looking out for that preacher for some time afterwards. I have no fear of hell, but I do have a fear of people yelling at me that they consider me evil. Who know what they might be thinking, or what they, or their friends, might do?

Comment 10 by Schrodinger's Cat

Excellent observation in my view. It's the forcing aspect that is the issue here, particularly when aimed at individuals. No-one should be subjected to threats in the public space.

We should be expect to be able to walk in a public space without being harassed by others. There is a difference between freedom of speech and directed haranguing.

There is another aspect, which is that we gay people have been subject to bullying, threats and violence. And so our experience of being harassed in this way is not the same as for some random straight person subject to threats of Hell or whatever - there is not the same context. I have little doubt that if I were in the situation that these gay men were in, I would feel shocked and scared.

Free speech is one thing: targeted bullying is another. We shouldn't confuse the two.

I do love these. "The Scale of the Universe" is one of the neatest demonstrations I have seen for a while.

Something I find interesting is the degree to which brains can show recovery, and not just in this case. When I was taught biology, decades ago, it was believed that brains were gradually shredded by life and by time and your fate was inevitable decline. But now it seems very different.

I have been thinking about the content of this brief letter for a while, and I can see no reason why the author isn't a doctor, indeed a well-educated one.

The questions he asked don't show any sign of rejecting evolution, indeed they seem quite reasonable questions coming from someone who has had a brief mention of evolution during their education, but who is after some details, perhaps out of personal interest, perhaps to answer questions from someone else.

The question about whether or not evolution is still going on might refer to human evolution, and such a question has been asked by respectable scientists.

The other question is one of those one might not have a clear answer to. To be honest, after my typical school biology education in the 70s, I would have found it hard to have the answers to these questions at my fingertips!

I am not, of course, sure about the motivation for this letter, but I don't think it's obviously from someone dishonest. Not at all.

Comment 393 by inquisador

No more excuses or cultural exceptions should be accepted.

Absolutely. I have no hesitation in agreeing with this.

Next question: How?

I have an idea which could be based on the differing opinions of Muslim communities in different countries. I don't know their views about women, but in terms of homosexuality UK Muslims are startlingly less tolerant that French Muslims. I could see an effective campaign based around that - insist that UK Islamic leaders justify their relative intolerance. By pointing out the difference between them and Muslims in other countries, such a campaign could in no way be dodged using the defence of racism.

Comment 93 by Tanweer

The liberal left and centre are the most maligned political forces on the planet, and yet they are, without question, the only political forces which have made our part of the world habitable and even pleasant (at times). For once, give them a bit of credit and let them denounce all the fascists.

Well said.

Comment 91 by Peter Grant

I hate him already.

Fine. Well, you must have an awful lot of hatred in you to hate so many. Hatred isn't a particularly effective political tool though, experience shows.

comment 87 by Peter Grant

Neither do I, he's a theocrat by his own admission.

Unless you have heard something from someone's mouth, you are just inventing stuff in order to justify hatred.

Comment 84 by Peter Grant

Go love your own enemies, don't be loving mine. My enemies are the theocratic fascists. I don't love them, >I want to destroy them.

-Christopher Hitchens

Indeed. I have nothing but contempt for theocratic fascists too. In fact, any fascists are my enemy.

But I don't assume that someone is a fascist.