FREDOM OF RELIGION– FREEDOM TO CHANGE RELIGION– FREEDOM FROM RELIGION
As a liberal free-thinking person my interests in Canada, as it applies to religion, was to confirm that our government allowed the free practice of all religions and did not favour one religion over another. I believe this state of affairs exists now in our country .I worry however about Islam and the 57 countries where Islam is the only, or the predominate religion.
As the people who read my blog know, I am an atheist. I cannot, in all honesty, believe in a God, anybodies God, whose existence has never been proven empirically, and the fact that agnostics or atheists cannot prove the absence of a God, is not sufficient for me to change my beliefs. I will readily admit however that the psychological state of most human beings may be such that the belief and idea of God helps humans cope with the stresses of life. Through the centuries of recorded history, all over the world, most humans from the cave-man to modern man needed the presence of a super-power i.e. Sun, Moon, unseen God,in order to function, or at least they believed they needed it. Around the individual Gods, are built up administrative bodies who set the rules, regulations, customs, practices, which distinguish one religion from another, and allow control by priests, ministers, imams and rabbis. To-day most countries outside of the Moslem world allow freedom of religion as long as the religion does not interfere with secular society.
In 1990 the Cairo Declaration or so called “Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam” was drafted and subsequently ratified by all the Moslem member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). This is a 57 state collective which includes every Moslem nation in earth and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations (UN). Both the preamble and concluding articles (24 and25) make plain that the OIC`s Cairo Declaration is designed to supersede Western conceptions of human rights as enunciated, for example in the US Bill of Rights and the UN`s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The opening of the preamble to the Cairo Declaration repeats a Koranic injunction affirming Islamic supremacy (Koran 3:110 “You are the best nation ever brought forth to men…you believe in Allah”) .These statements capture the indelible influence of the Islamic religious law Shari`a—the Cairo Declaration claiming supremacy based on “divine revelation” which renders sacred and permanent the notion of INEQUALITY between the community of Allah and the infidels (us) Thus we can see clearly the differences between the Cairo Declaration which sanctions the gross inequalities inherent in the Shari`a and its western human rights counterparts which do not refer to any specific religion or to the superiority of any group over another, and stress the ABSOLUTE equality of all human beings. Enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights is the guarantee that laws may not be made that interfere with religion “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”
“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. The gravely negative implications of the OIC`s based Cairo Declaration are most apparent in its transparent rejection of freedom of conscience in article 10 which proclaims:
“Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion, or to ATHEISM.Ominously, articles 19 and 22 reiterate a principle stated throughout the document, which clearly applies to the “punishment” of so-called apostates from Islam
Rifqa Barry, 17, a teen-age American girl said she was threatened by her family because she converted from Islam to Christianity She had to run away from her home town to escape the wrath of her family. This is happening in America.! Are there other occurrences that we do not know about like “honour killings?” When the Shari`a law is in contradiction to the laws of the state the state laws must be obeyed. This is not Islamophobia, it is common sense and the way we want to live.
In the Moslem world a Qatari Liberal and former dean of Islamic Law at the University of Qatar, Dr Abd Al-Hamid Al Ansari published an article in the Kuwaiti daily Al_Jarida in which he drew attention to the incitement against secularists and liberals in the Arab world, a matter which he says has reached the proportions of a jihad war against them. A prominent Egyptian lawyer and women’s rights activist recently announced her conversion to Christianity in Cairo, Egypt . The announcement brought shock waves in and beyond Egypt. This is perhaps the first case ever of its kind, where a Muslim woman, who is also a Shari`a expert, has openly challenged Islamic apostasy from within the Muslim world
Modern western society cannot contemplate Shari`a law in its midst It is in contradiction of all everything for which we stand, including the equality of men and women.
