NationStates Jolt Archive

Quoted from the proposal:
The current trends in democracy have allowed many evils to exist in our society, under the guise of religious freedoms. This perverted religious extremism teaches hate; it leads to violence based on race, religion and nationality. One such group, the Aryan Nation, believes that whites are the superior race, that all Jews must be killed, and that Africans and Asians are inferior. To avoid criminal prosecution, they claim that their beliefs are religious in nature and therefore protected by law. The leaders of these groups call themselves ministers and pastors; they carry around the holy bible and other religious texts, to hide behind the freedom of religion.

If left unchecked, this type of religious extremism can corrupt the minds of the youth, lead to the suffering and death of innocent people, and give rise to large-scale terrorist actions.

This resolution proposes that the international law describing the freedom of religion be further defined to prevent this type of religious extremism.


While such a policy might restrict the freedoms allowed to individuals, it would only prevent them from openly practicing doctorines of hate. No group of people should fear for their lives based on their ethic or religious backgrounds, and the government should protect its people from these extremists.

Practicing a "religion" which preaches death to all people of a particular ethnic background is a threat to those people. Help protect innocent people, and support this proposal.

Thank you.

I gather this is your first proposal. Not bad. Good grammar, I'll definitely give you credit for that. Right category, which is unfortunately not always true these days.

On to commentary...

There's nothing wrong with disliking or even possibly hating groups like that, but I can't support this proposal from a government point of view, because freedom of speech and religion must protect all speech and all religions, or they really protect no speech and no religions. Think about it -- if a freedom doesn't exist in an extreme case, is it really worth anything?

And now the government is planning to tell us what is and is not a religion? That's a slippery slope, if I ever heard of one. Here's why:

Well, not many people think Wiccanism is a real religion, why don't we just ban them? I mean, they practice VOODOO, that's DANGEROUS. Never mind that they've never killed anyone, they look bad and hateful and they sometimes wear creepy eye shadow. Oh, and they pervert our children.

And, hey, there's a few Muslims out there that want to kill all the whiteys. Let's ban that religion, too, for the sake of protecting the innocent. Can any religion with a word for "holy war" really be preaching love and peace?

Then those Catholics. Man, those guys started WARS back in the day! Crusades, they called them. Pure danger to the innocent. And then they all poured money in to defend their priests that were accused of child abuse, and that got some major political flak. Heck, why let any Christians stay around when they oppress everyone else with all this "Christmas" stuff? That's totally an infringement on everyone else's freedom. Ban 'em.

Moving on...

I don't think it's a good idea to pass a resolution that basically amounts to "Pass another resolution." It'd be better if the modified definition was included in the proposal -- it's fine if you don't want to put one down right now, I'd just recommend starting a debate on the new definition and asking for suggestions.