Uncork the Champagne! Blasphemy has at last been abolished

THE National Secular Society and freethinkers throughout the land are celebrating the fact that Parliament last night had passed an amendment abolishing the blasphemy law.

Terry Sanderson, President of the NSS said:

This is the culmination of the Society’s 140-year fight to abolish this medieval law under which many innocent victims have suffered. Even in the 20th Century, one of my predecessors was jailed, and an old man was sentenced to hard labour, causing his premature death.

I pay tribute to all those who have suffered under this cruel law, denying freedom of expression, and to those before me who have campaigned for its abolition.

But he added a cautious note:

Our celebrations will be overshadowed by the knowledge that parliaments elsewhere in the world will soon be pressurised into passing a new law even more pernicious than blasphemy. It will outlaw so-called ‘defamation of religion’.

Pressure to pass this law is coming from a bloc of Islamic countries organised by the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Conference). Having made their demands at the UN Human Rights Commission, they are now planning to lobby the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We need secular nations to speak out against this and to block it before we are landed with something far worse than what we are getting rid of today.

NOT celebrating today is the man who has been trying to bring a private prosecution for blasphemy against the BBC for screening Jerry Springer, The Opera.

The witless Stephen “Stay a Virgin, Marry a Virgin” Green warns on his website that if blasphemy were to be abolished, disestablishment of the Church of England would follow. And if that happens:

The Bishops will lose their seats in the House of Lords and with that, much of their influence in the land. Church schools will go, as it will be argued that Christianity has voluntarily given up its privileged position as the faith of the United Kingdom.

Prayers in Parliament will be sidelined, made multi-faith or abolished.

Christians will find themselves increasingly under attack for their beliefs in public service jobs. They will be told to keep their views to themselves.

The Church will lose its charitable status (the assumption that a religious purpose is charitable has already gone). Faith-based social initiatives will have to give up their Christian ethos to gain Government approval.

The default position that witnesses swear on the Holy Bible in court will be replaced by an assumption that an affirmation is all that is necessary. The Bible will be available for a while for those who insist upon swearing upon it, then it will go, or become just one of a number of available sacred texts.

Public manifestations of the Christian Faith will be attacked one by one. Hospitals and the armed forces will no longer have paid chaplains. Mayors’ chaplains will abolished. Faith will be relegated to a private matter with no relevance to the public sphere, leaving the arena of public policy clear for atheist agenda-setters alone.

We fervently hope he is right, and that religion, once and for all, is relegated to the places where it naturally belongs - in the heads of the deluded and in the places they gather to offer of their useless prayers.