In 1941, in an effort to rally American’s to enter the war in Europe, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of four freedoms in need of defense from fascism: freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Without diminishing the importance of Roosevelt’s general articulation of the meaning of freedom in a society, on the historical evidence and more relevantly what is going on around us today, the four freedoms seem in need of a partial update.
Observing the murderous religious impositions and oppression currently gripping Iran and Afghanistan, and remembering the hundreds of millions of children continually born to religious parents in apparently free societies, children denied the right to choose whether their minds are exposed to a religion, rather than freedom to worship should it not be freedom from worship? That is to say, freedom from religion?
Without debating whether religion is more beneficial than it is harmful – though I think the evidence falls to the latter – the freedom to first choose whether one is trained in a religion, indoctrinated in other terms, seems more fundamental than the freedom to practice a religion that you were not free to choose in the first place.
Roosevelt’s defense of the right to worship freely ignores the right to first examine and then choose to worship whatever god is placed before us, particularly when young and as yet unequipped with the necessary powers of reason to handle such a potent tool. Religion is not like mathematics. Mathematics is free of moral judgments and moreover is verifiably and indisputably beneficial. Religion on the other hand, is loaded with moral judgments and strictures, many instilling guilt and powerlessness, restricting such natural proclivities as sexual liberty and, indeed, the right to be free of religion itself. If you reject religion you are an apostate and, if not killed for it, threatened with hell for your apostasy. Whereas rejecting Pythagoras’ Theorem as true will only likely get you laughed at, or at worst, if you decide to go into bridge construction it may wind you up dead, and then only as a result of your own foolishness.
As David Hume argues quite convincingly, minds should be exposed to religious ideas only after they have had the benefit of learning science and mathematics and other disciplines that provide the means to think rationally rather than believe dogmatically.
This of course is why religion is most effective when peddled to the young, and why religion always tries to get them young. Children do not have sufficient power to reason, and so will accept as true whatever it is you tell them is true. This is a form of child abuse, and therefore in order to be free from it children must be free from what causes it. That is, free from religion. Religious figures the likes of Cardinal Newman railed against “liberal” thought precisely because it has the power to expose religion for what it is, to raise doubts about its dogmas presented as truths, and to resist its repression of all that is natural and joyful, and therefore liberating and self-empowering.
Of course people should have the freedom to worship, but only if they first have the freedom to choose whether to worship or not. Until we acquire the skill necessary to rationally make this choice, everyone has the right to enjoy freedom from religion. Yes, I’m arguing we should acquire the skill to rationally choose to become irrational if we so want! As did Immanuel Kant, who famously declared that “I have had to limit reason in order to make room for faith”. Someone who has not lived free of religion until they acquire the powers of reason to examine it cannot be said to ever be worshiping freely. Religion must be freely chosen in order for its practice to be considered freely undertaken.