“You cannot take Christianity out of the West and have anything that’s recognizably the West,” atheist British pundit Douglas Murray has acknowledged. “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” says British historian Tom Holland in his popular book Dominion. One of those Christian concepts and assumptions, channeling ideas that draw upon even more ancient Greek and Roman sources, is that people must be free to speak their minds without the threat of arrest or violence. It was an incredibly hard-fought freedom. And it is one many of our elites seem eager to surrender for the sake of inclusivity and tolerance toward Muslims and people who call themselves transgender, among others.
Freedom of Speech Is a Western Phenomenon
Two hundred and 50 years ago, the United States declared its independence based on the proposition that “all men” are endowed by God with the unalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When, 15 years later, an independent, sovereign nation ratified its Constitution and Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of speech was included in the very First Amendment. Of course, its authors and signers did not think they were innovators in this regard but rather drew upon an ancient Western — and perhaps most singularly, British — tradition that included, per Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Algernon Sidney, who all recognized the importance of free speech.
Persecution Of John Cleese Shows Islamist Hatred Of Free Speech
No comments:
Post a Comment