freeinfidel

It feels like the 1930s again, but this time with slicker PR.

Our civil liberties are under attack. And every time we lose another freedom, we’re told it’s in our own best interest.

Some want to preserve us from terrorists. Others want to save our souls. The result is the same - the impoverishment of our lives and the narrowing of our minds.

It’s our belief that, just as in the 1930s, the real threat we face is totalitarianism, though in new guises.

Religious fanatics would have us abandon centuries of hard-won philosophical and scientific progress, to cast ourselves into a new dark age of superstition, intolerance and inequity. They want us all to join them in their irrational stew of ignorance and fear, to give up the difficult but worthwhile struggle to understand this baffling but marvelous universe.  And some of them are prepared to kill us if we decline the offer.

Governments are exploiting (as ever) the threat of the ‘other’, the fear of attack, in order to take from us liberties we used to regard as rights. Our privacy is under attack from increased surveillance. Our right to think and speak as we believe is also being eroded in the name of ’security’.

What is common to both these strands is intolerance of other ideas. It is a defining characteristic of totalitarianism that alternative information and ideas that don’t fit within the official doctrine, are not just to be avoided but must be suppressed. Crushed. You may not even think them.

This blog, then, is about holding up the doctrines and devices of would-be totalitarian and authoritarian systems - governmental or religious - to rational scrutiny. We are not trying to overthrow anyone. We do not support terrorism or the suppression of religion. We do support free thought.