Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

The ordeal of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was jailed for blasphemy in Sudan, ended quickly. We can be grateful for that. But the religiously oriented regime in which she was convicted remains unchanged. Who will be its next victim?

It was an act of pure malice. The school secretary, who had been fired, reported Gibbons as a way of getting revenge on the school. Such grudges, such petty behaviour, are a fact of life everywhere. What is significant here is that Sudan’s laws, shaped and enforced by religious observance, provided a mechanism by which an otherwise trivial act – the naming of a teddy bear – could be exploited to extract a savage retaliation.

(more…)