Lester Golden
2 min readFeb 14, 2025

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"Secular conformity"?

The communist USSR, its 1945-1989 eastern European satellite states, China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea are the only examples. They replaced religion with a collectivist authoritarian secular version. Human history has hundreds of times the number of examples of religious conformity. You're worried about the wrong problem.

"Religious liberty": Must include freedom FROM religion as well as freedom TO worship. It must include freedom of conscience, which includes freedom of apostasy. Islam punishes apostasy with death. See the problem?

Religion with freedom of conscience means that religion is a purely private matter, which makes the public sphere neutral in matters of religion, which means secular.

Freedom of conscience means freedom from religious indoctrination of children. Richard Dawkins calls this child abuse. I agree. The jihadi abuse of children by Hamas and Fatah shows us the results. Watch it on https://palwatch.org and https://memri.org. The entire UNRWA-run school system and PA-Hamas media ecosystem is a shaheed and child terrorist factory similar to Bushido Japan's wartime kamikaze training system.

Religion as an ideology has no special privilege or exemption from criticism, ridicule, satire, insult. Blasphemy is not a legitimate intellectual category.

Consequences:

1. No more tax exemption for religious institutions.

2. Abolish all state religions and salaries for religious functionaries.

3. Ban imported imams preaching jihad.

4. Ban religion-sanctioned child marriage and FGM.

5. Teach history of religions in schools and allow the teaching of a particular religion only together with the teaching of evolution and physics. No teaching of religion without critical thinking. No reading the bible and the Quran without also reading Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Einstein and Darwin.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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