@Iacchus 385337 wrote:
There will always be believers, there will always be troubled people who need a crutch, but religious scriptures become a less relevant basis for moral values over time and nothing will change that.
That still wouldn’t preclude a shift to the hard right out of anger and despair. in my town gay men get killed not because of Christianity or Islam, but because individuals hate them and take matters into their own hands!
extreme fundamentalism religious fundamentalism might disappear, but so also can the amount of free speech and expression those of us who grew up in the 1980s take for granted. 1970s British media and society was much censored and controlled but very few would claim it was as bad as the Middle East even back then, and as I said previously Iran’s people used their power to bring in the fundamentalist government to protect their oil reserves.
Censorship and control can also be exerted via the free market and commercial pressures. This is far more effective in the West than violence and is in fact how most mainstream media is censored. Its obvious that commercial stations can be intimidated by product boycotts of prominent advertisers – and even public funded broadcasters can be swayed by people voting for free market friendly right wing politicians who slash their funding, also the independent production companies can be got at by targeting their projects for commercial stations.
All that said, I’m surprised that the Yanks caved in to the “Muslim” pressures of “violence” over South Park as they are supposed to have loads of cops and feds and armed citizens defending their “free speech” against foreign intruders – even European broadcasters have armed guards on some studios (I have worked in a place with these present). I suspect much more there is a wider issue here they aren’t letting on..
