To The Editor,
An issue as important as free speech deserves an intellectually honest and coherent examination -- something we at UB Freethinkers work to promote on campus. However, Wednesday's opinion "New Jersey Transit worker fired for Koran burning" failed in this regard.
In it, the author wrote, "Making a public display of burning a peaceful and sacred text is intolerable. But Fenton's First Amendment rights were clearly violated…" Although they should be commended for highlighting and defending Fenton's rights, the author's loose wording contradicts itself, logically undermines the entirety of an otherwise principled statement, and hinges on -- and blindly serves to promote -- false claims to both the sacredness and peacefulness of religious texts.
First, to call burning any book "intolerable" negates, in short order, the very notion that the freedom to do the deed is any sort of defensible right. On that principle of free expression -- of which the written word is but one facet -- we at UB Freethinkers do agree that burning any book is "reprehensible," to use the author's earlier and more sensible term. However we argue that to do it is still entirely tolerable, since this act of free expression physically harms no one. It is precisely the "intent of the First Amendment" to protect exactly that: unpopular and offensive -- but still harmless – free expression.
Likewise, a book's status among a certain religious sect does not dictate how others must treat it, or make its destruction at all unique. Books are books; full of ideas both good and bad, truths and myths, focused on very earthly issues, and penned by very earthly human beings subject to very human emotions. Even among those books considered by some to be "sacred" or "holy," historical investigation and critical inquiry reveal that they are no different. As such, burning them is no more reprehensible, and no less tolerable in a free society.
When any books are so casually accepted as "sacred," the question of where critical thinking, doubt, and free expression are allowed to go becomes not just harder, but dangerous to answer. To label something as "sacred" is a very tempting, but very reckless human impulse -- one especially sad to see on full display in 2010. Unfortunately, as too many still do, the editorial's author fell prey.
Lastly, as a group dedicated to the rational examination of religion, we at UB Freethinkers would be quick to point out that for the author to call the Koran "peaceful" -- or the Bible and Torah for that matter -- only serves to show that they have failed to read it in its entirety. It is precisely that sort of casual thought and feel-good obfuscation that undermines objective and honest dialogue on transcendent issues like freedom of expression.
Ed Beck
Vice President and Co-Founder
UB Freethinkers
