Westboro Baptist Church Member Tackled at Military Funeral

[Drewbie]

http://www.towleroad.com/2012/10/wbcjohnson.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=spreadtwitter&utm_content=%3C$MTEntryPermalink$%3E

Glad to see this happen.

[Cole Parker]

Very glad. I see they've passed legislation to restrict protests around grieving families. I don't like restricting free speech, but this is eminently reasonable, and I'm glad to see it.

C

[Chris James]

Freddie Phelps and his brainwashed minions have been at this for decades. He was better off attacking the gay agenda because with veterans I think he has met his match. I don't condone the volence we see here, and at the gay marches where I saw him protesting it seems he was more the object of pity and derision.

My concern is that there are always children present, the Phelps kids and others from the congregation. As this video shows they are at risk during these events because their mindless participation with such inflamatory speech plastered on their signs makes them targets. I have no doubt that Fred Phelps is crazy, possibly certifiably so, but if a child gets hurt during these events then he will be criminally libel and that is insane.

All this ranting in the name of God certainly does not bode well for the Christian faith because I never hear their criticism of his activities. Phelps is laughable and instead of punches everyone needs to throw their ridicule at him.

[DesDownunder]

The Phelps children are already at risk from the dangers of the indoctrination of the extreme religious dogma associated with that church.

On a wider front, there is a growing awareness that religious belief is threatening the advances we have made since we came out of the Dark Ages. The problem really is, that not everyone has found a way out of the dark into the light of reason. Some degree of protection from the enforcement of belief is necessary, but at the moment we suffer from not clearly finding a way to balance the right of parents to raise their children as they wish, with the freedom of the child to not be indoctrinated with superstitious ignorance. Even stating it in this way is likely to attract the condemnation of believers as being an affront to God. Believers make no allowance for 'God' being their god; they assume that their god is universal, and that in itself is an age-old problem which has sparked confrontations costing untold numbers of lives.

It might not be so bad if we could hold rational debate on the nature of religion as an individual phenomena originating from our own self-awareness, but most religions prohibit such debates unless their dogma is an acceptable reference. A circular argument thus ensues.

We should take some comfort in the rising number of non-believers across the planet, but there is danger too, that our natural empathy, with each other’s predicaments of life, becomes lost as an unwarranted trait of the human condition. It needn't be that way, and shouldn't be that way, but recourse to religiously imposed compassion does not provide the rational love that makes us interdependently fully human whilst still maintaining our individual freedom to believe as we wish.

So far, the religious organisations have at last had their 'power to impose' curtailed at the secular level when separation between church and state has been enforced.

It might be interesting to know just how the belief in the religions of antiquity stopped being the measure by which the culture operated, including how children were raised. If, as I suspect might be claimed, that Christianity (for example) supplanted the older religions, then we are living through a period of transition where scientific reality is replacing the myths and dogma of older cultures. As difficult as this transition is for the organised religions and their believers, we can expect that they will eventually subside like the older religious orders did, being replaced by the verifiable truth of reality, whilst still permitting personal belief in explanations of the inexplicable.

It behoves each of us to make sure that every man, woman and child has the opportunity of freedom to find their own enlightenment without being threatened or coerced by superstition, or trying to impose their own belief on others. It's proving to be a difficult task, but fortunately the human race has a history of abandoning superstition even if it isn't as free from confrontation as we might prefer.