Billboards by Christians against separation of church and state have been popping up in Florida and other states. These billboards consist of quotations from Founding Fathers, except many seem to be completely made up fabrications. Making the Founding Fathers say things they never really did? Another example of those shining ethical principles that Christians are always so proud to flaunt.

Nothing is sacred. Things are not sacred just because people say they are. Since nothing is sacred, the desecration of something is more like riding in Santa Claus’s sled: it just can’t ever be done. When we "desecrate" something, we are only treating it in some ordinary manner which religious believers find objectionable. Criticism of religion sometimes requires blasphemy and it sometimes requires desecration. Just as blasphemy is a victimless crime, desecration is a harmless crime.

Believers can’t really make anything sacred. Things are not really divine or supernatural either, just because lots of people think so. The natural sciences stopped treating things as sacred as soon as it gained its independence from natural theology. The natural sciences found no gods among the stars or the atoms, so the meaning of "the heavens" changed to conform to facts. Just because people say "thank heavens" or they pray up to the heavens, or they think that they will meet a god in heaven, does not make heaven a real place.

The social sciences have lagged behind the natural sciences in correct language use. The social sciences study peoples’ beliefs, among other things. The social sciences shifted the meanings of many religious terms, so that they referred more to peoples’ views rather than any realities. This was convenient for the social sciences, because they needed to study something from a neutral non-belief stance (not disbelief—just suspension of belief).So when the social sciences study "the sacred" and things that are sacred, the social sciences don’t actually treat such sacred things in a relationship with any actual divinity, but instead they treat "sacred" things in their relationships with people who believe them to be sacred (people who believe in deities that can make things sacred). The social sciences study beliefs and relations between beliefs, but they cannot study relationships between beliefs and deities, because they are no deities. The social sciences cannot actually study sacred things, because there aren’t any. It is the same familiar situation along with the study of witchcraft or the paranormal.

PZ Myers affirmed that nothing is sacred when he "desecrated" a communion wafer. He wrote,

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity’s knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

Free Inquiry magazine published four of the controversial Muhammed cartoons, first published in Denmark in 2005, in its April-May issue of 2006. Related articles about religious criticism, Islam, and free speech are available online:

"Was It Right to Publish the Islam Cartoons? YES: In Defense of Blasphemy" by Paul Kurtz and Tom Flynn

"National Bookstore Chain Refuses to Carry Magazine Containing Controversial Cartoons" FI press release

"The Need for Qu’ranic Criticism" by Ibn Warraq

"Representation of the Human Form in Islam" by Ibn Warraq

"The Freedom to Ridicule Religion—and Deny the Holocaust" by Peter Singer

"Why Critical Scrutiny of Islam Is an Utmost Necessity" by Syed Kamran Mirza

"A Time to Push Back" by Tom Flynn

"Religious Correctness and the Qur’an" by Paul Kurtz

The proposed Irish blasphemy law caused a strong reaction in protest. One impressive campaign by Atheist Ireland has a website along with Facebook and Twitter.

You can read Ireland’s Justice Minister defending his proposed blasphemy law. On July 1, the Irish Parliament’s Justice Committee discussed the matter, sending it on to the legislature.

Rebecca Mackinnor at RConversation updates on resistance to China’s Green Wall. Especially interesting is an anonymous "uprising" as Global Voices Online reports:

"In reaction to a series of internet censorship policy, in particular the introduction of Green Dam, a declaration has been circulated on the net in the past two days calling netizens to express and protect their rights to anonymity on July 1st. Below are the declaration posters and English translation of the declaration (all by anonymous netizens via google.doc)."

2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens

To the Internet censors of China,

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We have seen your moves on the Internet. You have deprived your netizens of the freedom of speech. You have come to see technology as your mortal enemy. You have clouded and distorted the truth in collaboration with Party mouthpieces. You have hired commentators to create the “public opinion” you wanted to see. All these are etched into our collective memory. More recently, you forced the installation of Green Dam on the entire population and smothered Google with vicious slander. It is now clear as day: what you want is the complete control and censorship of the Internet. We hereby declare that we, the Anonymous Netizens, are going to launch our attack worldwide on your censorship system starting on July 1st, 2009. [ read more… ]

On 18 June, the German Parliament passed a law requiring internet service providers to block websites for child pornography and child abuse. See the news from Intellectual Property Watch. Germany joins Sweden, Denmark, and Norway in this effort. Protesters worry that the lists of blockable websites will be secretly expanded over time by state police departments without judicial or legislative oversight.

The "Green Dam" has been an important part of China’s Great Firewall against free speech. China hopes to require this censorship software on all new computers in China (see update: The Guardian) and prevent users from uninstalling it. This software seems unusually broad in its censorship and riddled with security problems. An anaysis of this "Green Dam Youth-Escort" censorship software is posted to Wikileaks and another analysis is provided at the University of Michigan.

Howcast provides a video demonstration for circumventing internet censorship.

The value of free speech is best appreciated by those who must fight for it. Let the lessons learned inspire toleration for free speech about religion, too. How long can a people tolerate theocracy?