Like most “Conservatives” or “Classical Liberals”, I used to think that free speech was one of the most important ingredients for maintaining a free society. The argument that Violence is the only outlet available to the dissident when speech is suppressed made a lot of sense to me. I can’t say I have ever heard that argument properly debunked, but I am beginning to think that free speech is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Years ago, I saw a video of Bill Whittle—a Classical Liberal and not-a-Christian—interviewing a decrepit Larry Flynt, creator of the exploitative Hustler magazine. Whittle’s admiration for the creep is palpable. He sees him as some kind of folk hero, a champion of free speech, worthy of endless accolades. I found this strange—glorifying a purveyor of filth—but I didn’t think about it too hard.
I suppose any Christian who has read the Bible must have some doubts about free speech, considering the various “blasphemy laws” which can be found in the Old Testament, but my doubts really began to pick up after reading A History of Freedom of Thought by J. B. Bury. I had been assuming that free speech, being an idea shared by everyone on the side of the angels, must have been upheld and supported by Christians and the Church consistently throughout history (with maybe a few prominent exceptions and dark spots), but to my great discomfort, J. B. Bury’s book reads like a long history of the Church suppressing dissident ideas. At first my assumption was that J. B. Bury was unfairly representing the history of the church, but then I started to approach the issue from a different perspective. Maybe he was right.
I was forced to embrace the Dark Side.
As a Calvinist who does not see any conflict or disagreement between the Old and New Testament, I should have considered the ramifications of the Old Testament blasphemy laws sooner. Would Moses have been a free speech absolutist? No. In the Old Testament, blaspheming the name of the Lord earned you a prominent place at a peculiar kind of rock festival.
This raises a question. Is free speech a Christian virtue? No, it is not.
Where does it come from, then? Has Christian virtue been surpassed or something? Have we evolved past it? Is there some higher standard than the Word of God? No.
Although there have always been prominent Christians who were in favour of allowing dissidents to be heard, the idea of ‘free speech absolutism’ is a concept that mostly came out of the so-called Enlightenment. It is bizarre how many Christians embrace Enlightenment ideas despite the fact that the Enlightenment was an Anti-Christian movement. It might as well have been called the “Enlightenment from the Silly Superstitions of the Past, By Which We Mostly Mean Christianity.”
When Christians embrace Enlightenment values which supposedly “supersede” scripture, you end up with absurd figures like Steven Crowder and G. Morgan Jr. who defend the rights of pornographers as if porn is the price we pay for living in a free society. Porn is a civilization-ending scourge. What possible justification can there be to justify the legality of such a thing?
If the men who wrote the First Amendment could have seen modern pornography, they would have torched the entire Constitution and re-written it without any Secular Humanist influence.
It used to be that only insane French Revolutionaries would set the Marquis de Sade free. If the Marquis were alive today, classical liberals like Bill Whittle would give him a gushing fanboy interview.
Enlightenment philosophers wanted us to believe that human reason was above the Word of God. Christians somehow fell for this lie and allowed the idea to become endemic throughout Western Civilization despite the fact that the Word of God literally upholds and sustains the universe.
Free speech would not be as much of a problem if Western Civilization had not been cucking to the rest of the world for the last few decades. Unfortunately we have been infiltrated by people who are not Christian, whose origins are non-European, and whose heritage is something other than Greco-Roman. Some of them, having achieved positions of prominence, are using Western ‘tolerance’ and our tradition of free speech to actively destroy and demoralize their host nations. How else would you interpret the “Piss Christ” art exhibit in New York; the vulgarity, blasphemy, and sex on TV; the ubiquity of Marxist propaganda; and the filth produced by Seth Rogan.
In light of these things, it is worth reevaluating whether free speech should really be one of our prime values.
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According to Enlightenment Philosophy, it is possible for people, institutions, and governments to be non-religious. This is an absurdity. Everyone individual person, every institution, and every government is religious, whether their religion is a conventional one like Christianity or a non-conventional religion like Secular Humanism, which I consider to be a form of neo-paganism.
All religions, conventional or otherwise, can’t help but propagate themselves and suppress others. Secular Humanism suppresses Christianity through “free speech”, encouraging vulgarity and blasphemy specifically for the purpose of demoralizing Christians.
All religions have blasphemy laws. Secular Humanism disguises its blasphemy laws by urging people to be “politically correct”. There are always things we are forbidden to talk about.
Free speech does not exist. If it’s anything, it’s a weapon designed to suppress Christianity.