Speakers' Corner
I'm currently reading Them by Jon Ronson and in it there was a brief mention of Speakers' Corner. Given that the corner is something of a last bastion of free speech in this country, a freedom close to my heart, and given that I live in London, I thought I should go along and soak up the ambulance.
It was thoroughly entertaining, and a little infuriating. I spent most of my time listening to a Protestan preacher who seemed more interested in mocking disbelievers than winning over anyone to his rather twisted and ill-founded belief system. This man (not pictured) denied that Daniel and Jonathan had a homosexual affair because Daniel had seven wives. He was insistent that evolution was a ridiculous notion, despite the mechanics being relatively clear and to some extent observable. I'm not claiming there are no holes in the theory of evolution - it never quite manages to explain where the new information comes from, or why birds spent so much evolutionary energy developing wings that must have been useless for most of the life of the life - however that is hardly evidence in itself for creationism. What I have come to notice more and more is the way in which people seem to be blinded by their own beliefs when encountering other points of view. One of the reasons the preacher didn't believe in evolution was because he couldn't see evolutionary sense of the Cicada, who lives underground for most of its life, emerging only to mate and die. It's a bit of a tightrope, because to doubt the wisdom of the cicada is to doubt the wisdom of God. However, a Cicada is relatively well hidden away from predators, and only emerges when it really needs another cicada. The point is, there doesn't have to be a reason behind evolution. Evolution is a mechanism. Creationists have a tendancy to look at evolution, find it Godless, and reject it on those grounds alone. Ask a creationist how God created the universe and they are stumped.
I tried and failed to get the preacher to acknowledge the fact that the bible seems to suggest that God, who ought to be changeless in his omnipotence, decided to change the rules for his creaton. The idea is that the old testament has one covenant and the new testament has another. I've heard the need for a change of rules as a "series of revelations" which does actually make sense to me, suggesting as it does a dialogue between God and its creation - and hints at the excellent 2001: A Space Odyssey. Preacherman, however, explained that God has set up one rule for one set of people and another rule for another. Hardly PC, what?
Speaking of which, he also went on to explain to an audience made up of Germanic female teenagers that (because men have XY chromosomes, and women have XX) women come from man, are subservient to men, were created to honour and obey, to sit around looking pretty (this is not much of a departure from what he said). This, he explained, is shown in the bible in the way that Eve was made from one of Adam's ribs. But Cain, rather confusingly, went over the hill to the land of Nod and married a woman he found there. Not a woman created from anyone's rib, just found over the hill.
Now, if his belief tells him this, that's fine. It's not like he's married. But then he took so much pleasure in exerting his authority over the women in his audience that the religious propriety of his point of view seemed totally absent. It was almost as though he had selected a religion that would allow him to maintain misogyny in a world long moved on.
There is a worry often voiced, that Speakers' corner is nothing more than token liberty. We are taught that it is a place that exists in the greatest spirit of freedom, yet it is given over by people such as this dodgy preacher and a hoarde of other equally cranky opinions. These cranky opinions deserve a voice, certainly, but sadly they serve to couple up freedom with eccentricity and wrongheadedness, and freedom suffers. Freedom of speech, it would seem, is most coveted by preachers such as he, who believes equality is overrated, that slavery is no bad thing, and is a black Jamaican. A man who denounces egotism from a pulpit.
Protest, the useful and necessary element of freedom of speech in this country should be a gentle and victimless overstep, but under the current Government protest is being boxed into an allowable space. The paradox of the permissive society is that it relies on someone to do the permitting.
It was thoroughly entertaining, and a little infuriating. I spent most of my time listening to a Protestan preacher who seemed more interested in mocking disbelievers than winning over anyone to his rather twisted and ill-founded belief system. This man (not pictured) denied that Daniel and Jonathan had a homosexual affair because Daniel had seven wives. He was insistent that evolution was a ridiculous notion, despite the mechanics being relatively clear and to some extent observable. I'm not claiming there are no holes in the theory of evolution - it never quite manages to explain where the new information comes from, or why birds spent so much evolutionary energy developing wings that must have been useless for most of the life of the life - however that is hardly evidence in itself for creationism. What I have come to notice more and more is the way in which people seem to be blinded by their own beliefs when encountering other points of view. One of the reasons the preacher didn't believe in evolution was because he couldn't see evolutionary sense of the Cicada, who lives underground for most of its life, emerging only to mate and die. It's a bit of a tightrope, because to doubt the wisdom of the cicada is to doubt the wisdom of God. However, a Cicada is relatively well hidden away from predators, and only emerges when it really needs another cicada. The point is, there doesn't have to be a reason behind evolution. Evolution is a mechanism. Creationists have a tendancy to look at evolution, find it Godless, and reject it on those grounds alone. Ask a creationist how God created the universe and they are stumped.
I tried and failed to get the preacher to acknowledge the fact that the bible seems to suggest that God, who ought to be changeless in his omnipotence, decided to change the rules for his creaton. The idea is that the old testament has one covenant and the new testament has another. I've heard the need for a change of rules as a "series of revelations" which does actually make sense to me, suggesting as it does a dialogue between God and its creation - and hints at the excellent 2001: A Space Odyssey. Preacherman, however, explained that God has set up one rule for one set of people and another rule for another. Hardly PC, what?
Speaking of which, he also went on to explain to an audience made up of Germanic female teenagers that (because men have XY chromosomes, and women have XX) women come from man, are subservient to men, were created to honour and obey, to sit around looking pretty (this is not much of a departure from what he said). This, he explained, is shown in the bible in the way that Eve was made from one of Adam's ribs. But Cain, rather confusingly, went over the hill to the land of Nod and married a woman he found there. Not a woman created from anyone's rib, just found over the hill.
Now, if his belief tells him this, that's fine. It's not like he's married. But then he took so much pleasure in exerting his authority over the women in his audience that the religious propriety of his point of view seemed totally absent. It was almost as though he had selected a religion that would allow him to maintain misogyny in a world long moved on.
There is a worry often voiced, that Speakers' corner is nothing more than token liberty. We are taught that it is a place that exists in the greatest spirit of freedom, yet it is given over by people such as this dodgy preacher and a hoarde of other equally cranky opinions. These cranky opinions deserve a voice, certainly, but sadly they serve to couple up freedom with eccentricity and wrongheadedness, and freedom suffers. Freedom of speech, it would seem, is most coveted by preachers such as he, who believes equality is overrated, that slavery is no bad thing, and is a black Jamaican. A man who denounces egotism from a pulpit.
Protest, the useful and necessary element of freedom of speech in this country should be a gentle and victimless overstep, but under the current Government protest is being boxed into an allowable space. The paradox of the permissive society is that it relies on someone to do the permitting.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 8:00 pm
2 Comments:
The problem with free speech is of course that it permits people to say the most insane and appalling things.
I came to the conclusion long ago that I simply don't believe in it.
Still, Speaker's Corner is - like the Daily Mail - a good place to go and test your sanity by checking you don't agree with any of it.
It's good to have benchmarks.
Oo, no, I'm all for it. If you start censoring people, then the people you censor claim that the censorship is significant.
This is why anti-semites and the like are so quick to bemoan the fact that they are being censored, when all that is happening is that their views are being roundly rejected. They want to promote the idea that they're saying something that secret authorities want to keep quiet, and helps distract people from thinking about what it is that's being said in the first placed.
When you make claims about international zyonist conspiracies, and your views don't get air or university lecture time, then that just gets worked into the conspiracy as confirmation.
The best thing to do is let them speak, albeit in the right place, and heckle like crazy.
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