Dinesh D'Souza Quotes
Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.
D'Souza, Dinesh. What's So Great About Christianity. Regnery Publishing, 2007.
In 2005 an Egyptian writer, Usama Anwar Ukasha, criticized one of the Prophet’s companion’s role for causing dissention and divisiveness in Islamic history. Some called for his legal punishment for slandering a holy figure (see {588714}) and a law case was brought to force him to divorce his wife—so that she would not be “contaminated by his heretical thoughts. Al-Bana argued for freedom of thought and speech on such subjects. His view was particularly important since he was the brother of Hassan Al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful fundamentalist organization. Note that Al-Bana’s call for intellectual freedom does not go so far as to say that it should be legal to criticize The Prophet Muhammad and it illustrates how far even modern Islam has to go to meet reasonable standards of freedom of thought and speech.
Ironically, without the word “wicked” most people would regard the first sentence as a good description of elements of a modern democracy. It illustrates that for the Islamic fundamentalist democracy substitutes the rule of man for the rule of God, freedom of speech allows heresy and blasphemy to to uttered and communicated, and religion which is supposed to inform and direct politics. So what is good for the lover of democracy is the very thing that is bad for Islam. This is not a uniquely Islamic viewpoint. It has been and is held by fundamentalist Christians and Jews as well who would return to Biblical law punishing blasphemy and heresy with death and have religion drive all politics.
This is a critical quotation on the government establishment of religion issue. There are a few people who have argued over the years that the Founding Fathers and their culture was religious and where they were careful to avoid favoring one religion over another, they did NOT intend to put atheism on the same equal plane as religion as far as government action is concerned. However, some of the Founding Fathers were atheists, and some others like John Adams were deists—they believed in a God but not in the Trinity or in Judaism or any organized religion. So this quotation makes it clear that the First Amendment does NOT favor religion over non religion or secularism. Atheism must be on an equal footing but not on a higher plane.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. This was his observation after his first excommunications -- by his Jewish Congregation in Amsterdam.
Dinesh Joseph D'Souza is an Indian-American right-wing political commentator, provocateur, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. D'Souza has written over a dozen books, several of them New York Times best-sellers.
