Oh, I only now saw that it was an old thread, just recently updated.
I'm going to have to agree with Paul, despite being a leftist myself who's never read the Bible in his life.
The landscape around us - the way cities look, the monuments, the random memorial plaques - it has all been created by the history we've had. It is all testimony to where your country has been, where your society has come from.
Some of us will now repudiate some of those things our country/society used to be, and now no longer is - or in their opinion no longer should be. Fine. No monument is going to force you to adhere to it or even to oblige any affinity with it. It is there for those whom it does mean something to, and for those who are ready to respect and acknowledge history for all that its been, whether they agree with it or not.
Erasing the reflection of history time and again in order to make the cityscape mirror the exact current interpretation of what is right breeds ahistoricism, a lack of relativation, and ignorance. As far as I am concerned, it should all stay. I feel empathy for those post-totalitarian societies where they want to get rid of the statues of their former tyrans, but thats about it. I'll note that in East-Berlin, even the removal of one such statue of Lenin evoked a storm of protest - notably, by citizens who were largely hardly Leninist themselves anymore, but merely said, look: we grew up with this thing, it's grown to mean something to us, it represents the way our life simply
was for decades - let it be. As testimony to what history's been, and what our various present sentiments about it are. We don't need to agree about it, or about him; merely to respect that he was and remains part of our common public space of shared memories or affinities, good or bad.
In the case of Lenin's statue, I could still empathise with, you know - the former political prisoners who didn't want to be running into the uebersized representation of the man in whose name they'd been imprisoned and maltreated, as well. But what harm does a mere bible,
outside a courthouse, do?
Live and let live, I say. You want to put up a similarly sized monument to a famous atheist, go right ahead (or, you should be allowed to go right ahead, imho). But to cleanse the public space from anything that anyone might feel uncomfortable with just promotes a fearful stifledness. Before you know it, you'll be banning Muslim women from wearing headscarves. Or, a further step down, kids from wearing punk clothing. Freedom goes over righteousness, whether it be Christian or secular.
On that count I specifically agree with Paul that we shouldn't start banning stuff "just because [people] *feel* different when walking past" it.
I have a perhaps topical example to pose, even if its right from the other side. The other evening I was out with A. and her friend H. Now H. is an exemplary liberal, activist for Amnesty International, used to volunteer for Refugee Work, the lot. She recounted that - as per her info (I find it hard to believe) - some cities had decided to ban women from wearing burqa's and other face-covering veils outside.
Note, we had this discussion about wearing burqa's in schools - some schools, reasonably enough, banned it because it makes for unfeasible teaching or studying, especially for, say, nurses or primary school teachers in training. OK. But she was saying, banned from wearing burqas or the like in the
street - the market, the shop, just anywhere in the public space. Because a) it was not good for those women and b) Dutch people "felt" unsafe when confronted with these veiled creatures they could not even look into the eyes.
A. and I reacted in spontaneous indignation, of course, but H. turned out to actually
agree. With a), yes (how patronising can you get! "Here, we'll go save you from what you're doing because we know best, and it's really not good for you". It implies an immediate claim to cultural supremacy - we are "ahead" of you and therefore have the right to impose our superior, more advanced standards on you for your own good, even if it be against your own will.)
And with b). As if any majority can just decide to
ban what other people choose to wear or show because it makes them
feel unsafe or uncomfortable! Hello, groups of teens on the street make a lot of people feel unsafe too, are we gonna impose bans on hanging out in groups next too? (Actually, yes, those are in place in certain parts of town / at certain hours already as well).
When I made the unavoidable parallel with our very own orthodox Protestants, out in Staphorst and such villages, who still wear their own brand of long skirts and headscarves just like Christian women used to do in old times, she said yeah that should be banned too. Cause it's all religious oppression.
Note how xenophobia has bred a brand new militant secularism. Now that in itself is irrelevant to this thread, but the underlying logic is not. People saying they "feel" uncomfortable about something that merely
is (does not do anything) in their environment should not be sufficient reason for its removal, IMO. Not as long as there's also people who feel greatly comforted by it. Let them put up their own things if they want. A thousand flowers and all that.
I'm realising that by now I'm in a reprise of
this post here (and its follow-up in the post immediately underneath and
this one later on), in Fox's thread,
Is there room for Christmas anymore?. I am against moves like the one described in this thread not because I see them as a threat to Christianity, but as one to
multiculturalism - to the "salad bowl" of diversity. Those Hindus and Muslims and others who were quoted here as not feeling any affinity with the Bible will not, in the end, benefit from its removal - because it will merely serve as precedent / justification to a ban on any of
their expressions of religious identity in public space as well. But I say that the progress achieved by multiculturalism was that the US moved beyond the straitjacket of a melting pot in which each was to just merge, and where the public space would be a comfortable but conformistic place of uniform values. Moved on to one in which the public space is a reflection of all the diversity that exists among its inhabitants, religious and otherwise - a space we may all put our own thing in and take our own thing from.
