Another Quick Note: Freedom of Religion

Man, I’m all about the follow-up posts today…

Another conspicuous omission from their list of rights, by our standards, is freedom of religion.

This is on what they would deem the perfectly reasonable grounds that religions tend to include an ethos in the package, and if you can’t tell obnoxious ethoi where to shove it, nothing but trouble ensues.

So if a religion contains lovely doctrinal claims that, say, gay people aren’t really proper people and should be forbidden rights afforded to everyone else, or that women are the cause of vice and legally worth only one-fourth of a man, to pick a couple of examples from a very wide sea of obnoxiousness, or any other such things that are blatantly antithetical to the liberty and ethical equality of all sophonts asserted and guaranteed by the Contract and Charter, the Empire has absolutely no problem in saying to immigrants and converts: “You cannot simultaneously believe both of these things. Pick. One. (And if it’s the other one, get the hell out.)”

(This is perhaps a little unfair to people like – well, like many modern believers who have no difficulty at all performing some mental editing and selective reservation when it comes to the differences between their personal morality and what the doctrines of their religion actually say, but among the many things that the modal Imperial has very little patience for is cognitive dissonance.)