PAN STATEMENT ON RELIGIOUS HATRED

 

 

We at PAN fully believe in the liberty of any individual to pursue their lawful spiritual beliefs, no matter how unpopular or seemingly bizarre, without harassment or persecution by people who have different beliefs. We endorse a pluralist approach to society. It is not now and never has been PAN’s objective to incite hatred (religious or otherwise) against any individual’s religious conviction but to oppose the misconceptions and falsehoods put about by bigoted people who under the standard of one religion, seek to disenfranchise or destabilise the welfare of people who hold a different belief.

Our aim is to counter lies with factual evidence e.g. truth!  We seek to comment on events/situations wherein we consider that the authorities, be they the government, the police, the media etc are in error of the real facts. Our firm objective is to enlighten and instruct; we have no time for any sort of incitement to violence. We reject hostility in all its forms as an unproductive vehicle of social demise.   PAN does not and never has sought to accrue support for any form of physically illegal or antisocial action or hostility. Alternatively, there have been many cases where sectarians have engaged in destructive methods of aggression.  

Some so-called Pro-life, anti-abortion activists expressing overly religious views for instance have produced highly aggressive actions against others that they have disagreed with.  Activists from these religious groups have picketed legal abortion clinic, terrorised the workers and patients therein and violence with police involvement has ensued. This type of antisocial activity is performed in the name of their deity. These events mark a typical example of how religious extremists, in this event Christians,  act, but of course the government does not need any new laws to stop that type of thing - they already have long-existing laws against hostile actions, breach of the peace, illegal assembly, offensive weapons and so on.  What they require is the backbone to actually face up to these spiritual storm-troopers; courage which they seem to be completely deficient of at times.

We reiterate: PAN does not campaign in that fashion.  We do not want to prevent any person from believing in what they want to believe in; quite the opposite is in fact the case. We wish for everyone to have the independence to be able to believe in what they want to as long as it is lawful and harms no other human being.

We educate, instruct against and intellectually oppose religiously-moved extremists assaulting nursing staff in maternity-led units, victimising innocent occultists and Pagans at Halloween, or killing ordinary people in office blocks or cars with explosive weapons.   We peacefully challenge fundamentally – motivated disinformation and hatred against occultist minorities and the violence such zealotry may bring.

PAN fully supports the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (to which this country is a signatory) and the European Directive on Human Rights.

We would dearly love to end all religious persecution of any kind happening anywhere in the world.  

We do not seek to condemn all people who follow the way of Christianity or any other faith system. We fully accept that most Christians are good, caring and loving individuals, yet we do criticise activist Christians who seek to over-prioritise themselves above and at the ‘expense’ of other faith systems. This we believe to be our democratic right and duty to perform as caring individuals. PAN applies the same notion to people following faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism Islam etc. The majority of people are fine and well meaning. We do not wish to condemn any other belief or religion per-se yet we will criticise, remark upon, draw attention to and generally emphasise the debate on the pressing issues at hand in relation to concepts of freedom of belief.   

We believe that our insight is wholly productive and socially-progressive. We have a distinctive non-partisan approach to the problem because we seek the harmony of all spiritual and religious beliefs on equivalent measures.   

Let us hope that any new religious hatred laws will help to prevent the type of costly mass hysteria that created the highly avoidable Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth. We have reported greatly on this subject which was instigated by fundamentalist zealots who wished to inflict their one-sided religious views on society.

Freedom of expression and religious conviction are concepts that we hold dear and fully support. We will however continue to criticise the clear dangers posed to society from fundamentalism in all its intolerant formations.