Atheist Richard Dawkins caused an uproar with his recent tweet:
He remarked that the lovely bells of Winchester Cathedral are much nicer than the ‘Allahu Akhbar’ shoutings from mosques. He was strolling around the cathedral, enjoying the coolness of the afternoon, and heard the beautiful church bells. Then he spoke his mind. Immediately the Muslim and Atheist thought police started to pummel him. They called it Islamophobia, xenophobia and bigotry.
Imagine he had said ‘Allahu Akhbar sounded better than the church bells’. There would have been no castigations from the thought police.
Many atheists attacked him for making a positive remark about church bells. They demanded that an atheist must be equally derisive of all religions.
During the last few weeks, an atheist writer Shahzahan Bachchu was shot dead in Bangladesh. An Indonesian atheist was given 5 years sentence for comparing Quran to Lord of the Rings. An Egyptian atheist was jailed for cracking jokes on Islam. Ravi Zacharias once remarked, ‘Any atheist who wants to mock religion should start in Saudi Arabia. That would be a one-way trip. He wouldn’t need a return ticket’. Where Islam is the dominant religion, atheists don’t have freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is a gift of Christianity to our world.
Atheists better enjoy the lovely bells of Cathedrals while it lasts. As Allahu akbars dominate the neighborhoods, there wont be much freedom left to atheists.