There’s a tenet in Maths: “If you can’t prove it, make your statement *stronger* and it will be easier to prove”. I suspect the special case statement would be obscure and difficult to understand, and would cause even more problems. When you look at Pythagoras and irrational numbers, you can see how you don’t need to be criticising a religion per se, just any sort of blind faith. You would need to state things carefully at best, or hold off on certain scientific discoveries at worst if you were banned from, say, disagreeing with a monarch.

I mentioned the Patel case because a doctor has been found guilty of manslaughter for patients he operated on. This is effectively taking a doctor and treating them like an ordinary citizen as opposed to a special group, as they have been treated in the past. I do agree that I don’t believe they considered professional groups to be “communities” when they wrote that tenet. I think they might be able to, though. There’s (likely) no reason that teachers, doctors, and the police need special treatment.

I mention actors because “religious leaders” are not the only ones who can discriminate. It was special cased but I see no reason for special casing it.

Re schools – I roughly agree, but there are problems where a particular religion is taught without others. Any school which forces the teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as well as Christianity is fine.

Representative democracy is a scalability hack for real democracy. It’s a “meh close enough” for “proper” democracy. I don’t know how Marxism ™ would work in the real world, but the wikipedia article mentions “Social Democracy”, and I guess Kibbutz is similar. Anarchism is also heavily associated with making democratic decisions.

What do I care about the bus-number? I’ll be king. After that the survivors can sort it out.

(For home-viewers playing along: in a engineered system, you try to avoid single-points-of-failure – where the failure of one component will cause the system to fail. In critical systems, you try to avoid the system failing even in two – or even more – components fail.

In organisations, where the components are people, you try to ensure there is redundancy in the knowledge and skills of your members, so even if one person leaves the organisation or becomes unavailable, the projects can continue.

This is represented with the macabre term “bus-number” – i.e. the minimum number of people in your organisation that would need to be hit by a bus to guarantee failure to meet the organisation’s goals.)

Re: Freedom of Expression

I think that special case you mention is defensible, but they demand more than that.

One could argue that Freedom of Expression is a good thing, even for theists. I won’t disagree. But when you argue that complete freedom of expression is necessary for atheism, I think that’s too far. I can imagine a secular society in which it is illegal to criticise the monarchy, but legal to say “that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!”.

Re: Doctors

My point is that they are given certain rights and responsibilities that other communities aren’t. My example could have easily been lawyers, teachers, police, plumbers, etc. I don’t think the Jayant Patel case is relevant.

Re: Actors

People who hire actors and models are given special dispensation to discriminate based on appearance. I don’t think someone’s religious views would preclude them from playing the role of a person from a different religion (assuming that role doesn’t involve, for example, eating pork.)

Re: Schools

I read their demands much more strongly than you did. If their demands are weaker than I think, I would be happy.

I do not believe students should have a right to schooling without any mention of religious concepts, any more than they have a right to schooling without any mention of foreign countries. There is a big difference between exposure to other people’s beliefs and indoctrination into them.

re: Democracy

I don’t agree with your loose definition of democracy. It seems to exclude the governments in Australia and the USA (representative democracy) and include Marxism and (perhaps correctly?) Kibbutzim.

I think an Atheist does need freedom of expression, because if, say, an Atheist were forced to at least pretend to be Christian or Islamic on pain of imprisonment or worse, it’s not really being an Atheist is it? This goes for an arbitrary religion as well, of course, but a particular religion could in theory force an area to be of that religion. E.g. Israel could be “Jews only”, which would preclude people of other religions living there, but it’s fine for Jews. An Atheism accepting of other religions requires freedom of expression. Maybe you could special case it for “freedom of expressing your beliefs or lack thereof?” but I can’t think of any way off the top of my head.

Interesting point about Doctors. I wonder how they would re-word this, especially given the Jayant Patel case. I also wonder if special groups like doctors (the text does say “communities” which is a bit loose; I wonder if doctors would fit) really need the special treatment after all. However, is this related to being an Atheist? I suppose not.

For discrimination, they are also notably not taking into account acting and modelling (for example, employers are allowed to ask for female models for a line of female clothing, or a black guy for someone who dies first in a movie). I wonder why religious discrimination is special.

For faith based schooling, I wonder if they’re only thinking of where faith based schooling is paid for, but not ordinary public schools. They probably should’ve said faith based schools should not be treated specially, must follow the normal curriculum, and must allow an intake of students from other faiths. At least, that’s my reading of it, esp. when taken with the first sentence “special consideration”.

For the “secular education” bit, remember they are talking about “the right to”. This means that a student, should they so choose, can have a schooling without any mention of any religious concepts. Having non-secular parts is compatible if someone can choose not to learn that, and no secular education is censored.

I totally agree with the “democracy” thing. However, looked at loosely democracy really means “The people define the rules”, so I think it’s fair enough to use that terminology.

Sounds like we’re a good match – I tend to think the `Benevolent Dictator’ model of government is probably one of the best, but I have no wish to be the dictator myself. Ideally you’d have the responsibility to make all the relevant national decisions, and each time I’d see what you did and think “Yup. That’s exactly what I would’ve done.” only without having to actually think about it myself.