How Promotion of Religious Freedom Can Help Prevent Extreme Violence

[rug]

AIR DATE: Sept. 30, 2013

SUMMARY

Are recent waves of religiously-motivated or sectarian violence part of a larger worldwide trend? Gwen Ifill talks to Suzan Johnson Cook, U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, about the importance of promoting religious freedom around the world.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/religion/july-dec13/cook_09-30.html

Transcript at link.

[cbayer]

1. Saw this last night. Good interview and recommended.

[dimbear]

2. Ambassador Cook makes some good points and is worth hearing out, but she commits a logical error

when she claims that groups such as Christians (the most prominent example she cites) are suffering for their beliefs. The oppressed groups are suffering for the beliefs of their oppressors, in most of these cases Muslims, but in almost every current case some other sort of believer.

They are expressing a rather unattractive sort of religious freedom, the freedom to cleanse their regions of other beliefs. This is not to say seculars haven't ever done this, but this is what's in the news.