The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it.
The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred.
Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation.
Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word’s major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts.
Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because of who they are.
Changes to the proposed law include making it illegal to explicitly threaten violence against religion, which begs the question what has religion got to do with this? Current laws against violent acts protect society from what people do, there may an argument for extending this to what they threaten to do.
A law that protects religion would have to define what constituted a religion:
If a religion is a ‘commonly held belief system’, then potentially any type of belief system or ideology like Nazism could potentially be protected by law.
If it isn’t all commonly held belief systems, then the law is discriminatory itself.
If it is any commonly held belief system that doesn’t itself promote discrimination, then Judaism, Christianity and Islam would be excluded, if tested under current legal arguments.
In other words, you get both Christians and Nazis or a law which manages to break itself. A candidate for the legal equivalent of the Darwin awards.
The reality of this sleepwalk into chaos is that the reason people tolerate each other, who have different beliefs, is often by finding common ground and empathy while ignoring the logical inconsistencies between their beliefs. These inconsistencies are not obscure theological arcana, but whopping great Fuck Yous – such as be ne of us or go to hell. This law will bring these ‘inconsistencies’ to the surface and result in inevitable persecution.
The best thing to do about religion is to ignore it and focus on good. The best thing to do about this future law in the UK is to provoke a showdown by taking religion itself to court.