One Scotland publishes spectacularly hate-filled poster designed to stoke prejudice against religious Christians, Jews and Muslims

The Barnabas Fund, a Christian aid charity which supports freedom of religion around the world, has called for the Scottish police to withdraw “hate crime” posters by One Scotland which appear to incite prejudice against Christians, Jews and Muslims.

https://barnabasfund.org/en/news/barnabas-calls-for-withdrawal-of-scotlands-hate-crime-posters-that-promote-anti-christian

The Barnabas Fund calls these posters “state-sponsored prejudice.” Although One Scotland isn’t the Scottish government per se, it’s clearly a quasi-governmental body very close to, and supported by, the Scottish government, as its website shows.

It’s amazing that an employee of One Scotland thought that these posters were okay. And presumably these posters were ‘okayed’ at quite a senior level before they went to press.

A couple of observations on the fact that these posters even appeared (and similar typography is still boldly displayed on their website):—

• What the appearance of these posters likely indicates is that we now have two, if not three, generations that have grown up, that have very little conception of important social constructs such as freedom of speech, freedom of belief, and religious conviction.

• It also is likely to indicate that the lessons learned from the 1930’s, when entire people groups were essentialized[1] in the public narrative in order to promote racial cleansing, etc. — and embodied in such statements as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — it likely indicates that these hard-won and hard-learned lessons are being forgotten.

Note
etimasthe.com is something I do outside of full-time employment. Consequently I generally only post new material on here once or twice a week.

Please note that etimasthe is no longer on Twitter or Facebook. See announcement here.

[1] ‘essentialize’: a verb borrowed from Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin Books), chapter 6, ‘The New Peace,’ to describe the human “cognitive habit of treating people as instances of a category.” Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, p.323, location 7512 (Kindle).