Diwali does not end when the lights go out (2013)
Context: For the Jains, Diwali is celebrated as the joyous day on which Mahavir, the great Jain teacher, attained the eternal joy of liberation or nirvana. It is an occasion for rejoicing and gratitude for a life spent in rigorous religious search, realization and teaching centered on non-violence.
For the Sikhs, Diwali is a "day of freedom," when the Mughal Emperor, Jehangir, freed the sixth Sikh Guru (teacher), Hargobind, from prison. Guru Hargobind refused to accept his freedom unless the emperor released detained Hindu leaders. Guru Hargobind is celebrated as seeing his own religious freedom as inseparable from the freedom of others.
Even for the Hindu community, there is a confluence of many traditions connected with Diwali. Some celebrate Diwali as ushering the New Year and others as the triumph of Krishna over the evil, Narakasura.
“Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.”
Source: Books, What's So Great about Christianity (2007), Ch. 3
Source: What's So Great About Christianity
Context: Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views.
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Dinesh D'Souza 61
Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author 1961Related quotes
“All religious expression is symbolism”
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 62
Context: All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word " spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe.
“The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression.”
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943), Statement Of Obligations
Context: The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression.
The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien.
“The poor man has sold his freedom of expression to the state.”
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4693628.stm Statement made about free speech following the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed
Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 17.
1934
p. 24 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t71v5g25n;view=1up;seq=28
A History of Freedom of Thought (1913)
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
As quoted in "The right to be downright offensive" by Jonathan Duffy in BBC News Magazine (21 December 2004) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4114497.stm
Chen Chien-jen (2019) cited in " Report lauds Taiwan for Muslim rights http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2019/06/23/2003717421" on Taipei Times, 23 June 2019.