To the participants in the congress of Oslo of the ILCALF
In the first place, we greet all those with whom we shared ideals and we highly encourage them to continue with force the fight for rationality and freedom of conscience, in other words secularism and free thought. We are going through a difficult social and political time, with a serious economic crisis and also a very serious moral crisis.
In the economic questions, we all note the proliferation of speculators and false liberals with very specific interests to increase the advantages of a minority to the detriment of the greater number.
With regards to the ideas, we also face speculators and false liberals, as religions and so called progressive ideas, which finally recognize their incapacity to face mind manipulators.
So this Congress is of a great importance to create a path towards a return to the republican values of the Enlightenment and the ideals of the beginning of last century, properly updated in the form and content. Today, we are confronted with a deeply technical teaching and a lack of the value of freedom of conscience and of rationalism, our ancestors would be terribly disappointed by the failure of their ideals and by our incapacity, not only to remedy the situation, but also to denounce it.
The religions, especially the Christians and the Muslim, are advancing in the battle of ideas, the enlightened ones would tremble at the sight of the campaign conducted to obtain that creationism is considered as a science on the same level as evolution. The attempt to invent an alliance of civilizations to stifle the voices of rationalism by the negotiation between authoritarianisms is on its way at the same time that an alliance of the religions called “inter religious dialogue” to isolate and to destroy atheism, agnosticism and nonbelief, that is to say rationalism and freedom of conscience. We want to preserve an open attitude to all forms of thought which, through a progressist project of the future of the society, wish to advance jointly with the others, while keeping in mind the existence of much more things that link us than things that divide us.
In spite of these approaches, which are certainly shared by many of us here, we note that we still are too much polluted by two main issues: individualism and protagonism. We are divided into international organizations that, because of their various genesis and creation process, have not found the way of unity. We think that it is in the work more than in the debate of ideas that friendships are created and complicities begin, therefore we propose to initiate jointly a common work, independently of the model of our organizations, by sharing work objectives. Our presence
and our influence in the society will make us promote an exchange of ideas, an exchange of social objectives, replacing economic triumph by happiness.
In order to advance in these objectives, we suggest, for example, the writing of a comparative study of the national and international penal law related to the freedom of conscience, its defense and its application, in countries where we have partners and in those where, for various reasons, mainly repression, we do not have partners. Various international authorities (EU, UNO, etc) should finance the fieldwork and the publication in diverse languages. This comparison should be illustrated by classical texts, texts from the Enlightenment and from Freethinkers of all time.
We must set a reasonable deadline of one year to carry out this work, starting from the agreement on the financing, given that the majority of the contributions must be selfless and carried out by volunteers. Within less than two months, it will be necessary to propose a project manager and collaborators, with legal knowledge, and bases of social sciences and thought.
If this experiment, or any other that is approved by this congress, comes out well, we can, more ahead, propose to ourselves more ambitious projects.
Best regards