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The Guardian’s Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo Objects to Freedom of Religion
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo, writer for The Guardian, is a “perfectionist to a fault, empathetic, sensitive, gentle, complicated, multi-layered.” At least that’s how she describes herself.
So what does she have against religion?
What does she have against something which, at this very moment, literally billions of people around the world are on their knees for, eyes upraised in supplication or closed in prayer, acknowledging, each in his or her own way, that there is Something in life that is greater than they?
By using her Guardian article on cancel culture as a platform for bigotry against an actor who is a Scientologist, Bilen-Onabanjo dismisses those billions, along with their respective faiths, with a supercilious sniff. One’s choice to be religious is not a character flaw, nor is one’s religious choice itself.
Remove religion and any awareness of spirit from the equation of humanity and you are left with zero humanity. Decency, kindness, accountability, help—these all go out with Monday’s trash.
One’s choice to be religious is not a character flaw, nor is one’s religious choice itself.
Surely someone who is “perfectionist to a fault, empathetic, sensitive, gentle, complicated, and multi-layered” is not going to fall into the casual slot of so many of her fellow journalists who simply recycle the same old lies as truisms without doing any research at all.
What Ms. Bilen-Onabanjo doesn’t understand is that by pronouncing judgement upon one individual, she has taken a moral position against not just that person, but the thousands of others who share that person’s spiritual path, and, worse still, she has crystallized that moral position in verbiage for all to see. It is a grimy, unsightly position that reflects more on her than it does on the target of her smear.
It has been said that in journalism you have one bullet. You can use it or misuse it.
The long and the short of it is Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo has taken her bullet and shot herself in the foot.
The long and the short of it is Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo—perfect, empathetic, sensitive, gentle, complicated, multi-layered Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo—has outed herself as a bigot.
