The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that religion should not be used to justify limiting freedom and oppressing human rights.
Margaret Atwood's quote highlights the dangers of using religion as a tool for repression. History has shown that individuals or groups often manipulate religious beliefs to justify actions that infringe upon fundamental human rights and freedoms, regardless of geographical or temporal context. It serves as a reminder to critically assess how religion can be wielded in both positive and negative ways in society.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the role of religion in politics.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.
It's not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree - eventually, at least some of the time - on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn't mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform.
The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.
Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.
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