Of course I would stand for your freedom to believe what you want and to say what you want. But the freedom to criticize is equally important counterbalance. It so common to see any criticism of religion suppressed and treated as tantamount to racism.

By allowing certain ideas to remain immune from criticism, we risk throwing away all of the advances made since the Enlightenment, and paving the way to a world where bad, unsupported claims are allowed to flourish unchecked. No free and open society can exist for long if certain ideas become sacred cows. If the ideas of any religion are strong or true, then let them defend themselves in the open market place of ideas without the crutch of political correctness.

I agree with everything you say in this comment, however, I could well be in the minority soon. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech were initially given to the masses by people of faith who didn't see value in imposing their faith on others even though, at the time, they held the political upper hand and could have if they wanted to.

My concern is that, when people of non-faith hold the political upper hand (in some places they already do) will they have the moral objectivity to say that all people are of value and their opinions worthy of respect?

This was not the case under previous faithless systems. Soviet Russia and Maoist China saw people as expendable for what was perceived to be the advancement of their greater ideals. The Christian west may have acted like dicks and used God to justify their selfish atrocities, but at least they could be pulled up on a moral objective standpoint (the bible) and be told; "this is not OK because your bible says so". Most have since stopped listening to this kind of questioning however.

Nice talking with you super_mario, would like to hear your thoughts on the discussion I linked to above but we should probably talk somewhere else rather than steal a thread meant for Tim Cook.