Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion – New Naratif

If people cannot think freely, they cannot possibly then act or speak freely. Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is thus compulsory for safeguarding against tyranny. Only with this freedom can we act in an informed, moral, and ethical way.

This article is part of our Principles of Democracy series. Read our introduction article to find out, “What is Southeast Asian Democracy?”

Author Thum Ping Tjin
Collage Artist Karin Josephine

To recap, our earlier principles of democracy focused on the government, but we also need the freedoms of expression as well as association and assembly to voice out and to act as individuals and citizens. These are not unlimited rights, but are mediated by the other principles of democracy and other fundamental rights, as may be agreed by society. 

Speaking and acting are external actions, but thinking is deeply internal. It is tied to our sense of personhood and individuality, and our sense of ourselves as moral and political subjects. How we think, what we believe in, and what we feel is right and wrong should not be subject to external control by states, religious figures, employers, or teachers. 

We thus propose this framework for understanding freedom of thought, conscience, and religion:

• Everyone has the right to think whatever they want.
• Everyone has the right to change their minds.
• Everyone has the right to disagree.

We emphasise that the above is entirely internal and does not cover speaking or acting on our thoughts, or trying to convince others and/or change their minds. As long as we take responsibility for acting upon our beliefs and speaking our mind—speaking and acting are covered in the other two freedoms—Southeast Asians should have the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. This is the final enabling freedom that we need to ensure the goal of meeting the people’s needs.

This freedom is crucial for Southeast Asian good governance. When people can freely develop their beliefs, they can then open dialogues, debate ideas, and advocate for change. Doing so leads to more informed policymaking and strengthens government institutions. This open exchange of ideas helps governments remain accountable, responsive, and adaptable to the needs of citizens. It is crucial that any government always has people who dissent or disagree, because those people keep the government honest. Conversely, if people cannot freely arrive at their own conclusions, having been controlled by a government, then governance will inevitably lead to censorship, oppression, and groupthink. Governments can more easily manipulate or control populations by limiting dissenting voices and imposing ideological conformity.

What we think is influenced by many factors, including our life experience, what we have learned from within or without educational institutions, what we see as being right or wrong, and how we believe (or not believe) in a deity or an ethical system, among other factors Insisting upon this freedom is the basis for a fairer future while encouraging us to be accepting of the diversity of views within a particular society. After all, without the ability to think, believe, and worship freely, and without simultaneously respecting others’ beliefs (whether religious, intellectual, or otherwise), it is impossible to build a democratic society. Such respect prevents us from demanding state action to enforce matters of personal belief, and authoritarian governments more excuses to control what people say or do. 

Being an internal freedom, which is more difficult to control, authoritarian governments have employed various methods to influence how people think, whether through propaganda or the law, often with the aim of maintaining power, suppressing dissent, or shaping societal values. Two major ways in which Southeast Asia’s colonial and post-independence governments have sought to control thought, conscience, and religion are deeply connected with two of the region’s most urgent challenges: (1) the underdevelopment of human capital (i.e. a lack of education, especially for children) and (2) its religious diversity (including both the dominance of official religions and the extreme diversity of religions). Attempts to influence thought generally take the form of two intertwined but overlapping approaches: shaping people’s lived realities and shaping norms and expectations.

Shaping people’s lived realities involves the control of the media, propaganda, censorship, and surveillance. Autocrats often use propaganda to shape public opinion and present themselves in a positive light. State-controlled media can be used to broadcast biased information, glorify the government, demonise opponents, and promote a specific ideological narrative. Social media can be weaponised too, as discussed in our freedom of expression explainer. At its most extreme, Singapore’s PAP government has used its “Fake News” law¹ to force legitimate interpretations of facts to be branded publicly as “falsehoods” simply because a Minister has a different interpretation of fact.

Through dominant and repetitive messaging and aggressive censorship, governments can limit access to alternative, dissenting, or dissident information and perspectives or create a controlled narrative. Such control restricts the public’s ability to think critically or question official narratives. Surveillance and the monitoring of private communications creates an atmosphere of fear that discourages dissent. Anti-defamation laws, blasphemy laws, or national security regulations can be used to criminalise criticism of the government, religious institutions, or certain ideologies. Citizens who feel they are being watched may self-censor and conform to accepted norms to avoid potential repercussions. This way, governments may not even need to determine which topics or subjects are unsuitable: fearful people can establish out-of-bounds topics by themselves.² Humiliation and fear are powerful incentives for people to tell themselves to push down thoughts that disagree with the government.

Shaping norms and expectations is done through laws and regulations, as well as controls over forms of cultural identity, ideologies, and economic practices. The educational system is frequently abused to this end. Governments almost always influence curricula to promote convenient ideologies, favourable historical interpretations, or subservient political values. By controlling what children learn in schools, governments can shape the normative beliefs, national identities, and values of future generations. Some regimes even create a “cult of personality” around their leaders, portraying them as infallible, heroic, or even divine. This approach seeks to inspire loyalty, admiration, and foster a sense of dependency among the populace, by marginalising critical thought and dissent as being anti-national, for instance. Through media, education, and public symbols, a leader, whether formally elected or appointed to the position by birth, is presented as the ultimate guide for the nation’s values and goals.

Under neoliberalism, economic means also influence thought and behaviour. Financial incentives shape decisions under the guise of a “free market”, such as providing funding or resources to institutions that align with state ideology while withholding support from those that do not. State-funded universities and other educational institutions are particularly vulnerable to threat. By rewarding loyalty and punishing dissent through job opportunities, grants, or other economic incentives, governments can subtly guide how people think and behave. In this way, a capitalist authoritarian government may undermine sustainable and equitable development. Finally, governments exert influence over religious institutions (and vice versa) to shape moral and ethical thinking within society. This can include promoting certain religious beliefs while suppressing others, regulating religious practices, or co-opting leaders to support government policies. 

Under Colonialism

Colonial governments understood the importance of controlling how people think, and consequently buttressed their rule by controlling education and limiting the freedom of the media. If they could produce subjects who had the same outlook and values as their colonial masters, ran their thinking, then those subjects would not challenge colonial rule but instead identify with their western masters. Often, colonial masters would convince themselves that they had a responsibility to educate and “uplift” their subjects (“the White Man’s burden”), as if colonial exploitation was not heavily responsible for their subjects’ wretched state to begin with. 

In the Philippines during Spanish colonial rule (1565–1898), the Catholic Church played a central role in governing the education system. Schools, which were often run by friars, primarily aimed to convert Filipinos to Christianity and instil loyalty to the Spanish crown. The curriculum heavily emphasised religious studies, Spanish culture, and loyalty to Spain, discouraging the use of local languages and indigenous knowledge. One of José Rizal’s crucial contributions to Filipino independence was his articulation of a Filipino identity separate from Spain via his novels and other writings. The idea of Filipino nationalism was so subversive that it led to his execution by the Spanish authorities. Rizal had also emphasised the importance of education in achieving freedom multiple times: “The gift of reason with which we are endowed must be brightened and utilised”, he once wrote. It should not be a surprise that the Americans instituted a public education system after their takeover. English was made the medium of instruction and American teachers were brought in (the “Thomasites”) to promote American ideals and values. Similarly, its “enlightened” goal was to create a generation of Filipinos who were loyal to America’s democratic principles and could help administer the colony in line with its interests.

Likewise, in the early twentieth century, the Dutch introduced the “Ethical Policy,” which included educational reforms in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The colonial government established Dutch-language schools intended mainly for the elite to promote Western values and concepts of governance. The aim was to create an educated indigenous class that could support the colonial administration and uphold Dutch control. The French established an education system in Indochina (modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) to create a class of local civil servants loyal to France. French was the primary language of instruction, and the curriculum focused on French history, culture, and values. This approach sought to diminish local identities and foster allegiance to the French Empire. The British introduced English-language schools in Malaya and Burma, mainly for the children of local elites and those who were to work in the colonial administration. The curriculum was designed to instil British values and prepare students for administrative roles that would support British rule. These sustained attempts at cultural transformation or destruction have left deep scars in the Southeast Asian psyche, leaving Southeast Asians believing that they are inferior, subhuman, and deserving of subjugation.³ 

Southeast Asian nationalists thus condemned western attempts to shape education and culture, which became a major catalyst for broader anti-colonial resistance, for example among the Chinese of Malaya and their independent schools, which were the targets of British attempts at control. Even those who emerged from the colonial system, such as Lim Boon Keng, a prominent Chinese Malayan intellectual, pushed back against British colonial policies that tried to westernise Chinese culture and values through education and advocated for educational reforms that emphasised the importance of Chinese language, history, and Confucian values. while incorporating modern scientific knowledge. Tan Malaka, the Sumatran revolutionary, advocated for an education system that embraced a nascent Indonesian culture and language, raised political consciousness among Indonesians, and promoted self-determination. Phan Bội Châu founded the Đông Du (Eastern Study) Movement, which encouraged Vietnamese students to study in Japan to learn modern skills and avoid French-controlled education. He sought to create a new generation of Vietnamese who could lead the country’s modernisation and independence movement, rooted in their cultural heritage rather than colonial influence. As a student activist, the future Prime Minister of Burma, U Nu, campaigned for the use of Burmese as the medium of instruction in schools and for an educational curriculum that included Burmese history and culture. His efforts were part of a broader resistance to the colonial efforts to create a class of Burmans loyal to British rule.

Under the Post-Independence State

Attentive readers will have quickly spotted the contradiction inherent in what nationalists proposed: their framing of post-colonial education itself relied on colonial boundaries and concepts. “Philippines”, “Indonesia”, “Vietnam”, “Burma”, “Malay(si)a”, “Singapore”: these are territories created by colonialism. Anti-colonial nationalists rallied people around these conceptual territories to win independence but after the achievement of independence, found that they had to convince their new citizens that the “Filipino”, “Indonesian”, “Vietnamese”, “Burmese”, “Malayan”, and “Singaporean” nations existed. Inevitably, this involved a significant amount of propaganda and promotion of new concepts of national identity and the suppression of those who would think, conceive, and dream differently.

Like colonial subjugation, the national project was also achieved through education. The second volume of Wang Gungwu’s autobiography, for example, begins by narrating the close link between his Malayan identity and that as an undergraduate student at the University of Malaya (UM) in Singapore. From Wang’s autobiographical recollection, his scholarly career dovetails with his insistence on contributing to the new Malay(si)an nation. He cites the importance of the university as a space for open thinking and intellectual freedom, one which he saw as being increasingly besieged as the Cold War and other regional developments unfolded.⁴ But what is also being produced at the university by intellectuals like himself is a nationalist project to justify the new nation-state.

This is not to condemn anything that Wang, or other Malayan nationalists, articulated as “right” or “wrong”, but to draw attention to how the construction and justification of the post-independence nation-state has also resulted in the oppression and an undermining of freedoms of thought, conscience, and religion. Colonial governments used education to justify their rule; post-independence authoritarian governments have also used education in the same way to justify their rule. Frantz Fanon had warned of the “national bourgeoisie,” or the emerging elite in post-colonial nations, who often replicated the exploitative patterns of colonial rule rather than advancing true social and economic liberation for the masses. Sadly, this criticism was right on the nose: post-independence authoritarian governments rapidly seized upon the same methods of oppression, using the same justifications, including education and mental degradation to influence and control what people thought. Indeed, what goes somewhat unmentioned in Wang’s autobiography is how many end-of-empire universities were often elite bastions: UM started not with the goal of facilitating and democratising the freedom of thought, but with the more instrumental goal of building an elite stratum of (English-educated) future leaders in service of (elite) nation-building, a role it then carried on in the post-independence state.⁵ 

What clearly emerges is the place of the state in education. Inasmuch as public institutions emerged to provide mass education and reach developmental goals, they were also constructed as either non-political or overtly pro-government spaces. Independent (read: potentially dissident) institutions would be brought under control, as seen in the case of both Singapore’s Nanyang University and University of Malaya/Singapore. This sometimes occurred through ostensibly technical reforms, such as the 1965 University Curriculum Review Committee Report (also known as the “Wang Gungwu Report”).⁶  Repression was overtly exercised against student leaders during the Cold War, such as the University of Singapore Students’ Union,⁷ and seen in the massacres at Thammasat University in Thailand.⁸ Lecturers were not exempted from persecution. For example, the sociologist and later politician Syed Husin Ali recounts his years of detention after defending student demonstrators from UM in the mid-1970s. During his interrogations by the police, a clear picture of how state authorities expect him to think emerges.

All of a sudden, he [Inspector Abdullah] asked, “Why is it you always criticise the government?”

Meanwhile, scholarly disciplines were also developed to further repressive national interests. In Myanmar, anthropological studies were specifically developed as a strategy to pacify ethnic minorities who resisted Burman rule, thus tying scholarship to General Ne Win’s push for “Burmanisation”.¹⁰ Even key intellectuals themselves were involved in providing the ideological bedrock for his junta. Rather than the aspirational “site of free and open learning” that Wang identified above, regional universities are more akin to institutions or objects of authority. 

Two relatively recent experiences from Nanyang Technological University are worth exploring to understand how the state presents itself more subtly. In Cherian George’s reflections on his academic career, the university was characterised less by overt external state censorship: instead, control was inflicted internally by university administrators themselves. Certain lines of critical inquiry are foreclosed even without the active interference of the state, while scholarship headed towards safer (i.e., non-political) directions. In Teo You Yenn’s reflections on how “the Singapore state has many different levers and modes through which to exercise its will”, its responses to critical research do not always come in the form of overt denunciations or censorship. Reflecting on the publication of her study, This is What Inequality Looks Like, for example:

Two senior civil servants (and a more junior one) arranged a meeting to discuss my research. In addition to giving me a 20-slide presentation about government assistance, they delivered, in a large envelope, a letter detailing what they called “factual errors” that they wanted me to “correct” in my book. When I had not done so a few weeks later, they contacted me again on email, asking for my phone number as well as that I make the changes immediately, place them online and put a sticker on my book to direct readers to this “errata”.

It is not just the state which exercises authority over institutions, but also the market. Sometimes, both sets of interests go hand-in-hand. During the rule of President Joko Widodo in Indonesia, several challenges to academics included not just threats to academic freedom and scholarship (including physical violence), but also the emergence of “the state-sponsored commercialisation of higher education”,¹¹ where “over-commercialisation and stronger engagement with capital” was rife.¹² Now, key performance indicators, global rankings, the exploitation of international students, the “publish-or-perish” model, and other practices which erode academic integrity are more or less universal for regional scholars.  

What this tells us is to be wary of how scholarly practices unfold within unequal spaces of knowledge, shaped by internal power dynamics and historical legacies. These conditions structure our freedom of thought, and thus, we need to consider how it is possible to break out of them: whether through the pursuit of autonomous knowledge projects, placing an emphasis on indigenous knowledge, or even engaging directly in scholar-activism, such as Academia SG does. 

Unlike education, colonial governments were generally less aggressive at pursuing social engineering through conversion in Southeast Asia. The most aggressive were the Spanish, who used religion as an extension of their rule and who declared Catholicism the state religion of the Philippines. The Portuguese, likewise, promoted Catholicism in their colonies. Consequently, the Philippines and Timor-Leste are the only two Catholic-majority countries in Asia although large swathes of eastern Indonesia are also Catholic. However, the British, Dutch, and French were more focused on economic exploitation and governance than religious conversion, and so their colonies did not adopt the colonial religion. Indeed, as discussed below, the British made a particular point to protect Islam in the Malay States, the legacy of which has had effects until today.

In Southeast Asia, most states are secular but ostensibly respect religious worship. (Vietnam, which is formally atheist, is an extreme example where religion is erased from the public sphere.) In practice, however, religious freedom is not so much respected, but policed. The breakup of the European and American empires and the subsequent need to justify national borders have led post-independent governments to include religion as a defining factor of nationality, among other identities such race or language group. Conveniently, most Southeast Asian countries have a majority population subscribing to the same religion (e.g., Buddhism in Myanmar and Thailand, Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia), even where plural societies emerged. By including religion as part of national identity, most citizens could be easily rallied around a common identity. 

Here, states assumed the responsibility to define how religion should be practised. Authoritarian states imposed official interpretations that impinged greatly on individual freedom of conscience, with laws on their books which enabled religious intolerance, or ostensibly upheld freedom of religion to silence legitimate discussion and criticism.¹³  This is not to say that religion is a tyrannical or conservative force—rather, it is how religion is governed and interpreted which becomes a significant problem. 

Malaysia offers a unique case study because of how its legal system and government institutions negotiate an uneasy balance between secularism and religious governance. The Constitutional definition of “Malayness” as including the profession of Muslim faith alongside speaking the language and practising its culture remains unchanged until today. (This ran counter to how Malayness was historically understood and alternatively envisioned in the People’s Constitutional Proposals “in terms of allegiance to and acceptance of the land, Malaya, which was their object of loyalty”.)¹⁴ By law, to be Malay was also to be Muslim, and thus racial governmentality was simultaneously a form of religious governmentality. Malay-Muslims were constructed as a single political community, made legible to the independent state. Spiritual and secular identities merged, even if present-day Islamist and ethnonationalist political ideologies are distinct from and sometimes diametrically opposed to one another.¹⁵

Meanwhile, a memorandum produced by the leaders of the Alliance Party before independence agreed that,

The ambiguous double negative in the second sentence, juxtaposed against the assertiveness of the first one, leaves it unclear as to whether Malaysia is a secular state or not. Thus, the Malaysian Bar still understood the country as a secular state (but apparently not then-Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, even as he would soon style himself as a cosmopolitan technocrat). Another text of interest is the Rukunegara, the National Principles,¹⁷ which set out to chart a path forward following the events of 13 May 1969. Among other aims, these included:

In setting out a path to safeguard a liberal and democratic society (even if not explicitly a liberal democracy), the Rukunegara first posits that society has to be governed upon a set of normative principles, the first of which is “Belief in God”. What this implies is that everyone must have a religion, which foregrounds religion as the basic prerequisite of a Malaysian identity. Read together with another key text, the National Culture Policy (NCP), what emerges is the positioning of Malay-Muslim identity as the basis of national identity.¹⁸ 

In the years to come, a form of “state-led Islamisation”, where the promotion/protection of Islam has become a key strategy of maintaining regime hegemony and ensuring electoral victory, would characterise Malaysian politics.¹⁹ Ideological rivalries within the Malay community, most notably between the secular UMNO and the theological PAS, led to the construction of an Islamic bureaucracy.²⁰ In response to PAS’s perceived electoral support, UMNO’s response was to construct its own Islamic discourses and institutions. The rise of Islamic revivalism in the 1970s–80s and the dakwah movement (Islamic revivalism) further heightened the UMNO–PAS rivalry, where each party championed markedly distinct interpretations. For instance, the state-led interpretations of Islam would be harnessed to decidedly capitalist concerns (e.g., Islamic finance, halal certifications).²¹ Meanwhile, “deviant” practices, such as the “Sky Kingdom”, would be outlawed.²² As Farish Noor has argued, what effectively happened was that PAS ironically achieved its goal of an Islamic state without having to actually win power, by forcing UMNO to lay the groundwork through Islamic institutions, policies, and discourses.²³ The latest attempt to bureaucratise religion can be seen in the Mufti (Federal Territories) Bill 2024: although a prominent academic has claimed that it is a necessary step to prevent extremism, from a legal standpoint, it should be regarded as another move to legislate how Muslims observe their faith at a personal level, while vesting more power through centralised authority.  

Even then, the “state” is not a singular actor, but composed of different ministries, departments, and court systems, all of which are in competition with each other.²⁴ Even the governance of Islam distributed and governed differently at various levels.²⁵ Thus, a complex landscape involving the royals, state governments, federal bodies, and judicial systems emerges. Perhaps the most prominent contestation between secularism and religion plays out in court, where the secular and Sharia courts compete against each other, even though they are theoretically allotted separate areas of jurisdiction.²⁶ 

This parallel Islamic judiciary, incidentally, is deeply rooted in colonialism. After the establishment of British protectorates, the Malay rulers found their spheres of influence limited to customary practices and Islam. However, this also enabled the emergence of centralised authority over religion, and “encourage[d] the concentration of doctrinal and administrative religious authority in the hands of a hierarchy of officials directly dependent on the sultans for their position and power”.²⁷ A corpus of Anglo-Muslim law, modelled to some degree upon the British legal system, emerged to codify what were largely oral, interpretive practices.²⁸ This was the precursor to the bureaucratic “Syariah” legal system—effectively a penal code without the dynamism afforded by interpretation—which was actually only formalised at a national level by post-independence Muslim lawyers trained in secular law, rather than the ulama. As Tamir Moustafa point out, “it was a project of state officials like Abdul Hamid Mohamad [who was actually trained in common law at the University of Singapore], who lacked formal training or in-depth knowledge of Islamic legal theory.”²⁹ 

Religion was thus made a matter of public interest, subject to the protection and policing of state-approved religious interpretations. One expresses an assigned religion (which is essentially hereditary) in accordance with official interpretations. Although these practices are ostensibly meant to police the Malay-Muslim population, the effects are also significantly felt for non-Muslims, which has galvanised unintended forms of politics and mobilisation, as Choong Pui Yee notes.³⁰ Significant areas of contestation have emerged between religious communities over the degree to which the policing of Islam has apparently impinged upon other religious practices (e.g., the right of Christians to proselytise to Muslims, using the term “Allah” to refer to “God” in Malay-language translations of the Bible). Further, the close relationship between Malay and Muslim identities, i.e., race and religion, have created significant complications for non-Malay converts, such as Muslim Chinese and Muslim Indians.³¹

However, this is not to say that religion constricts one’s freedom to think or act—rather, it provides a discursive framework within which individuals can act agentically. For Moustafa, “there is no necessary or essential tension between Islam and liberal rights […] the oft-cited bedrock principles of equality and justice in Islam comport well with contemporary notions of liberal rights”.³² For Diego Garcia Rodriguez, who has studied queer religious subjects in Indonesia, agency should be understood more broadly, for instance,

In other words, one can exercise freedom within seemingly totalising frameworks: to interpret and create meaning in ways which draw from both religion and lived contexts. And it is the agency afforded by religion that is most unwelcome to authoritarian governments, which often view a true freedom of belief as a threat because it can undermine obedience and mobilise societal opposition to their rule. Such was the case in the Philippines in 1986, when the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Sin, mobilised people against the dictatorial rule of Ferdinand Marcos. The success of the church in doing so led the government of Singapore to pre-emptively crack down on the Catholic Church in Singapore, via the arrest of church workers in Operation Spectrum the same year.³⁴

A final point is that in promoting freedom of religion, it is necessary to always be cognisant of the needs of minority religions. Excluding people who were members of different religions (or not religious at all) from the nation leads to discrimination against them. Often, those who were of different religions already lived on the margins even during the colonial period, as they lived in border regions (such as the Muslims of Pattani Darussalam, the Catholics of eastern Indonesia, the Muslims of western Myanmar, or the Muslims of Mindanao, due to ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences.³⁵ Thus, there is a strong correlation between those who are most oppressed and religious minorities. 

Hence, the tolerance of members of differing religions is the first step towards exercising the freedom of religion: we can only live in a democratic society when there is give-and-take, rather than policing or absolutism. There will always be friction when it comes to the exercise of this freedom due to the diverse ways of thinking even just within our societies (e.g., perhaps one’s freedom of religion might impinge upon another’s). But we must also strive to move beyond merely tolerance, and towards true acceptance of others’ beliefs, lest we fall into the trap of forcing our beliefs onto others and create more harm than good. 

Even though the freedom of thought and religion is a deeply personal or internal matter (at least compared with the public or external freedoms of expression as well as association and assembly), it is still made the focus of state control. But throughout Southeast Asia, attempts to limit the freedom of thought and religion have had disastrous and divisive effects, as seen above. 

But one way out of a period of growing extremism and polarisation (secular or otherwise) is by exercising freedom of conscience. To use the Merriam-Webster definition, a conscience is 

[…] the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one’s own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good.

We argue that conscience is a deeply personal matter of ethics, where we choose to act within their specific context, as shaped by their educational or religious upbringing. Our responses are not predetermined, even if they are framed by what we have learned and what we believe in. After all, thinking in a moral way, allows us to be democratic, equitable, and progressive. It cannot be controlled from without, but only from within. To have a conscience is also a prerequisite for considering and debating what exactly constitutes a human right.

Only a democracy, with its respect for one’s religion and the need for an emancipatory and empowering education, can facilitate the full emergence of a conscience. Thus, it requires a diversity of views and choices, and an environment in which differing opinions can be debated freely. Only then can we begin fairly addressing the following dilemmas:

• There is a potential contradiction at stake in protecting religion. When does one’s religiosity impact another’s freedom? Or when does religious law conflict with secular ones? 
• How can the ways in which we think be truly critical and constructive, rather than being merely reactive or reactionary?
• How much should scholarship or education be driven by instrumental needs, and what safeguards should be taken in researching potentially controversial or even harmful topics?
• Subjects such as religion and science have been often coded as being in opposition to each other. Also, being religious is often coded as being “conservative”. How can the exercise of these freedoms allow us to move beyond these apparent dichotomies?
• If one is forced to take part in an activity against their conscience (e.g., mandatory military conscription), how then should one act if there are possible repercussions (e.g., imprisonment)?
• How can one conduct research in a field structured by inequality, biases, and knowledge obtained through unethical means? What are the implications of using such knowledge, and what should be done?