Religion
Related: About this forumHow Hatred of Islam Creates Strange Bedfellows of Christians and Atheists
Atheists shouldn’t be singing from the same song sheet as the Christian Right.
By CJ Werleman
April 11, 2014 - Politics is a funny game, for wedge issues often make for strange bedfellows. NSA overreach unites the far left with the far right. Libertarianism unites neo-confederates with black evangelicals. If you’re looking for an even stranger ideological matrimony, try this one on for size: mention the Middle East peace talks, and voila, you have atheists singing from the same song sheet as the Christian Right.
Despite the Palestinians making a sudden about turn to the United Nations, who can blame them, Secretary of State John Kerry is to be applauded for his efforts to bring the peace process back into focus. Not only has he dragged both sides to the negotiating table, he has also attained crucial concessions from both the Palestinians and the Israelis. But any further progress is made difficult while Americans remain in the dark about what is really taking place in the Occupied Territories. The most ignorant include the corporate-owned media, the Christian Right and movement atheism. This ignorance results in a lack of political pressure on the White House, Republican or Democrat, to seek a much-needed two-state solution.
Despite claims by David Silverman, president of the 501(c4) political lobby group American Atheists, atheism does not earn an atheist the title of freethinker. With very few exceptions, movement atheists are not. They’re parrots. Don’t believe me? Ask an atheist to opine on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and he or she will invariably wax lyrical about religious motivated violence, Islamic extremism and suicide bombers. In other words, expect a recital from atheist luminaries Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.
“Islam is an unmitigated evil,” said Dawkins in response to whether or not atheists should support faith-based NGOs in Africa, while simultaneously ignoring the despotic warlords Western secular governments have financed in recent times. On his blog, Sam Harris asks why “nineteen well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors?” With total disregard for geopolitical history, what troubles Muslims living in the Middle East, and studies into global terrorism, Harris answers, “Because they believed that they would go straight to Paradise for doing so.”
http://www.alternet.org/belief/how-atheists-are-complicit-atrocities-and-oppression-palestinian-people?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
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The author of this piece is complaining about islamophobia in the atheist community and then proceeds to blame Jews for the problem.
Does this idiot really not see his own bigotry? He even threw in the "Jews are the new Nazis" anti-Semitic trope for good measure. What an asshole.
rug
(82,333 posts)Here?
"This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that forty-six percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live.”
Israel punishes Gaza with daily 12-hour power outages, blocks medical equipment and medications from entering the territory, forcibly removes Palestinian farmers from their land without compensation, and has now erected a barrier that has annexed at least 40,000 acres of Palestinian land. Life in Gaza is so grim that “families are piled in boxy, concrete rooms capped with corrugated tin roofs weighed down by rocks. Water and electricity service work only sporadically…donkey carts crowd the streets, and orange garbage bins, donated by the European Union, overflow with putrid heaps of refuse,” observes Hedges.
He's attacking the policies of the Israeli government. That's no more representative of the Jewish people than the Nazis were representative of the German people.
He is saying there are Islamophobic strains in some atheist writers, notably Sam Harris. Are you saying there are anti-Semitic ones as well, as in Werleman?
Mosby
(16,306 posts)Last edited Mon Apr 14, 2014, 12:37 AM - Edit history (1)
Is because of Israel. Pretty sure Islam's hostility towards the west began long before Israel existed, which is why the real issue is just plain old religious intolerance and bigotry.
That's the kind of nonsense we used to hear from bin laden. Speaking of bin laden, he was one of the first extremists to justify his terrorism on the presence of US troops in the holy land. This stupid author didn't even get the provocation right, because there are no US troops in the "Holy Land". The "holy land" bin laden and others refer to is the Arabian peninsula, not Israel. How this author could make such a stupid mistake I don't know.
rug
(82,333 posts)Despite the massive U.S. political and economic presence, not to mention its multi-billion military aid, there are afaik no actual military bases there. So he is factually wrong about that.
But I don't think a fair reading of this article leads to the conclusion "to blame Jews for the problem" of islamophobia in the atheist community.
This is the problem he sees:
Atheists, myself included, enjoy mocking religious fundamentalists for their inability to question authority or dogma. But very few atheists sound dissimilar to the aforementioned atheist heavyweights when it comes to assessing the roots of Islamic terrorism. In the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, American Atheists president Silverman tweeted, “Dear Peaceful Muslims: Sorry, but yet, that IS your Islam and your Prophet’s followers.” Silverman included the hashtag #IslamIsBarbaric. If you were told neo-con firebrand Ann Coulter had posted this careless tweet, you would have believed it.
No doubt, Harris (neuroscience) and Dawkins (evolutionary biology) are leaders in their respective fields. What they’re not is experts on terrorism and the Middle East. So movement atheism needs to stop pretending like they are, because the words of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens serve only to make movement atheists sound like neo-conservatives, Zionists and the Christian Right, which ultimately makes seeking peace even harder to attain."
Jim__
(14,075 posts)From the wikipedia site titled Holy Land:
The holiest place in Islam is in Mecca
- Jerusalem
- Mecca
- Medina
The US did have military bases in Saudi Arabia in 2001, and many Muslims resented this:
Also from wikipedia:
Opinion polls conducted by Gallup from 2006–2008, found that many in Muslim majority countries strongly objected to U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. 52% of Saudis agreed that removing military bases from Saudi Arabia would very significantly improve their opinion of United States. Also 60% of Egyptians, 39% of Jordanians, 40% of Syrians and Palestinians, 55% of Tunisians, 13% of Iranians, 29% of Turks, 40% of Lebanese, 30% of Algerians gave that opinion too.[4]
rug
(82,333 posts)It may be there but if it is I missed it.
Jim__
(14,075 posts)... he talks about the humiliation of occupying forces and the Saudi hijackers on 9/11:
I took that as context for the mention of military bases in the Holy Land.
Mosby
(16,306 posts)He is repeating far right wing Islamist talking points without even understanding them.
fwiw I agree that there is a lot of unwarranted hostility emanating from the "new atheists" or whatever towards believers and Muslims in particular, but he ruined his thesis with the Antisemitic statements.
rug
(82,333 posts)
msongs
(67,405 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)I suppose you also believe the Israeli government is "completely representative" of the Jewish people. Ask Professor Falk about that.
so much for that argument eom
Starboard Tack
(11,181 posts)
MisterP
(23,730 posts)but more than that there's a lot of cynical Cold-War wheeler-dealing: since Entebbe Melani McAlister's found that Americans increasingly identify with Israel as either a new and egalitarian frontier (which had garnered it some Jewish-American support, and even MLK's comment) or as simply being better at ending the "hostage situations" that helplessly fixated Americans (who saw themselves as victims and fetishized that status)--even if groups like PFLP were Orthodox Christians
but at the same time Washington (and Jerusalem) were not just eagerly using Arab groups as cats' paws (mujahedeen, Beirut), but often pushing the very regimes concocting what would become ultra-Salafism in the 90s--Zia and Suharto come to mind
rug
(82,333 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)for the same avowed reason it opposes it now
in fact, the characters only change, the script doesn't: we're on the side of freedom, whereas the dastardly British/Freemasons/Catholics/Mormons/French/Spanish/Chinese/Anarchists/Jews/Commies/Muslims will go to any lengths to infiltrate the Americas and rule the world!!111: thus every fight is not only existential but 100% arbitrary, and changed at the drop of a hat and a quick turnabout where the forgot why we hated yesterday's foe (David Davis, "The Fear of Conspiracy," which is superior to Hofstadter); everything the Birchers said about Moscow the Birchers had been saying about the Jews when they were arguing we were on the wrong side in WWII
Pierton Dooner's "The Last Days of the Republic" (1879) said that "To rule the World, is a dogma, a creed, a holy tradition of China"; it ends with, "The Republic had fought its last battle; and the Imperial Dragon of China already floated from the dome of the Capitol"
S.W. Odell's "The Last War; or, the Triumph of the English Tongue" (1898) has an egalitarian America of the year 2565 with 185 states; it and its White allies facing off against the Tsar, who's also the Pope and the Chinese Emperor: Anglo-Saxons, "approaching human perfection," are so different from the Catholic-feudal Asiatics that war's inevitable. It ends with civilization of the benighted into the United States of the World. Ignatius Donnelly's "The Golden Bottle" (1890) has fiat money leading to a republican Europe under a US flag attacking Russia, "that land so utterly given over to ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, and despotism." "The thousand years of peace and happiness and love had begun."
It's not too different from Jack London's little tale where all 1.5 billion Chinese are murdered and their land made over into an all-white socialist paradise. Mark Twain also found himself fuddled that Europe didn't do it like America: why, it was composed of different countries, many of them full of Papists! (and they hadn't torn down their cathedrals to make room for hygienic council estates for the masses)
MST3K may've rightfully laughed at "Invasion USA" and "Red Nightmare," but there are thousands of pants-crappers who not only supported the Taliban and cocaine-running mass murderers and a guy named Blowtorch Bob (in order to supposedly keep the Russkies from taking over the Manchester, Kentucky courthouse), but who then turned right around and bought "Liberality for All" or "Prayers for the Assassin" (where SF's full of gays' heads on pikes around the Osamadome): now we have (or had) the airwaves full of people telling us how some flavor of Sharia's coming to Manchester, Ky., any day now, and the Shahada will be raised over the courthouse
there's a very tight and extremely specific list of interconnected fears that's haunted our republic since its birth; only the name of the Great Threat is swapped out, at appropriate intervals; the fact that it's not only as old as the Republic but that it remains so clung-to despite never having come to fruition once: it's not just an arbitrary song-and-dance catapulted by the PTB for the latest purge or appropriations hearing, not just a way to divide classes and ethnicities, but something more permanent than even our form of governance
as we saw with the fin-de-siecle "white socialists" like London and Donnelly and the eugenicists, it's deeply connected to a provincialism so deep it can't really understand that other countries are real places: Reagan saying "You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries" about Latin America is from the same root as Reagan saying that there could be no Latin cause for revolt--it HAD to be Moscow's great game to take over all the world's canals and ultimately turn Murka Red
on edit: sorry it's so long
rug
(82,333 posts)Not that it's not here but the concentration of it there is deadly.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)dictatorships, Israel's basically secular nationalism, the Naqba and the growth of a sort of colonialist mentality since the Special Night Squads, the 70s surge in Lebanese ethnoreligiopolitical tensions and political Islam, down to the hell of Hama and south Lebanon, and then the 80s Israeli right and its 90s "Judaization" with a wave of Russians and Americans (though I might be getting some of these incidents from Said)
I hope I haven't derailed this thread on US-Mideastern relations--but it's important to know it's different than just "the mullahs and rabbis made people mad and they attack these nice secular democracies minding their own business": I'm not even a ME historian, but fanatics (Cold-Warrior, nationalist, technocratic, Baptist, Wahhabi) all hate history--not primarily because it "debunks" what they say but because it shows their worldview as too simplistic to live inside of: hence not only do they only battle the other sect's fundamentalists, they happily agree that the fundies are indeed the only true exponents of that sect!
rug
(82,333 posts)has all the value of watching a monkey tying a bowtie, with half the entertainment.
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)is very different from the reason far right Christians do.
rug
(82,333 posts)I don't care what the reasons are.
But thanks for your candor.
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)Many atheists hate Islam because it is a hateful, bigoted, misogynist, homophobic belief system, as laid out very explicitly in its own texts. And not just atheists. There's nothing irrational about that.
Far right Christians hate Islam because it is competition for their hateful, bigoted, misogynist, homophobic belief system. Specifically, their tyrannical god tells them to reject any other belief system or face eternal torment.
Most far right Christians are more consistent, and therefore take seriously the Bible, and have irrational fears of all sorts, especially about other belief systems, considering irrational fears form the basis of their own religion. When you already fear eternal torture in an invisible place, it's not a leap to have irrational fears of other religions that may lead other souls there.
Saying "new atheism" (whatever the fuck that is) is in bed with the far right Christians is stupid, but not as idiotic as calling all those who hate Islam "Islamophobes". That's for Palin level stupidity.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)to hatred of Muslims.
Please. That's a new low, even for you.
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)It's an irrational fear of Islam, by the definition of words. The term is associated with hatred of Muslims, and it's often used to brand any relevant criticism of Islam, the belief system, as hateful of all Muslims, like you're doing right now, which is stupid.
Islam is a belief system. It's not people. It's quite easy to hate various ideologies/philosophies without hating people. We do it on this site every day.
It would be like me calling you a conservatismophobe, by which I personally mean you hate conservatives. It's a stupid word, Islamophobia, and is often used in the same way many Christians cry out that they're being persecuted and hated when their religion is criticized.
I hate any ideology or belief system that promotes many of the things Islam does. I don't hate Muslims. Just like I don't hate conservatives. I don't hate people, it goes against my personal philosophy to. But the fact that this basic concept has to be explains shows the power and privilege of religion when it comes to any criticism.
Equating "movement atheism" with far right Christianity is intellectually lazy bullshit, just like saying that everyone who hates a belief system must hate the believers too. And I think it's intentional, not just stupidity, often enough.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)currently accepted definition, and you do so at your own peril.
Just as homophobia is used to describe bigotry towards GLBT people, islamophobia is used to describe bigotry against muslims. You can insist that your definition is correct, but you will then be interpreted by some people as saying one thing when you possible mean something else.
I don't hate conservatives, by the way.
I disagree with the bulk of the republican platform, am vehemently opposed by the agenda of the religious right and dislike some, but not all, people who identify with these two groups.
Despite all your words and words about how you parse the difference between hating an ideology and hating the people who ascribe to it, you should know that you come across as venomous and truly hateful when talking about them.
And the fact that you would then point to some kind of power and privilege when you speak of a group (muslims) that is discriminated against not just here but in many parts of the the privilege world is really ironic.
Your point of power and privilege may make them invisible to you.
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)in most of the places there are Muslims. It's perfectly relevant to point that out, and to point out that they benefit from the power and privilege given to religion in general, even where they are minorities.
I'm pointing out the stupidity of the term Islamophobia. To compare it in any way to homophobia is bullshit. Homosexuality isn't a choice. It's not a belief system spread almost entirely through childhood indoctrination. Islam is. Islamophobia is used as a way to silence relevant criticism of an idea. It would be like saying conservatismophobia, or christianophobia.
Islam, by it's own explicit dogma, is homophobic. Are people who can't stand that Islamophobes? Well, no, for one thing, it's not irrational, and for another, it's different to be scared of ideas than people, on a number of levels. The fact that you equate the two at all is sad, because it shows how oppressors can take the language of the oppressed and use it for themselves.
Islamophobia reminds me of the term "reverse-racism". It's bullshit in the way it is often applied and used.
The word should be Muslimophobia if you want it to mean what it does, but the purpose of the word isn't really about pointing out bigotry anyways.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)group below you.
Let me guess - you are white, male, straight, college educated, employed, financially secure and a US citizen. The mere fact that you have no religious beliefs makes only the smallest dent in your degree of privilege.
Islamophobia is a generally accepted and defined term meaning "prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of Muslims or of ethnic groups perceived to be Muslim". You can start a crusade to change that, but I doubt you will be successful. The term is used to describe a kind of bigotry, not to silence anyone.
I do not agree with you that religious beliefs are purely voluntary and think for some they are as much a part of themselves as sexual orientation. You believe it is due solely to "childhood indoctrination" but do you have any evidence to support that? Could you voluntarily change to a believer?
It is obvious why you might object to the term because you exhibit what most people would say exemplifies it. You see Islam as entirely negative and describe it in the most extreme negative terms possible. You do not see the variations in interpretation or practice.
It is the same as some of the most hateful language that is used to describe atheism and atheists by some people. In neither case, is it acceptable.
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)I don't know what to say. How?
I have lots of evidence to support that religion is though childhood indoctrination almost exclusively. Simply by looking at what the chances are you'll be the religion of your parents, and how that correlation becomes even greater the more religious the society is.
I understand that there are variations in the practice of a Islam, like Christianity, that don't actually follow what the Koran says, but these are just watered down versions, existing only because it's the only way to continue surviving in the modern world. I look at the text and see what these belief systems truly are. I'm glad they are watered down and continuing to, but their core is still rotten, just by looking at the texts. Eventually they get so watered down they dissolve, and that's a good thing. The Koran, Torah, and Bible are not good moral guides for humanity.
Religion has been protected from harsh criticism for so long that open criticism of it like any other subject still shocks a lot of people. But as it becomes more widespread, the shock will wear off, and people will feel they can criticize and mock all religion like they do the smaller, easier to target ones like Scientology.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)The same arguments about "choosing" it were used against LGBT people for a very long time. I doubt that you could choose to be a believer. I also doubt that many believers could choose to be atheists.
Please present your evidence that religious belief is almost exclusively a result of "childhood indoctrination". The fact that people follow the religion of their parents or community is not surprising, but correlation can not necessarily be linked to causation.
Were you raised religious? If so, why are you not now? Were you somehow immune to the "childhood indoctrination" that others experienced, or do you just consider yourself superior in your enlightenment.
What you call "watered down" could also just be a personal adaption of belief that embraces one's own set of social or political beliefs.
When you look at the texts, what you see is what you believe those systems are, not what others see. Your interpretation is no more valid than anyone else's.
Religion may evolve, adapt and become differently interpreted, but it is not going to "dissolve". The texts can be used and are used by many for causes that one would hope you embrace, as you apparently consider yourself a progressive democrat. Some of those causes include social justice, taking care of the most needy and civil rights. Those interpretations should be embraced and nourished.
Religion has never been exempt from harsh criticism and I am glad that those with no beliefs are experiencing more freedom and acceptance. I hope also that that freedom and acceptance will go both ways.
Your intolerance and overt hostility towards religion and the religious is no better than that of those who show it towards those with no religion. In short, you do not help the causes that this site supports, you harm them.
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)To Muslim parents and is a Muslim but was instead in an alternate universe was born in Brazil to Catholic parents, the chances of him being a Muslim are tiny compared to Catholic. That's largely because of childhood indoctrination. There are other social pressures besides.
And, the majority of religions explicitly indoctrinate children on a weekly basis at their own places of worship. It is part and parcel of their religion to indoctrinate. It's not even hidden. In this case, correlation is also a result of causation, very obviously so.
Do you honestly believe that Iran remains 99 percent Muslim over 50 years through sheer luck? Religious indoctrination is the obvious reason why there are only a few major religions as well, and not thousands and millions of completely new religions popping up all the time among believers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iran
That's incredibly good evidence.
The chances a person will have a certain sexual orientation has nothing to do with the beliefs of the parents or the region's religion where they are born.
It's a terrible comparison, considering religion is behind almost all discrimination and persecution of homosexuality.
Beliefs are always something someone can change. It is in no way comparable to sexual orientation. It's offensive and disingenuous to say so.
Atheists can and do choose to be believers, and vice verse. Just because I don't choose to now doesn't mean it's impossible. I did already choose to be an atheist. I never "chose" to be a believer so much as was indoctrinated into it, but I chose to remain with it for a while once I could actually contemplate it.
People still indoctrinate their children in religion at ridiculous rates, but less so in the US as church attendance falls off. It's completely immoral to indoctrinate a child in anything.
rug
(82,333 posts)I have no interest in the rationale for bigotry.
There are many reasons to oppose Nazis. Solid reasons."Hate" is not one of them. It is the direct opposite of rational thought.
Your reasons to hate Islam are based on a broad brush misunderstanding of it. While it, like anything humans are involved in, warrants criticism, you hate a caricature not reality.
While we're on the topic of hate, let's resolve this dishonest notion of hating ideas., not adherents. Since you think hatred is a rational course, do you or do you not hate those you consider "hateful, bigoted, misogynist, homophobic". Given your claim, it would be irrational not to. So, let's hear it, once and for all.
agbdf
(200 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)Stop being so dishonest just to shovel your false attacks.
You say my reasons for hating Islam are a "misunderstanding". You say there's solid reasons to oppose nazism. Is hating nazism bigotry? No? Oh, because there are solid reasons for it. Well then, I think you care about why someone opposes something, at least selectively.
If you want to label everyone bigots for a position no matter their reasoning, no one can stop you, nor the far right Christian fanatics screaming bigotry for every criticism of Christianity.
If you want to say that Islam is not misogynistic, hateful, bigoted, homophobic, etc., then get to it. There's plenty of explicit examples in its own texts that show it to be. I've pointed them out to you before, and you've said nothing. Proof certainly doesn't seem to sway you.
Hating an idea isn't bigotry. But that doesn't stop religion from trying to make it so, for itself only of course.
Hate is simply an adjective as I use it. It's a strong dislike. It's not a "course", it's a description. It's rational to strongly dislike certain things, but never people, IMHO. People are mostly a product of their environment. Hating a person for something they didn't have much choice over isn't rational. Hating the environment that leads people to act in harmful ways is rational, or the ideas that justify it and keep it going. People could always be very different if their environment changed, so hating them makes no sense.
Of course it's possible to hate ideas and not people. What's dishonest is to say the opposite. It requires a certain mind-reading ability. Do you dislike certain ideas? If so, you must dislike people, how mean of you rug. And if you strongly dislike any idea or belief, well, now you hate people, according to you. What bullshit.
rug
(82,333 posts)
MellowDem
(5,018 posts)Sweet dreams rug!
rug
(82,333 posts)
Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)lack of proof that their gods are real, and their archaic and primitive moral and ethical systems that give excuses to present day atrocities.
Generally these practices are limited to extremists, but a lot of moderates of these religions also give cover or excuses for these practices. The key difference is that many countries are run by or supported by Islamic extremists, so they are able to formalize and legalize their atrocities, something most Christian and Jewish extremists can't do, even if they try. Of course, there are exceptions, such as Uganda. But the key is this, its not that the Quran is any worse than the Bible, in all honesty it isn't, or that Islamic beliefs are more atrocious than Jewish or Christian beliefs, because they aren't, its the legal cover that occurs in many countries, and the extremists in Islam are, in general, better organized.
If, for example, pro-theocracy American Evangelical Christians were to become as organized as many Islamic terrorists or militant groups, they would be just as dangerous, and would be cutting off heads in the name of Jesus rather than Allah.