COEXIST’s Bonehead Bumper-Sticker Politics

[unrepentant progress]

You think you're sending a hippie dippy message of peace, love, and understanding but you're just throwing down your gang signs.

But the Coexist bumper sticker mentality, shockingly, isn’t an antidote at all. It’s not even a harmless or naïve. It’s a symptom of a much larger phenomenon, one that makes it hard for Americans to talk seriously about religious conflict and history. That phenomenon is not limited to peaceniks with spiritual aspirations. It’s just as common among hardline atheists as it is in squishy interfaith circles. It is, essentially, the insistence on perceiving religious conflict as the clash of big, abstract beliefs, which people can choose to set aside.

In the mindset of the Coexist camp, those abstract beliefs have become twisted things, wrapped up with hate. If people could only renounce their hateful ideas, they could learn to love one another. “Why,” the implicit question here goes, “can’t we all just get along?”

In the view of certain atheists, those damaging beliefs have seized people’s minds. As I’ve written before, there’s a tendency among some atheists to think of religion as a kind of virus, or a dangerous philosophical infection—in other words, as an idea that hijacks minds. In this perspective, the question of religious violence is something like “Why can’t people free their minds from religion, and learn to get along?”

The problem, of course, is that politicized ideas—religious and otherwise—are entangled with material problems. The conditions of history, colonialism, poverty, and geography have left people with plenty of reasons to find it difficult to coexist. None of those reasons, at their core, have much to do with what is or is not written in a religious text, or whether a Jewish star can be made to look pretty next to a Muslim crescent on a bumper sticker.

Full post: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/21/coexist-s-bonehead-bumper-sticker-politics.html

[okasha]

1. Haven't seen the word "peaceniks" in a looooong time.

Now, as then it seems to be used as a slur by warmongers. The fact that it's used in ideological rather than physical conflict doesn't make it less hateful. Squelching ideas --isn't a good idea.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Oh, come on-- I got maybe halfway through...

this thing and his main point seems to be that a bumper sticker won't bring that whirrled peas we all want.

Of course it won't! It doesn't take a pompous article to prove that.

But it is a statement that many people want to make, and it's reasonable place to make it.

[peacebird]

3. Not sure why a bumpersticker asking all religions to Coexist brings out such rage in this author....

It seems a reasonable idea to me.....

[okasha]

4. The author seems to be unaware that the sticker

is intended for an American audience. We could use some "coexistence" right now-- and the dominos falling to equal marriage seems to indicate we just might be creating a bit of it.

[LiberalArkie]

7. I loved the whirrled peas

[silverweb]

5. I'd like those minutes back, please.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]What a complete waste of time and bandwidth.

[Cartoonist]

6. The author is a religious apologist.

Essentially, he is saying that the problems of the world are economic and geographic, and that religion has nothing to do with it. I see that attitude here on DU as well. While I agree that economics, water rights, population expansion, and a whole host of other problems are things that need resolution, it is the religious factor that often rears its ugly head to defeat any compromise or peaceful solution. Is it any wonder that atheists see religion as a kind of virus, or a dangerous philosophical infection—in other words, as an idea that hijacks minds?