Inspired by some of the discussion in this thread. I don't think it's appropriate place for that discussion there, but hey why not have a separate thread for it
If I think religion is not good in general, am I Reddit and cringe and basically Richard Dawkins?
Yeah lol, I'm in the replies there too.
My point is that it seems hypocritical for westerners to single out Islam, or otherwise imply that Islam is particularly bad, considering that the west (America) is the cause of so much of it. America has wiped out so many progressive or revolutionary Muslim states and installed repressive regimes in their place.
So if religion is to blame, then these are ultimately the crimes of Christianity.
But I don't think it's fair to blame religions. It seems imperialists could weaponize any belief system at all. Even the most innocuous religion, only preaching peace and love, could be co-opted and used as a smokescreen for endless bloodshed. That's kinda what happened with Christianity -- a pacifistic anti-imperialistic religion got co-opted by the empire it was resisting, and used to further imperial endeavors for centuries.
Or like in Dune, when the liberatory religion of the Fremen gets co-opted and used to launch the galactic jihad.
Practically speaking, I think being completely anti-religion is counterproductive, since the vast majority of people (especially in the global south) have some kind of religion. You have to meet people where they're at. Also, it's kind of a bad look when it's mostly militant atheists in the global north condemning the opiate of the masses.
It wasn't my intention to single out Islam or imply that it was somehow worse than any other religion, just note that we shouldn't be giving it a pass just because it's currently widely held among countries and peoples that are currently engaged in anti-imperialist struggle. It's also worth noting that these areas had secular socialist groups as well; Palestine had such groups until Israel decided to prop up Hamas as its preferred enemy. The Iranian revolution also had a mix of factions, not all of which were Islamist.
It's not like Christianity was the innocent victim here; the early Church was happy to go along with the Roman Empire so long as it got a favored position. The modern notion of Jesus as a peace-and-love proto-hippie is contradicted in many places in the Bible (generally the parts that get glossed over nowadays), and there's probably a reason why the current flavors of Christianity rose to dominance while the harder-to-corral gnostics were stamped out. I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that all religions are equal here - there's a reason we're not complaining about Zoroastrianism and Jainism right now - but it is my contention that religions tend to have common features that make them useful to imperialists, including a mandate to spread, the promise to followers of an afterlife that justifies the suffering incurred in this one, and a way to reinforce in-group/out-group divisions and paint the out-group as deserving of extermination and that the ones that are culturally dominant now have achieved that by successfully leveraging these ideas.
The idea that religion is too entrenched in the Global South to be deposed has a whiff of paternalism and glosses over the secular and indigenous religious movements that have had to struggle against the dominant, colonially-imposed religion. The construction "militant atheists" is also pretty rich given the explicitly religious coding of the recent major conflicts (Bush described the Iraq invasion as a "crusade") and that similar terminology was wielded against the "godless" USSR.
And then:
I think we largely agree.
My issue with the "militant atheism" (not meant pejoratively) is just when it's directed towards the marginalized or countries of the global south. I have no problem with implenting state atheism in the wake of the revolution. Even on reddit, it was fine when it was directed at Christian fundamentalists in America, who wield substantial power. There was a sinister rhetorical shift with the reddit crowd and now it's just Nazi shit.
I suspect the "gnostics" were much closer to the original ideas than the Nicaeans were. Also Jesus gives me some real apocalyptic cult vibes.
I kinda assumed things like indigenous religions would be included in the category of religion but I guess it's a good idea to make a distinction between organized religion centered on a strict institution like the Roman Catholic Church and disorganized (?) religion. I am mainly just acquainted with one form of European "paganism" and I don't really know much about pre-christian religion in general.
Agreed. I apologize if I've been overly combative. I've been seeing some surprisingly islamaphobic takes lately and may have overreacted.
I'm not even at all religious, and was myself one of those fedoralords. I just can't help but side with the underdog lol (it's why I side with the gnostics).
I agree that we agree. I also started out as a fedoralord so you have my sympathies, haha. I've observed a small but persistent tendency to fedorajacket on here so it's made me a little defensive on the topic, so I also apologize if I've been combative. I've been slowly drifting away from online atheist spaces so I might have missed some of the shift (although I was around for Elevatorgate and the conservative/progressive schism, so it's not like I've been totally unaware. Unfortunately it seems like the progressive voices in the movement are getting somewhat problematic, but that might just be my own leftward shift). I think there's still a major need for cultural projects and gathering spaces that don't rely on religion as a scaffolding but it seems like they've been difficult to make material outside of a few conferences and I'm not much of a conference-goer.
I have a bit of an underdog bias here, too. I don't think there's anything particularly special about indigenous belief systems but their persistence does illustrate that the Global South isn't monolithic in its belief systems and there have been strong movements to preserve cultures and belief systems in the face of persecution that I think (or at least hope) has resulted in more benign manifestations of belief than their culturally dominant counterparts. I was a major archaeology nerd when I was a kid so I knew about all the Egyptian deities and read a bunch of folklore. They all have their skeletons, but I think we can appreciate their contributions to cultural richness when we've reached the point where we can view them as fictions and lenses through which the world was shaped and understood.