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I don't like black people because they're homophobic. What? Oh I can't criticize homophobia now? Ugh liberals, you're just giving black people special protections.
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Dec 14, 2015 20:15
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I'm sorry, let me rephrase. I don't like black culture because it's homophobic. That culture is incompatible with the modern world and needs to go...but of course you liberals are okay with homophobia if black people do it.
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Dec 14, 2015 20:56
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PT6A posted:I don't think it's fair to say you don't like black culture just because some elements of it are problematic and harmful to the black community as much as anyone else, but of course it's fair to criticize the problematic elements of that culture (homophobia, often aided and abetted by religious beliefs, being one significant problematic element). That doesn't mean the entirety of black culture needs to be eliminated, just like Islam's problematic elements do not mean that Islam itself is completely bereft of merit. Well sure, if your actual problem is homophobia and your critique is intended to advocate reform of the teachings of some Islamic sects and the legal systems of some Islamic countries that's not a problem, but some people use that criticism as an excuse for bigotry. Which is why I want to point out a couple of things here. One, there is no monolithic Islam, it's a religion of 1.6 billion people with many different sects over a large part of the globe and includes countries like Indonesia, Turkey, and Bosnia where homosexuality is 100% legal. On the other hand, you have Christian countries like Uganda, Ethiopia, and Russia where homosexuality is severely punished yet rarely do you hear people blaming a nebulous monolithic Christianity for this. Hell, even in the United States, several states still have laws against homosexuality on the books and only the federal government restrains state authorities from enforcing them. Two, gay rights weren't won in the west by attacking anyone's religion or saying Christianity is incompatible with modernity or anything like that. The gay rights movement didn't come out swinging against Christianity telling people their religion was the problem, because attacking people's religion isn't the way to get them to listen to you. LGBT people treated Christians as individual people with independent minds and appealed to them with out common humanity, that gay people are people too, that they're your neighbors, relatives, and friends and that homophobia was doing very real harm to ordinary people just like them. And that worked, a lot of Christians reevaluated what they'd been taught and reconciled their faith with their new realization that gay people aren't demonic perverts waiting in the shadows. Lumping them all together and saying "well your religion is wrong and you need to change it" probably wouldn't have been as effective and would have given ammunition to the conservatives who claim gay people are just out to fight Christianity.
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Dec 14, 2015 21:40
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PT6A posted:Yes; some people do. What I'm saying is that I'm sick of people assuming that I am as well, when I am not. Ironically, it would be like me assuming that any given Muslim hates gay people. No it's nothing like that at all. "Judging me for the content of my character, that's just like judging others for the color of their skin!" Islam isn't sacrosanct and above criticism, if the way you're criticizing it is getting reactions like "whoa that's a really unfair thing to say dude" then you should probably thik about the way you're coming across, not conclude that liberals love Muslims and are trying to silence all criticism of their favorite religion. I'm not accusing you of being a bigot because I don't know what you've said on the subject, but if people are having trouble telling what you're saying apart from what bigots say, maybe it's not just them. I notice you didn't address my point about how gay rights was actually won in the west, but if our goal is LGBT rights shouldn't we be concerned with how that was actually accomplished and whether targeting people's religion is effective. Do you think it would have been more effective for LGBT rights to lead with "Christianity has bad qualities"?
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Dec 14, 2015 22:07
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khwarezm posted:Homosexuality is not 100% legal in Indonesia, depending on where you live you can be subject to religious influenced laws that victimize it. It's still legal in a lot of places though so even if you're right it doesn't change the fact that lumping all Muslims together into a monolithic Islam isn't valid. khwarezm posted:I live in Ireland, which has had a long history of intense religiosity and slow progress on the LGBT front and I have to say that this is some serious whitewashing. Some of the most hardcore secularists and atheists I know tend to be queer people since they've seen that the biggest block against them generally came from the religious elements of the country. That's not to say that there are no religious gay people or anything but its usually not lost on people that progress on LGBT issues tended to correlate with the receding place of religion in this society. I didn't say that Christians could never be homophobic, I said that the gay rights movement focused on convincing people of our own dignity and letting them reconcile that with their faith rather than as a mass anti-Christian campaign. So I am skeptical when people wrap themselves in the flag of gay rights and slam Islam because while most gay people I know aren't very religious, I don't know any gay activists who spend their time attacking religion because gay rights activists are usually interested in affirming gay rights not tearing down other people.
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Dec 14, 2015 22:48
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khwarezm posted:True, the retreat of political religion in the west has been pretty great. These are arguments against theocracy, which are true, theocracy is bad no doubt about that. If you want to criticize certain sects or traditions in Islam that teach theocracy, that's a reasonable argument too. What wouldn't be reasonable is claiming theocracy is some problem inherent to Islam because that's just false historically (or at least it's no more of a problem in Islam than many other religions). Criticizing the repressive practices of some Muslim majority states without sounding like a bigot is fairly easy, as you're demonstrating here. And keep your standards consistent. At the very least, if you're going to criticize Muslims for having religiously influenced discriminatory laws as if that's some unique super-Islamic thing, pick something that large parts of the US didn't also criminalize for religious reasons only 12 years ago (and which still has majority support in the populations of those states, frustrated only because two anomalous presidential elections with a spoiler candidate resulted in a supreme court that was just barely willing to overturn its previous 1980s "gently caress the gays" decision in Bowers)
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Dec 15, 2015 02:43
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Omi-Polari posted:But Saudi Arabia also incubates and exports religious extremism into war-torn countries. It's not a coincidence Saudis make up the largest single group of ISIS suicide bombers. This is curious, why do you attribute the American politicians' refusal to criticize the Saudi monarchy or pressure their government to the apologetics of cowardly Islam-loving liberals rather than our decades-old military alliance with the Saudi monarchy that forms a large part of our strategy for projecting power in the Middle East and securing resources? And why do you think a Republican administration would take a hard line against the Saudis, I mean I know American politics is myopic and amnesiac and some people came of age after 2008, but it hasn't been that long: 
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Dec 16, 2015 04:55
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Jastiger posted:Hate crimes against Muslim people is retarded and racist. But saying Islam ought to be respected I'd retarded and dishonest. So while I don't think hate crimes are justified, pointing out how backwards Islam is is fair game. It's also hypocritical for Christians to do this since the same charges are at their feet as well Historically stamping out a religion all together has never been accomplished without doing hate crimes, ever, so if you're looking for a solution to the religion problem so effective that we'll never need another solution after that one
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Dec 16, 2015 05:39
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Nori_Takeshi posted:Not that there isn't a cultural aspect to religion, but last I checked people didn't become suicide bombers in the name of 'their culture.' Kamikaze pilots. I mean yeah they were Shinto and believed dead grandpa would be happy, but that's not why they did it.
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Dec 16, 2015 14:30
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Neil Robertsquote:On 18 November 1982, a suicide bomb attack was made against a facility housing the main computer database of the New Zealand Police in Whanganui. The attacker, a "punk rock" anarchist named Neil Roberts, was the only person killed, and the computer system was undamaged.
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Dec 16, 2015 14:48
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Ignacy Hryniewieckiquote:In February 1881 Hryniewiecki joined the bomb-throwing unit created to assassinate Tsar Alexander II. But he made fun of God and didn't say God doesn't exist so clearly it was religion that made this revolutionary socialist suicide bomber do it.
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Dec 16, 2015 14:56
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Dec 16, 2015 15:00
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Battle of Taierzhuangquote:Due to lack of anti-armor weaponry, Suicide bombing was also used against the Japanese. Chinese troops strapped explosives like grenade packs or dynamite to their bodies and threw themselves under Japanese tanks to blow them up.Dynamite and grenades were strapped on by Chinese troops who rushed at Japanese tanks and blew themselves up. During one incident at Taierzhuang, Chinese suicide bombers obliterated four Japanese tanks with grenade bundles.
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Dec 16, 2015 15:19
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 How the goalposts shift."Suicide bombers don't do it in the name of their culture, just religion. Oh okay well sometimes they do it for their nation, but religion influenced them all, you can't find any that were in no way influenced by religion. Well okay you can but not as many so they don't count!" So you realize that in 1920 we could be doing just the opposite, wringing our hands over anarchist bombings and lamenting that without the moral guidance of religion, people have no respect for life, not even their own and lack of religion is the culprit that must be stamped out, right?
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Dec 16, 2015 15:29
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Just say the arsonists were Christian therefore they were influenced by their religion
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Dec 16, 2015 15:41
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shrike82 posted:Kind of hilarious to see how far VitalSigns has to stretch to find incidents of non-religious inspired suicide attacks. The people who literally invented suicide bombings: "well now you're just stretching to ridiculous lengths, VitalSigns!" "Also, anyone who wasn't 100% atheist I am going to redefine as killing themselves in the name of religion no matter how obviously nationalist their motives"
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Dec 16, 2015 15:43
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Nori_Takeshi posted:Goalposts never shifted, your aim is just off. OK so socialist revolutionaries don't count because...? Anarchists don't count because...? Nationalist Chinese fighting foreign occupation don't count either because...? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Dec 16, 2015 |
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Dec 16, 2015 15:47
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Jastiger posted:I didn't say that. I'm saying that religious taboos make discussions even harder and are responsible for most of the silly cultural aspects we have today i.e unfair treatment of nudity in men vs women, abortion rights, sexual relations among the same sex, something as basic as teaching science in school. Stalin somehow managed to ban male homosexuality on penalty of hard labor and banned evolution in favor of Lysenko's bullshit all on his own without the TOXIC and EVIL and VILE corrupting religion rotting his brain.
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Dec 16, 2015 15:59
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The Nazis banned physics because it was too Jewish and enforced properly nationalist secular Deutscherphysik, giving them a massive technological advantage over the irrational Christian-dominated United States and their crazyman Einstein with his toxic belief in God, so it was no surprise that the 1943 atomic attacks on New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Boston knocked the US industrial machine out of the war and led to a quick capitulation.
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Dec 16, 2015 16:16
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Next up: freed of the shackles of dark-age religion by Chairman Mao, China's agricultural and industrial production are projected to soar
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Dec 16, 2015 16:21
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khwarezm posted:Einstein wasn't really religious in the way some people like to think he was. Besides Nazi Anti-semitism seemed to be more obsessed with the Racial aspects rather than the religious ones. Tei posted:My opinion is that communism was just a sort of religion. Ah okay, so if you do a suicide attack, no matter the reason, if you believe in a God or an afterlife at all then it was that pernicious religion that made you do it. But if you believe in God and make a scientific discovery, oh well then you're not religious at all! But if you're an atheist with an irrational anti-scientific taboo then whatever your convictions are is a religion. Okay I concede that starting from the definition "religion is that which causes all suicide bombings and all irrational anti-science taboos and can never coexist with scientific advances" then yall are perfectly tautologically correct.
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Dec 16, 2015 16:35
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Ddraig posted:They weren't, actually. They couched their violence in religious terms, but it's widely accepted that the actual conflict was secular in nature. There are people ITT who refuse to believe the Pacific Theater in World War 2 was secular in nature because it had kamikaze pilots therefore it must have been fought in the name of religion.
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Dec 16, 2015 16:43
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Tei posted:No, you can be a atheist with irrational taboos, yadda, yadda... that don't make you religious. I think.. Yes, now you're getting it. People are irrational, with brains evolutionarily hardwired to search for and find patterns even on incomplete information. Sometimes that means seeing a face on the moon and thinking it's a man, sometimes that means thinking a prayers and dances control the weather and reinforcing it when it appears to work and rationalizing it away when it doesn't. Sometimes that manifests by noticing religious people doing suicide bombings, concluding religion causes suicide bombings, then inventing a religious explanation for every suicide bombing to maintain the theory
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Dec 16, 2015 17:01
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Faith-based thinking is something humans do, that's why we create religions and superstitions about literally anything, including bizarre poo poo hanging a horseshoe above the door and avoiding black cats. You think religion causes faith-based thinking but its the other way around, and atheist regimes haven't shown themselves to be much better at avoiding magical thinking than religious ones. Say what you want about the Iranian government, but they never precipitated a famine because someone decided food crops would work together in class solidarity and not compete for resources and ordered everyone to plant the whole country's crop superdensely without bothering to check against reality.
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Dec 16, 2015 18:13
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Jastiger posted:Religion is an aspect of culture. I'm not saying that. I'm saying we shouldnt derive values, law, or norms from it. We should separate it out as a bad part of culture with little relevence. A nice myth to use as allegory and nothing more. You think religion is the cause of this, but it's not. Mythmaking is endemic to human thinking and it creates religion not the other way around, which is why when confronted with atheist regimes that have their own national myths and irrational taboos you No True Scotsman them into not being atheist after all, because your definition of "secular" is "things I like" and religion is "things I don't like"
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Dec 17, 2015 00:57
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Jastiger posted:Well, it does have a lot of passages about god creating life and you not being able to harm a hair on your head, and the extrapolations they get from there. No one accused anti abortion people of being rational or even honest. Yes they're irrational and dishonest because they've made up that abortion is murder from whole cloth, it's not supported anywhere in the texts, early Christian sects varied on whether they forbade it but the ones that did often treated it as a sexual immorality like pulling out or blowjobs and not like murder. And anyway when exactly a cell becomes a human being with rights and dignity is a philosophical question unanswerable by science, so there are plenty of atheists who also claim abortion is murder and for much the same misogynist reasons. In fact, the entire evangelical Christian opposition to abortion was invented in the 1970s as a Republican political strategy to find a wedge issue to grab religious voters who were drawn to the Democrats' message of economic justice. Ironically it completely failed to win over the Catholics who still vote majority Democrat (despite the Church's stance on abortion) but it flipped evangelicals (probably in combination with Nixon's anti-civil-rights dogwhistling). Abortion is a perfect example of how the literal interpretation of the text takes a backseat to other economic, cultural, and political factors. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Dec 17, 2015 |
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Dec 17, 2015 06:39
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MaxxBot posted:I don't think this is an accurate statement w/r/t homosexuality, there are many societies throughout history that have been accepting of homosexuality. This would only really apply if you were limiting your history to the past couple centuries. In the Mediterranean and Near East culture that Western Europeans share with Arabs and Iranians, prohibition of and bigotry against homosexuality is ancient and rooted in misogyny, that to be penetrated is womanly and disgraceful. It predated Islam and Christianity. Those scriptures have been a useful tool to justify homophobia that people absorbed from the culture, but they weren't necessary since the bigotry predated Rome's adoption of Christianity, and atheist regimes have found other reasons to ban and persecute it (naturalistic fallacy, it's a betrayal of one's duty to procreate for the race and the nation, it's a symptom of bourgeois decadence, whatever). You can watch people who have a cultural dislike of homosexuality point at a few lines in an old book, and then ignore the next few lines that condemn eating food that's popular and accepted in their culture, the literal words don't have the importance you think they do.
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Dec 17, 2015 07:15
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Jastiger posted:The idea of god or faith not so much. Its an unfalsifiable claim, ad unfalsifiable claims suck. Thou shalt not murder is unfalsifiable but I don't think it's a sucky rule E: And it's really weird that one post you're agreeing that religious law is malleable and arbitrary and changes with the times, then in the next you're saying religious laws are thousands of years old and believers refuse to question them VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Dec 17, 2015 |
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Dec 17, 2015 15:49
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Jastiger posted:A good rule, sure. We can forget that its broken over and over again in religious texts( really means thou shalt not murder who I want you to/ or its ok to murder heathens). It doesn't mean the way we get there is good. A society is stronger when people don't murder because they recognize why its wrong vs just doing/not doing something because someone told them to. All morality is unfalsifiable, there are no ethicons that you can collide in a big atom smasher to observe their fundamental constituents. That's what you don't get about religion, religion is a big-rear end false positive of human pattern-finding, it reforms itself all the time in response to changing cultural values because for most people god is just a post hoc justification for what they really want to do anyway. If we were talking about this in 1970 and I told you we'd live to see the day the Episcopal Church performs gay wedding ceremonies you'd call me crazy and tell me to stop fantasizing. Marketing works really, really well.
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Dec 17, 2015 15:59
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Tesseraction posted:Is that person who doesn't think they should vote enforcing a moratorium on them voting, or is it merely a personally held belief? What if the women were like Phyllis Schlafly, evil incarnate? I am in favor of barring all anti-suffragettes from the vote, and also banning Schlafly from holding a non-homemaker job. I think that's fair.
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Dec 17, 2015 16:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I get the sense that you are being ironic/sarcastic, but this argument is often made, both online and in the real world. Of course by the standards of this thread "but look what terrible governments some Muslim countries have," we can look at the behavior of atheist states like the USSR and the People's Republic of Kampuchea. And I don't want to hear about other historical, political, or economic factors; that's just apologism for atheists' bad morality and evil practices.
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Dec 18, 2015 10:54
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Tei posted:Just because somebody is atheist, it don't mean is rational. He or she can still be faith base. And people change. Somebody could have been rational in their teenager years, become atheist, then change and become irrational as he mature but still support atheism because is now his "religion". You know that being rational is hard, is a hard to do thing and many people lack the skill. You know because you have posted about it in this thread (If I am not mistaken). Oh interesting, so to explain someone's behavior we need to look at the society they grew up in, the beliefs they got from other places, the political situation in their country, and everything else and not just assume it's the atheism that made them do it. hm. Also interesting, people compartmentalize, what someone's (non)religion is tells you pretty much nothing about whether they'll approach a given empirical or moral question rationally or not, you don't say.
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Dec 18, 2015 13:43
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Jastiger posted:I agree but with one caveat about your part about the historical interpretation: Certain parts have always been considered canonical and literally true, namely the existence of Jesus, Jesus being the son, and the existence of some form of trinity. A lot of the rest has risen and fallen, but its important to note that there has always been (and almost has to be) a literal interpretation of religious texts. The difference in sects is often not so much interpretation but rather how much you consider to be literal. More a sliding scale than a modular choice. the trinity has always been canonically true, way to pick the most divisive issue in early Christianity, followed by the second most divisive issue (whether Jesus is the literal son of god and what that means or just a dude god liked a whole lot)So are you an Objectivist or something, the blathering about epistemology and the need to make confident pronouncements on things you know nothing about has a distinct Randian vibe.
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Dec 18, 2015 18:56
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