I apologize for all the trouble I've brought in terms of our discussions on religion and New Atheism. It's just a topic that if you did not tread carefully that can cause a lot of trouble for yourself as well as to those who are reading your posts or responding to them.
Just be careful people. And I know that you don't mean to be denigrating to Muslims, in general
@WotanArgead . Let's say that this is my "Asian values" kicking in in terms of dealing with this and with you.
Let's say that you are attacking religion in a wrong way but we understand what you are trying to say. But it doesn't work like how you explain it. Partly because you are using the wrong sources, giving wrong examples, and quoting the wrong people. And you coming out as a bad person without you meaning it.
Let me explain this too as part of addressing the general audience. I know that you will not agree with these viewpoints
@WotanArgead , but there is definitely an understanding of where you are coming from. However, you are coming off as bigoted, without you knowing it. And that's unfortunate.
That's why
@CalBear stepped in and made a warning to you, and indirectly, to all of us here if we are going to put this out of hand. Please do not feel bad about the warning.
For the masses....
Richard Dawkins is simply unqualified to give us a rightful explanation about what religion is to people. I suggest that you expand your knowledge on rationalism.
I may be biased here, but this is really what you get from lacking knowledge about class and dialectical materialism. I say this not because I am a Marxist. I am not, but I recognize the contributions of Karl Marx and see a lot of what he wrote to be relevant today as during the time they were written and published. And it's not just him.
This may be a fairly liberal-progressive forum in many political and cultural issues by American standards but using words like "Muslim countries" or "Islamic countries" or even "radical Islam" just doesn't work. This is not CNN or something. I just remembered that interview of Reza Aslan by CNN commentators. This is coming from a supposedly fairly "liberal" (corporatist liberal) channel. I cringed at it so much. Almost as bad as that Fox News interview.
Turkey, Tunisia, and Indonesia is just so different from Saudi Arabia and UAE that it just doesn't work. It's stereotyping a religion of more than 1 billion adherents coming from various countries, traditions, ethnic backgrounds, etc. Be careful, especially those who are so full of their Eurocentrism and "Western civilization is superior to others" believers that they don't realize it. This can become too unconscious to Westerners as white privilege is to whites, especially to Caucasian males.
I speak of this as a cultural Christian from the Third World belonging to one of the most emasculated males in the world, thanks to Western media. I may believe in that unexplainable supernatural and extra-sensory force that binds our Multiverse that the only word that's easy to use for me is "God" but I know my Jesus that I can admire (not worship) as an illiterate human Palestinian Jewish ethno-nationalist that is a semi-capable doctor for the very poor and a poor laborer (not a damn carpenter) who is simply one of the many ethno-nationalist liberation leaders of his time and even one of the most unpopular ones. That's documented. His followers in the Gospels in comparison to followers of other self-proclaimed "Sons of God" and zealots. He preaches in the countryside of Galilee for most of his ministry after all. He's not known. Biblical scholarship is a bit divided on the actual existence of Historical Jesus because it cannot be completely proven but the person's existence is very likely, given the background of who this person in the context of the place and time he is living in. He's simply an unremarkable individual. But it does not mean that those events in the Gospels all happened. Most likely, it's very few of them that most likely happen. But that can't be fully proven either. Documents on first century AD Palestine may be plenty but Jesus is not a special figure in his place and time and almost worth not mentioning in official documents. He's just one of those many other rabble rousers from poor Jewish background. And history is always written by the victors after all. Jesus is not a victor for that time period. The cult of Jesus was also almost not worth mentioning and Jesus was only mentioned in passing by a clearly disbelieving Jewish historian exiled in Rome decades after Jesus' crucifixion. It's also an indirect reference, because the reference is to his biological brother (yes!) that was the leader of the Jerusalem Church before the Jewish exile. He's one of those exiled by 70 A.D. anyway.
Most New Atheists does not understand this, at all, in their desperation to find material and physical meaning to such a collapsing civilization we are living in. This is part of being trapped in the neoliberal economic paradigm. This is also how I can see these atheists as being bad environmentalists and restorers of Mother Nature. It's not just the Christian fundamentalist lobby that's problematic.
There is simply too much toxic false debate between the role of science and religion today.
Nevertheless, I can recognize the historical Jesus as that admirable but crazy guy that preaches a reversal of the social order and it's far from an inclusive social and cultural egalitarianism, he's not a communist, and being so arrogant in his quest to decide out of the blue to march as a king-liberator to Jerusalem, proclaiming his presence to the authorities, and disturbing the financial transactions of Palestine's Wall Street that the Sanhedrin elites, including a blood-thirsty tyrannical Roman governor that supports them, finally ended the madness of Yeshuah and executed him. He's such a country bumpkin.
I may actually be offending more Christians by my statements than what atheists can. I sounded so heretical because I am turning their Jesus as Christ into a Jesus the normal human. At least atheists will argue against God by seeing their version of Jesus as Jesus the Christ and Jesus, the founder of Christianity and then fight that kind of Jesus.
You are not going to win that debate. It's mostly because many atheists of today look at religion in the same wavelength that religious people do. It's so wrong. And New Atheists do it so exceptionally well that it's so bad.
This is how I bemoan the fact that there's no proper religious instruction in the public educational system. This is the separation of church and state thing. However, we really need that religious instruction in terms of students gaining a basic academic understanding of what religion is. It's about studying religion in an academic manner as a social scientist studies it, not as part of promoting it. It's not theology. It's religion. Americans need to change the conversation about school prayer and religious instruction in schools before it's too late. It may very well be.
Many New Atheists also don't understand that many people on their quest to find God upon discovering that "unexplainable" (I have one and I can't explain it myself) studies religion
as it is and then find that there's
no God in there and the God they've understood or this unexplainable that they tried to rationalize by finding a religious outlet does not actually exist.
Because that God does not exist. But there's that unexplainable and unrationalized part of our existence that you can't get off that the only outlets of expression is religious expression. Roman Catholic Christianity is the most convenient and accessible one for me, because I am from a Catholic family living in a Catholic dominated country so I stayed a Catholic. And there's a stigma of putting "none" in application and registration forms that even my atheist friends put "Muslim" or "Catholic" there.
Going back, and that's where the word "faith" comes in, which I classify not as irrational but as
non-rational. Once you get in that direction, you will find it hard to blindly follow your own religion while still continuing to practice that religion and then you also dropped all those religious prejudices.... because you can see religion as it is. New Atheists can't do this. And Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher...They are one of the best examples of it. If you are really an atheist, you are not going to be such an Islamophobe and just use the word "Muslim countries" and "Muslim people" so loosely as if they mean anything relevant to attacking Islam. You are not attacking Islam. You are only making it stronger in its most extreme.
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@Alexander the Average
I get what you are saying. That's one good example you've given us. The entire eugenics thing and transhumanism looks partially repulsive even to a self-proclaimed left communist like me. But it's understood given the context of how things developed. That's what I am talking about. Because the entire cute world building in this thread makes the entire thing of moving to Reds! America so appealing that I am frustrated of why people can't see it that it makes the Cold War so finished in favor of the Comintern by 1975. We are forgetting the fact that we need to make capitalism a bit more appealing as well and the make communism a bit more repulsive, but for our eyes in general from out here in our timeline,
we need both sides to be equally repulsive though they are going to be seen in different dimensions.
We need to borrow a bit from Archangel Michael's AJND works. The US there looks so good to move in...but wait....wait. It doesn't look all that good...but it's passable.
We need to have that impression. If Male Rising and AJND can do it for a mostly liberal-progressive readership, we need Reds! to be that for its core left communist - anarchist readership, because Reds! tilts in that direction ideologically.
Basically...we, who are the communists, need to feel a bit bad that Soviet Americans can do things...like something. All that dominates me now is that the UASR is amazing and utopian, even though I know it's not. But it doesn't appear to be that.
Tell me your impressions on that.
And that's the problem.
Sure, the entire Cold War was about a gradual triumphant march of international communism throughout the world and the decline of capitalism and materially speaking, it's amazing, but people do not get the context of how Soviet America
does not look communist in a way that it can be hated and justified to be destroyed on the capitalist side to protect their beloved system against. That communism is truly such an authoritarian and totalitarian system. There's no vibe like that. It's even worse that it's the Internet Age and the language differences almost do not matter because Britain and America speaks the same language, as if it does not matter.
That's why I find the AH.com discussions that were made up so funny.
The Third Worldism in the communist struggles that's so OTL are also transplanted so easily ITTL's 21st century as if it's totally fine.
The entire world building for Soviet America became a Eurocentric economic and social liberalism, capitalist consumerism, civil libertarianism and methodological individualism in Reddish clothing. Yes, we can have elements of those things...that's part of the lower stage of communism....but not to this extent. It's not this way. Where does the struggles of transition to pure world communism shows up? There's nothing there. The pop culture are carry-overs from OTL.
I understand that it's almost unimaginable to think about though. I find it hard myself.
We are all struggling about this. And we're still in 1942. And even the cannon is so incomplete in many ways outside Western Europe and North America.
But I recognize our deficiencies. It's too much progressivism and liberalism.
Socialism is not progressivism. Socialists do not see the world in the context of continued upward technological and social progress from a darker ancient past with temporary setbacks from backward elements but then the march of progress continues. It's technocratic. If it is so easy as that, we shouldn't be in our current 21st century Gilded Age with prospects of global change and continued survival so slim that we may not make it out. It does not work like that. Rationally speaking, we should still be living in an era of strong welfare states with a Green New Deal for everybody. But it's not that. But we are made to think like that and it reflects in our creations here. I admit it to myself as well. This is also what separates New Atheism and the respected atheist and anti-religious part of socialist tradition if I can return back to that topic.
I am sorry if I am not very helpful in this myself. I wish that I can. But I find myself inadequate to face the task and lead the way. I don't even know if I should and if I am qualified or capable. So, I am sorry about this.
I wonder how
@Jello_Biafra sees this now. I want her honest opinions. But I guess she can't be bothered by this.
This entire thing is just for fun after all.
). You can then touch on LGBT.
