RE: Jeff Sparrow on the need to save ourselves from the sickishness of the New Atheists
March 18, 2016 at 4:12 pm
(March 18, 2016 at 2:20 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: The writer lost me when he started labeling Dawkins and Hitchens with left-wing approved insults. I have come to believe that reflexively calling others racist, bigoted homophobic, sexist haters use those accusations as cover for their irrational and hypocritical hate of those with differing opinions. Nevertheless, the New Atheists bore me to tears. I cannot take them seriously. Everything of theirs that I have read displays ignorance of the religious traditions that they criticize and their lack of self-reflection.
Exactly who have Dawkins, or Hitchens insulted? I can go with "offended" but as Hitchens put it "I hope I never unintentionally offend anyone". Bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and religiously justified violence DO need offending.
No it is not a reflex, it is an apt response to bullshit. Now, this is where my well intended PC atheists AND theists go wrong. THIS IS ABOUT logic, not human rights. And the kneejerk "bigot" slur is on the left's part to their own fellow liberals, like me, like Dawkins and Hitchens.
Liberal atheists DO NOT accuse all religious people of being bigots, but holy books do contain stories, depictions, and verses that allow other believers to come to different interpretations who DO use those claims as weapons that justify harm to their fellow humans.
The part the left misses, is that it is STILL the same umbrella religion, with the same characters both left and right worship. And with all the different versions of the bible and all the different sub sects of Christianity those different interpretations DO cause conflict to the point of harming others, via law and or violence.
How you wish others would behave does not change the positions they hold. How you wish others would pick up the same book you pick up and do things the way you do, because of how you interpret that book, DOES NOT CHANGE others see other things it it and justify their own morality WITH that same book under the same umbrella label.
No Christian reading this has any problem saying that the Quran is the same book BOTH Sunni's and Shiites use. So it stands to reason that a GOP voting Baptist Evangelical is STILL worshiping the same God and same Jesus that a liberal Obama voting baptist is, and still using the same version. Just like a liberal Catholic is still using the same KJV a conservative Catholic is.
As long as humans compete over the same religions an same books and insist on different interpretations it is most certainly a requirement to question, ridicule and even blaspheme, not to rid religion via use of force, but to keep it off it's pedestal. PC is what Iran is, PC is what Saudi Arabia is.
