Islam

[Belacqua]

Remember that not too long ago, even the Western world was guilty of extreme prejudice against homosexual people (and still are in some respects).

This has been a remarkable change for me. I'm old enough to remember when anti-gay prejudice was widespread and unashamedly expressed. 

The interesting thing is that the most adamantly anti-gay people were the "conservatives" who were concerned about preserving "Western values." Now the "Western values" people use anti-gay prejudice in the Middle East as proof that "the West" is superior, because we are all so tolerant. They were dragged, kicking and screaming, toward tolerance, and now they barely remember that it hasn't been eternal. 

This forum is educational for me, because all the other English-speaking circles I participate in are more progressive. The kind of unashamed anti-religion bigotry that Sungula and others here express would be cringe-making in progressive circles -- or seen as downright dangerous. Trump-like.  

I suspect that in a couple more decades the anti-religion bigotry will be seen in the way that anti-gay or anti-Jewish bigotry is viewed today. (That's if we can keep going forward.) 

Mostly I'm in touch on line with progressives and scholars of various types. These are the people who were earliest in overcoming their gay prejudice. When I worked in the art world in NYC in the 1980s, it was more common to be gay than straight. We figured out when I was working at the Cloisters (the Metropolitan Museum's medieval branch), that I was the only straight white man on staff at the time. Few of these people are strongly religious themselves, but they find Dawkins-type atheism childish and anti-Muslim speeches ignorant. 

Now that I think of it, the only deeply religious guy I'm in touch with is a Jewish gay man. He was Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend for a long time. He teaches advanced mathematics for a living, and is also a deeply knowledgable Dante scholar. Just a splendid guy. So we can see that he's not prejudiced against STEM, homosexuality, or other religions. And his Jewish values are for him a light and a guide, and for me to say to him that theism is foolish would be unthinkable.