apparently, evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick passed away last night
let us remember him by taking a moment to laugh once again at this classic
It brings me comfort tonight to know this sacrilegious Satanist is burning in eternal torment.
What I take from Chick’s and others’ condemnation af atheism as inherently amoral is that they themselves would do absolutely anything if they didn’t believe there is an all-powerful guy with a big stick standing behind them, and I find that terrifying.
Last original post for the day (sorry, I just have so much to say and add on to concerning conversations jumblr has had before I created this account)
But let’s talk about “Christian culture”
You know how you hear Christianized atheists try and say they “aren’t Christian/Christianized because you know they don’t believe in G-d”
And we, as religious minorities in the west, have to explain that that’s not how this works.
This is the problem with seeing religion as “just religion” and not a whole entire culture.
Ive seen secular people wear crosses (upside or downside doesn’t matter)
I’ve seen secular people say “Merry Christmas” and celebrate Christmas or celebrate Halloween
I’ve seen secular people give “something up for Lent” because “they need to be more healthy”
I’ve seen atheist people dress up as Jesus or the Christian European version of what people think G-d “looks like” or dress up to what Christians think the devil looks like
I’ve seen atheist LITERALLY GO TO CHRISTIAN PRIVATE school (source: me, I was the atheist that went to Christian school. Before you ask, no my mom was agnostic she had no interest in Christianity but saw it as better education and other reasons)
I’ve seen secular workers complain about how they don’t have Easter/Christmas off because you know, “everyone has off those time”
I’ve seen atheists literally trying to prostelyze their lack of religious beliefs to others.
I’ve seen many Christianized secular/atheist people do things that are inherently from Christianity or Christian centric, you know why?
Because, as religious minorities stress, religion IS NOT just “religion” something you can shed once you stop believing in it.
It is a CULTURE (especially ethnoreligions)
If you’re an atheist who was born into a Christian society, community, or family you do things you don’t EVEN realize stem from Christianity.
You will never ever be able to divorce yourself from that narrative.
ex-Christians who convert to another religion (like me) have incredible trouble already erasing and unlearning Christianized behavior. And some behaviors we may never unlearn
So it’s no wonder, that ex-Christian atheists are the same, in fact worse when it comes to Christianization. Many secular and atheists spaces in the west are in fact, Christianized, and have no want to unlearn Christianized behaviors. So many of you stop being religious and suddenly think “I’m not Christian anymore”
When that is not how it works
Christianized secular/atheist folk please realize: you can never EVER stop being christianized and that your form of secularity is in fact thriving and hasn’t been oppressed (at least compared to other religious minorities) for a long long time.
Sorry I had to be the one to explain to you that you benefit from other religious minorities oppression not because your secular but because you’re Christianized secular.
As an ex-Christian and Christianized atheist I can say 100% this is true in my case. It’s actually very interesting to observe all the ways I am culturally and spiritually Christian in my thinking. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being Christianized, but it is wrong to deny your own influences and gaslight religious minorities about the unthinking cultural dominance you assert over them. In the Western context this seems to be another case of cultural/religious privilege, in that people who are part of the dominant culture don’t have to think about their cultural influences and assume they are some kind of nonexistent “neutral” default.
The idea that I often see espoused that religion causes only strife and if we just got rid of religion, the world would be more peaceful is weird and wrong in a lot of ways, relies on a lot of magical thinking, and fuels the evangelical tendencies of a lot of especially culturally Christian atheists.
Keep in mind, I am a Jewish atheist. I don’t typically identify as an atheist, because my Jewishness is so important to me and because I am fairly observant, and because not believing in G-d does not preclude being a religious Jew as it would say being a religious Christian, but I do not believe in G-d. So I can say this as someone who explicitly rejects a supernatural origin for religion. If you reject that supernatural origin, you have to accept that religion is a human creation and arises out of human needs and desires. And even if you posit that it was made up by sinister figures to control and exploit potential followers, a position I think is laughably naive and completely unrelated to how humans work, then you have to conclude that both those evil puppeteers have non-religious motives, and their followers are getting some kind of psychological need filled. So religion is something people adopt for human reasons.
Violent religious ideologies are also adopted for human reasons that have nothing to do with religion making people crazy or violent. For example, Islamic extremism arises primarily as a response to the effects of colonialism, poverty, and a pervading sense of hopelessness, both in the Middle East and Asia, and in ghettoized immigrant communities in Europe and North America. Although this response is religious in nature, this religiosity is only a veneer over an attempt to fight back and to give their lives a sense of meaning in the face of seemingly insurmountable opposition, and these desires would not disappear or grow less destructive if tomorrow every Islamic extremist were hit with the atheism stick.
Atheistic and secular ideologies have been plenty violent in the past and still are in the present, so we know that any ideology, whether it includes an appeal to divine authority or not, can be used to promote violence or to encourage adherants to respond to percieved threats with violence. Yet to hear some atheists describe it, religion in their minds seems to be a supernatural force that can take over people and make them violent, and if we just conquer this scourge, the world will be at peace. This fairy tale helps explain why many atheists, mostly Western culturally Christian atheists, replicate the Christian need to evangelize. If Christians believe they are keeping the people they are trying to convert from going to hell, these atheists believe that other people’s religiosity brings war and violence to the world and they must convert people to bring peace. Either way, it comes down to the same obnoxious inability to deal with the fact that other people believe differently from you, which strangely enough is the very thing that’s supposed to make religious people so violent and warlike.
White evangelical atheists are just Christians who found a new devil in religion.
And you know what? All of you atheists who bought into the line that religion is the font of all evil and acted like anti-religious regimes could never be evil on par with religious ones? From the bottom of my atheist heart to each and every one of you, get fucked.
The thing that I hate about atheism as a movement is that it doesn’t just want to critique the hegemony of Western Christianity, it wants to kill spirituality. There is no joy, there is nothing about it that isn’t founded in a pessimism that sees itself as so self-important that it cannot exist outside of destruction. The face of atheism is a white male disgruntled ex-Christian who decided that if he can’t find joy in religion, then nobody else can. There’s a leftover missionary sensibility to “enlighten” people to atheism that exposes itself as racist, antisemitic, and islamophobic, that’s ultimately not unlike the dominance exerted through colonial Christianity
Every butthurt atheist on this thread who’s going #NotAllAtheists and whining about how this isn’t them needs to shut up and learn to read. OP specifically said atheism AS A MOVEMENT, that is the New Atheist/anti-theist assholes who spend all their time shitting on religions and religious people. Not all atheists are part of that movement; I hope most of us aren’t and we are by and large nice and reasonable people, though you’re certainly making me doubt that last part. If it’s not about you then it’s not about you, like Jesus H. Christ get over yourselves.
This is why Mr. Fry will always have a seat at my table.
Amen.
I was having a conversation about religion with this guy and he asked me what I would do if I got into heaven and had to sit next to God. I told him I wouldn’t take the seat.
i have no issue with atheism as a concept but if you mock people who rely on their god to help them get through hard times, you are trash and you are not nearly as intelligent as you think you are
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was not a perfect show but its treatment of imperialism, war crimes, and genocide was light-years ahead of some of the stuff coming out today (looking at you, Star Wars).
In DS9:
Bajor, a world struggling to recover from decades of genocidal colonial policies, is front and center
Bajoran characters, most prominently Kira, are allowed to grapple with their own trauma and their stories don’t revolve around making their oppressors, the Cardassians, feel better
Kira’s history of violent resistance against the occupation is not sugarcoated, nor does the show shy away from the fact that she hurt innocent people in the process. But neither does the story condemn her for using violence to resist genocide
Not only was Kira a terrorist, but a religiously driven one as well. Belief in the Prophets held Bajor together during the occupation, and is a major subject of exploration in the show
Despite all that Bajor suffered, Bajorans are not relics of the past or a destroyed, defeated people–their culture is vital and alive, they are rebuilding against incredible odds, and are working toward Federation membership
Bajorans themselves are not some misty spiritual cardboard cutouts, either. They are complex, they lash out, they are spiritual, they are lovers, killers, reactionaries, weirdos, mystics, the full range of experiences and personalities
And then there’s Kai Wynn, who is an entire book in herself. She is such a well-drawn female villain, a complicated portrayal of self-serving ambition, self-deception, and self-entitlement
Because Bajorans are given their own stories, it actually works when some Cardassians–generally minor and one-off characters–are shown to be dissenters, or themselves traumatized from the occupation
We actually see Dukat, the leader of the occupation, trying to play the misunderstood hero/redemption card only to get slapped down by the narrative time and again
Dukat isn’t a one-note villain either; he is often charming and sometimes inspiring, as when he has a stint as a resistance fighter himself against the Klingons occupying Cardassian territory
Ultimately, though, the story reveals Dukat to be a liar, a virulent racist, an abuser, and at heart an imperialist megalomaniac who almost destroyed the Alpha Quadrant with his lust for power
David Brin was right and Star Trek is better
Can we also mention the fact that (spoilers) Bajor never joins the Federation? Which isn’t to say the Federation were secretly evil (although, at various points during the 7 seasons, they totally were), but rather that the Bajorans had a right to self-determination, and that while they’d been broken by the Cardassians, they didn’t need to join the Federation to become whole again. It was a rare story beat, as usually cultures either join the Federation and presumably live happily ever after, or refuse to join the Federation in order to retain some (almost always) regressive, oppressive, or barbaric aspect of their culture.
The fact that the Bajorans were not only a highly spiritual culture (something extremely rare in what we see of the Star Trek universe), but were also never criticized or demeaned or looked down on for their choices was kind of awesome. I am an atheist through and through who loves the secular vision of humanity that Star Trek represents, but it’s also deeply satisfying when the Federation lives up to its actual mission statement of helping other cultures without assimilating them, or othering them from their own traditions.
I was a little bummed when I saw that one of the novels had written that Bajor eventually joined the Federation, because it felt so anticlimactic to everything that had happened in DS9. Bajor was its own thing–they were flying in space when our captains were still dying on transatlantic sea trips. We were just there to help them out after a horrible tragedy, not use that as an excuse to add them to our ever-expanding network of planetary satellite states. Sisko understood that, in the end.
I thought Bajor was determined to join the Federation and it was only Sisko’s vision that caused it to delay at literally the last minute? The Prophets commanded the delay for Bajor’s self-preservation and not for deeper philosophical and religious reasons, as I recall, because by not being a member of the Federation Bajor could maintain neutrality when Starfleet was forced to vacate DS9 and the Dominion/Cardassia took over. That episode was a gripping take on the conflict between rationality and spirituality, something I agree with you is a rare and refreshing take for Star Trek. Sisko’s whole arc was great for that reason, really.
I agree Bajor doesn’t need the Federation to be whole but there were benefits to joining that it decided it wanted, like the military aid and those sweet sweet trade deals. The only other time Bajor’s future with the Federation was in doubt, and which would have been in the direction of “refus[ing] to join the Federation in order to retain some (almost always)
regressive, oppressive, or barbaric aspect of their culture,” was when the planet toyed with the idea of returning to a caste system which indeed would have axed any possibility of Federation membership. I think we can all agree that Kira not making any more sculptures was a mercy, though. Also this is totally shallow, but my God she looked good in a Starfleet uniform.
I think one of the major questions that DS9 explored was whether the Federation is a colonializing or assimilating force. At least in theory it fully respects all its member worlds’ beliefs that are not oppressive (see caste system, above), but another thing I loved about the show was its sharp critiques of the Federation from all directions, from disillusioned former Starfleet officers to characters like Quark from non-Federation worlds. You can also see how overbearing the Federation’s worldview is when Sisko, effectively a convert to the Prophet faith, constantly has to choose between being a Federation officer and being the Emissary. As another atheist who really likes the secularism of the ST world, I also loved this critique of the Federation’s secularism and its narrowness.
I tried to read the novels but found the first book too boring, so nothing that happened in them is canon as far as I’m concerned. I liked A Stitch in Time but that’s about it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Bajor joining the Federation, but it would be even more interesting if they decided it wasn’t who they were. It would be a breath of fresh air, I agree, if a democratic world that isn’t “evil” in some way decided the Federation wasn’t for them.
L.J.'s Obsessions 