In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city became the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council. They viewed the power shift and diversity as a meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
Never trust someone religious. By definition they are ruled by fairy tales, and that’s not a rational approach to living.
I meannnnn…I’m an atheist, but how is this any better or more productive than a religious person saying never to trust one of us?
It’s not, confrontational comments like that come from a place of pain. When you see smug assholery about religion and coming from an American, 99% of the time it’s coming from someone who got treated like shit by their evangelical parents. Comments like the one you responding to aren’t really an expression of opinion; if you could translate it into its most basic form, all it actually says is “fuck you, dad”.
I was once a fundamentalist Christian. After a long and difficult process I deconverted and became a very vocal atheist. One of the “all religion is horrible” types. But at some point I realized that I had never abandoned my fundamentalism. I had only changed the flavor of it from religious to nonreligious. I still dealt in extreme beliefs with very little room for questioning and nuance.
It was when I introduced that nuance into my thought process that my worldview genuinely changed. I’ve come to understand that most lines you can divide people on will have well intentioned people and sinister people on both sides. I have met so many delightfully kind and welcoming religious people in addition to all the terrible ones I’ve known. They’re generally in different circles, but not always. It does us a mental disservice to think in such black and white ways.
The same can be applied to arguments. It is possible for two sides of an argument to have genuinely good points. It’s possible for an argument to not have a “good” side. And of course it’s possible for an argument to have a completely good side or a completely bad side. The point there is that I think we should think critically and dissect arguments and look for good faith arguments and bad faith arguments. We should understand that things aren’t always going to be easy to make decisions on and that’s okay. It’s okay to struggle with an issue and admit that you don’t have an answer to every question.
Religion is a great example. Nobody can prove something that isn’t provable. You can think that religion is sinister for that reason, but I think that does a disservice to religious people. I don’t believe in God. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to believe in God if I’m being honest with myself. But I haven’t forgotten what it was like to believe and I don’t blame people for finding comfort in it. Who can blame people for searching for a little bit of hope? I don’t think it matters to many religious people whether they can prove their beliefs in God because for them it’s not really about believing in the “objective truth” but rather clinging to hope for a bright future in a very dark world. And those hopes don’t need to be attached to bigotry like so many religious people have unfortunately done.
The same is true for ideologies. It’s the same irrational approach imo.
Depends on the ideology.
also depends on the religion.
I honestly can’t think of a single organised religion that hasn’t had atrocities committed in its name (or encouraged adherents to commit atrocities). A lot of unorganised religions and spiritualities also encourage/require some abhorrent shit too, such as genital mutilation or the use of human body parts in certain folk magics.
I honestly can’t think of a single organised religion that hasn’t had atrocities committed in its name (or encouraged adherents to commit atrocities).
it’s just flatly true of religions and ideologies. there are bad people who adhere to everything—you can’t avoid that, so it just doesn’t make sense to really analyze it from this dimension. if you want to make a useful critique of either i think you have to actually weigh the scope and scale of the atrocities somehow.
Unitarian Universalists. Quakers. Zen Buddhists probably?
Quakers invented solitary confinement which isn’t quite a war crime but it’s not exactly great.
By this logic, it only takes one bad apple to spoil the name of a group, but that bad apple isn’t necessarily representative of or indicative of the whole group.
sure, we could argue about who’s bad apples are more rotten, but what’s the point? humans are fallen and imperfect, so it’s no surprise that groups of humans are also imperfect.
I guess the next question to ask, is the group defined by the actions of it’s bad apples, or by the principles it claims to stand for?
It’s especially difficult to argue against supernatural beliefs. It means they don’t even have to pretend to care about reality.
You have too much faith in humanity. Blind, irrational devotion to your beliefs with no regard for reality is not exclusive to religion. Browse a conservative forum for a few minutes and you’ll come across plenty of atheists who also have fundy-esque devotion to nonsensical right-wing concepts like trickle-down. Not even cults have to be religious: just ask people who believe in the Jason Fung Diet or chronic lime disease why they think the scientists are wrong. Religion is just a means to an end for most dogmatists, their real god is the dogma itself.
The distinction is meaningless. A zealot is a zealot.
Dude I don’t want an any religion majority council.
That does sound like something an ethical AI would say
“Same bigotry, different religion”
Hard-core Muslims and Christians should really drop all pretense and just get together on an island somewhere and create their perfect little backwards community, they have much more in common than the rest of civilized society.
Please no, we have enough trouble with them while they’re fighting each other. And you know they won’t be happy until everyone is under their thumb
Wow what a shock, religious people using it as an excuse for their bigotry? Who could have ever guessed that this could happen!
i think this line of thinking is easily the least useful anti-theist critique you can make of religion. even if we dispensed of all religion, spirituality, and superstition, most people would still be fundamentally irrational actors. religion might influence the ways in which they are and how that practically manifests—but let’s be clear, most people do not even come close to having a coherent moral system or set of beliefs and that wouldn’t even if you made them blank-slate irreligious people. the problem you are describing is not a religious problem, and it would exist even if we had no religion.
EDIT: fyi this post was attached to something previously but something fucked up happened so it’s totally context-less now lol. upvote if you will but this makes no sense in the context it’s now being displayed in
religion is what gives them cause to act on their shitty way of thinking. It gives them an excuse that they can then go to sleep thinking they’ve done right.
Without religion society would come down so fucking hard on them for their shitty ass views… Sadly lots of people are religious so even those that don’t agree, agree that it’s against god or w/e stupid ass shit they come up with.
you’re just describing being an asshole here, which is not religion exclusive. how would your point—which appears to be this is some unique property of religion—reconcile someone like Mao Zedong? Mao was not a religious person in any meaningful sense of that word. he renounced Buddhism and was basically an anti-theist (and/or at least an atheist) for most of his life, and in fact presided over one of the largest systematic destructions of religious heritage in modern history during the Cultural Revolution.
Sure, people of all types can be awful, but there’s definitely trends within an organizations history from which a larger effect can be seen. Religion isn’t needed to be an asshole, but the venn diagram overlap is rather large. If you’re looking at things structurally, religion is often used as a tool of population management and often times goes hand in hand with imperialism. Everything from the Kamloops massacre and genocide to the undertones of homophobia in dancehall music often times comes from religious values imposed by authority figures.
Sure, there are philosophies such as liberation doctrine and the like that seek to make religion as a means to lift people from oppression, but if you take a large look at the effects of organized religion, that is very clearly the exception to the norm. Organized religion is often used as a structural hierarchy to dictate and govern morality, which is why it shares a lot with authoritarians that want to set up strict hierarchies of other means.
Theres ways to practice religion in non-assholish ways, but the religion itself, especially those with more organization in their structure, absolutely to spreads hate and vileness
Sure, people of all types can be awful, but there’s definitely trends within an organizations history from which a larger effect can be seen.
the contention here is not scope or scale or anything of that nature, it’s literally whether this is an intrinsic and unique property of religion—and it’s not, thus it’s bizarre to pretend that if we didn’t have religion suddenly people would cease acting irrationally, or cease acting shitty, or whatever else. you, in your post, literally agree with this and admit people of all types can be awful and irrational, so i don’t know what your disagreement here is.
well currently in the US religion is fighting progress and religion is what half the bills in Texas that just passed were based on. Abortion is sceince, but religion is what has caused it to lose legality. Religion ignores science. Same thing going on with climate change… religion says humans aren’t doing this… Science disagrees, but here we are.
So yeah religion is the thing. not just being an asshole. It’s written into the various religions (who all think the other is wrong by the way) that this is the way to be. To deny science is the right choice of action for them.
Irrational, yes, but not fundamentally so. Without supernatural beliefs, they’d have to at least think that they care about empirical reality. Their beliefs would be falsifiable, whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not.
When you throw religion into the mix, though, you can’t even guarantee that much. Were the beliefs of Heaven’s Gate wrong? I’d like to think so. Can I prove that? Not in the slightest, because supernatural beliefs like their founders’ “revelations” are fundamentally unfalsifiable. For all we know, there’s still a chance they were right, and that all 8 billion of the rest of us are still under the thumb of the “Luciferians”.
That fundamental inability to be reasoned with, which I would consider fundamentally irrationality, is unique to supernatural beliefs. Even if they don’t take it nearly as far, it’s still a concern I have with other religions. I’d like for people’s moral
beliefsjudgements to at least be ostensibly possible to reason with.EDIT: “belief” is a bit too nebulous on second thought.
Irrational, yes, but not fundamentally so. Without supernatural beliefs, they’d have to at least think that they care about empirical reality. Their beliefs would be falsifiable, whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not. […]
That fundamental inability to be reasoned with, which I would consider fundamentally irrationality, is unique to supernatural beliefs.
i just do not think this at all nor do i think falsifiability is a meaningful consideration in this conversation (because people do not care about falsifiability, i’m sorry. to my knowledge this is well studied and the bulk of those studies show that proving someone wrong seldom influences their opinions in any meaningful way). you don’t even have to get harmful here: just try reasoning with a person who thinks Pluto should still be a planet at this point about why it isn’t. there is no rational underlying justification to continue to believe this, yet people will go so far as to say the Whole of Science got it wrong and there is no argument you can make to convince them. people will gladly die on fundamentally irrational hills and fundamentally be incapable of being talked out of defending those hills with or without religion. this is not a supernatural thing.
I agree that people cant really be convinced by proving them wrong on the spot. However, if someone is just a little bit interested in being rational, then after going home over time they will think about that question again and again, until they resolve that dissonance, not necessarily, but potentially by changing their mind. I would assume that this would be somewhat hard to study, but if you have some good resources on this im interested. Its just that when people constantly hear from their leaders that faith is a virtue and even more virtuous when practiced despite strong evidence to the contrary (i was raised christian, and i experienced this there, i would assume its somewhat similar in Islam), then they will be a lot less likely to go through this.
I’m from MI, nonreligious, and I live in an area with a decent Muslim population. This wasn’t inevitable. There are a lot of places across the state, and across the country, that really rely on these sorts of coalitions of voters to stand against conservative strongholds. Religion aside, it’s just a bad political move. They’ve splintered their supporters and really raises the question of if they can keep their gains. Really a damn shameful “cut off the nose to spite your face” situation.
Religion-driven identity is literally toxic to humanity.
“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”
Let’s see what happens when this Muslim majority council calls for solidarity against discrimination of Muslims.
People victim of discrimination based on religion deserve to be defended. At the same time this council deserve to be recalled they were threatening others’ right not too long ago. A little shaming won’t hurt and hopefully would make them rethink their stance.
A recall is necessary but I highly doubt anything will be learned. Religion fosters absolutist-type thinking, and expecting Muslims to be an exception to this just because Christians don’t like them is absurdly silly.
Not all Muslims agree with them, of course. These are conservative Muslims. “Rights for me and not for thee” is a right-wing trait, regardless of religious belief or heritage.
The vast majority of religious people are ideologically conservative though.
I don’t think that’s true? It might be true of USian Christians because the Christian right has run riot there for the last 40 years. But I don’t think it generalises?
There is a Christian right in the UK but they’re not really that prominent outside of the Northern Irish context (where they are sadly all too prominent). I think most British people would associate Christians with feeding people, and cardigans. Our Christian churches are mulling over whether to perform same-sex marriages, not trying to ban them for everyone.
And the UK Muslim vote is firmly on the ‘left’, of course. But I don’t know how that breaks down by heritage vs belief (or centre vs actual left).
I’m not exclusively talking about the USA. I live in the UK myself and I still think that most religious people are somewhat conservative. Doing charity doesn’t make you not right wing, in fact some would argue that charity is a right wing concept because right wingers believe that things like feeding the homeless should be done by charitable individuals and organisations, rather than it being something that the government should be fixing (like many left-wing people believe).
There are many different flavours of conservatism, not all of them are rabid screaming morons who publicly admit to their bigotry, many are much quieter and subtle.
We can say “not all” about basically anything. Doesn’t change the trends
Demonising entire demographic groups gets people killed. The salient point is their conservatism, not their religion.
mad
There used to be a subreddit called r/selfawarewolves this would’ve fit right in…
Whatever happened to separation of church and state?
Unfortunately there is no separation of hatred and state.
What did you expect
This comment could stand to be nicer and/or more open to further discussion, like some of the others in the thread. Please try to incorporate that into your future comments.
Is this a bot
Unlikely crusade: Are Muslim immigrants joining the anti-LGBTQ right? Yes and no
Over the last two weeks, a series of contentious and even violent LGBTQ Pride month protests, from Southern California to suburban Maryland to Ottawa to Calgary, have given rise to a new hope on the right: Has the push for LGBTQ rights and representation so badly alienated immigrant and Muslim communities that these generally liberal or left-leaning constituencies are switching sides? Across social and right-wing media, conservative pundits and activists have trumpeted that claim. “The Arab community is sending a message to the woke that they are not accepting this!” “Selling immigrants on hating liberals would be the easiest thing in the world.” Crusade nobody saw coming. Muslims, Christians, and Atheists vs. Pro-Child Mutilation groomers."
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Can I just say I’m pretty tired of democracy in general. Thing is that democracy always leads to simple majority rule, and let me be frank, the majority is racist, stupid, selfish, etc. The anti trans stuff proves this. As far as governments go I’m most in favor of our Republic which protects our rights, and I wish we had more right and not just those which defend capitalism. However beyond that I’m leaning anarchy. This is as a leftist.
Constitutional republics are just a type of democracy, and the US is already both. What distinction are you trying to draw?
Yeah but aren’t they one that specifically is about the protection of rights decided by a super majority and not much else?
While I’m with you partly (I don’t think rights should be removeable to majority rule), I’m not sure how much effective democracy we actually have, as I don’t see much of a straight line between the power of individuals to vote and the ability to gain policies that people actually want.
