Our Religious Extremists Aren’t as Bad As Theirs

I love Bill Maher. He speaks truth to lunacy.

HOOYAH!!

It’s good to hear that we don’t have crazy Christian extremists who would make death threats over a cartoon. A play, on the other hand, is a totally different matter:

A Texas university class production of “Corpus Christi,” by Terrence McNally, below, has been canceled by college officials citing “safety and security concerns for the students as well as the need to maintain an orderly academic environment,” The Austin Chronicle reported. “Corpus Christi,” Mr. McNally’s 1998 play depicting a gay Jesus figure, was scheduled to be performed on Saturday. . . university officials changed course late Friday night, canceling the performance after receiving threatening calls and e-mail messages. . .

I disagree, our religios nut are just more restrained by our lsecular aws and customs. Give them a little more power in society and they would be just as bad.

And they HATE non-believers!!!

….contempt that Islam inculcates for the unbeliever, “the most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6), and the Qur’anic directive to Muslims to be “merciful to one another, but ruthless to the unbelievers (48:29).

Yes and no. Death threats have shown up in response to the atheist bus ads, and in response to various atheist articles/op-eds in newspapers. My wife and I have both received them on our blogs from Christians and Mormons. Most of these are probably idiots being idiots, but still…

How “theirs” is the group that made the threats? They’re based in NYC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_Muslim

I don’t think Maher would be so willing to dismiss Christian terrorism if he were not in such a position of privilege. A bunch of Christians getting together, hunting someone down and beating or killing them based on their gender presentation? Happens all the time. Denial of rights and attacks on queer people due to Christianity? Happens every day. Christian white-power groups (including the Klan) citing scripture as their justification? Happens all the time. Doctors being murdered and threatened? Happens all the time. Wars being waged in the name of religioun? Yes, we’ve got one of those going on too. Government support of religious run social services that deny certain groups access? Yes. Death threats over criticism? Yes.

It is much easier to see the flaws of a culture as an outsider than to notice the fanatic bullshit that you have become habituated to. We also have a cultural image of the (dark skinned) Muslim as some evil bogeyman while we put up with the same shit from white christians and write it off. How many news station decried Tiller’s murder as terrorism? Now, if a Muslim had shot a doctor after being part of an organized group that stalked him and had attempted to kill him before, you can bet your ass that terrorism would be the word on everyone’s lips. “Our culture isn’t different, it’s better” is far more a statement of imperialistic supremacy than it is about actually dealing with the international relgious problems. Muslims are “uncivilized” and “less evolved”, classic racist imperialist buzzwords.

Also, the assumption that the US is free of violence against and oppression of women, denial of freedom of speech, and has perfect seperation of church as state is ridiculous.

Maher routinely makes sexist comments himself, but that’s because women’s rights aren’t actually a priority for him, blindly stereotyping brown people to excuse imperialism is.

that christian extremists shoot and kill doctors, bomb abortion clinics and so forth

doesn’t make them any more respectable or less extreme than freaking out over cartoons

which, xtians also freakout over cartoons, teletubbies and other things that they do mindless mass letter campaigns and threaten consumer boycots for products they don’t buy anyway

and, I don’t see much difference between threatening violence over cartoons

and raising funds and organizing denying rights or taking them away from gay people

Any equation between Christian extremism in the US and Muslim extremism is pure lunacy, and anyone claiming they’re remotely similar needs to get their head out of their ass.

Agreed. Many liberal atheists equate Christianity with tradition and since they blithely dismiss any traditional concepts as archaic and oppressive, Christianity becomes even more vile than is warranted.

I wrote about liberalism, Islam, Christianity, and atheism here:

http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2010/03/problem-of-liberal-atheism.html (125 comments thread for more discussion)

http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2009/12/swiss-minarets-and-liberal-atheists.html

I just read cathy’s comment carefully, including this tidbit:

“Our culture isn’t different, it’s better” is far more a statement of imperialistic supremacy than it is about actually dealing with the international relgious problems. Muslims are “uncivilized” and “less evolved”, classic racist imperialist buzzwords.

but that’s because women’s rights aren’t actually a priority for him, blindly stereotyping brown people to excuse imperialism is.

In my linked to article above, I wrote the following:

Further, the overarching liberalism pervading structured atheism affords members of a minority religion, such as Islam, the “protected minority” treatment. Any condemnation of Islam isn’t a result of real-world events or rational discourse, but rather a reflection of bias and intolerance. Thus Islam, a force responsible for this and this, is dismissed as the quaint beliefs of a poor and oppressed minority, like voodoo but with scarves and nifty hats.

I called that one!

Dunno why people bother replying to Cathy. S/he’s obviously a troll…

Even if the worst of the xtians took over, I doubt they would spray women with acid for showing an inch of skin, or gas attack girls schools, like the Taliban.

Maybe not acid in particular, but they’re hardly any less barbaric.

Epitomizing the Reconstructionist idea of Biblical “warfare” is the centrality of capital punishment under Biblical Law. Doctrinal leaders (notably Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen) call for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes in addition to such contemporary capital crimes as rape, kidnapping, and murder. Death is also the punishment for apostasy (abandonment of the faith), heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, “sodomy or homosexuality,” incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, “unchastity before marriage.”

According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, “along with those who advised them to abort their children.” Rushdoony concludes: “God’s government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.” Reconstructionists insist that “the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty.” However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be “happy” places, to which people would flock because “capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society.”

The Biblically approved methods of execution include burning (at the stake for example), stoning, hanging, and “the sword.” Gary North, the self-described economist of Reconstructionism, prefers stoning because, among other things, stones are cheap, plentiful, and convenient. Punishments for non-capital crimes generally involve whipping, restitution in the form of indentured servitude, or slavery. Prisons would likely be only temporary holding tanks, prior to imposition of the actual sentence.

http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisre1.html

These Christian extremists are no better than the Taliban. They just don’t have the power (yet) to do what they want.

I haven’t had the time to read through all the comments, but to anyone who says our religious crazies are just as bad as Muslim crazies: you can’t be serious… The fundies that kill abortion doctors PALE in comparison to Islamic extremists!
At least the Christian extremists killing abortion doctors aren’t going after large numbers of innocent people and children. and Christian extremists aren’t going around killing abortion doctors simply because they aren’t Christian. But an Islamic extremist absolutely would kill a non-believer for being an infidel.
I’m not trying to justify killing doctors, but you have to recognize the difference between the fundamentalists here and the fundamentalists there…

Sorry to post again so soon, but I just found out that Siviku has a great post that shows how criticims of Islam can be non-racist, non-imperialist, non-sexist, and can invoke solidarity rather than ‘us vs them’ mentality http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/international-women%E2%80%99s-day-iran-and-global-struggle-women%E2%80%99s-liberation

This is what doing it right looks like.

There’s a big mistake being made here by Maher and by the people agreeing with him in the comments. There is a difference between Christian extremists and Islamic extremists, but it is not that Christian extremists are “less wacko”. They’re equally wacko, and just as violent as Islamic extremists are.

The difference between the two is that we have managed to forge better laws in the Western world that do a good job of separating the church and the state, and deterring violence and terrorism. So our wackos, of all sects, are marginalized and largely ineffective. Whereas the Islamic extremists actually run many of the governments in the Islamic world, and have more of a megaphone to mobilize and manipulate people into doing their will.

Don’t downplay the wacko-ness of the Christian faith. Just because we’ve successfully deterred their efforts at mayhem, doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous or crazy.

Imagine a US with a religious Constitution based on the Old Testament, in which the President was Fred Phelps, and then try to tell me that we wouldn’t have Christians running around doing the same things Muslim extremists do. The only reason they don’t is because they can’t.

Bill Maher is so brave for courageously taking the stand that “our culture…is better!” Good for him! What a unique American!

While nearly 3,000 Americans were brutally murdered on 9/11 at the hands of religious extremists, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died at the hands of the American invasion of their country. But surely the Iraqi people must be convinced of the superiority of the American people to the Islamic religious extremists? Because, after all, we killed all of them for the right reasons!

Sarcasm aside, it is stupid to play this ranking game. Religious extremism is a horrific problem in our world today. It played a huge role in the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of the last decade, and I would assert that it played a role in the invasion of Iraq too, because President Bush was able to rally the Christian supremacists to make that war happen.

The reason this kind of conversation rankles me is that it is always disturbing when Americans can suddenly just forget about our invasion of Iraq, one of the greatest international crimes in recent history, when discussing who is truly evil in this world. I mean, people try to point to widespread Palestinian support of terrorist attacks against Israel as evidence that there is something fundamentally messed up about their culture, but what about the widespread support in the United States for the invasion of Iraq?

American exceptionalism makes me sick. As soon as you start crowing “we’re so much better than them!” you put on a blindfold that checks critical thinking about your own country. Can’t we take a stand against all religious extremism and all violence, whether it comes from Muslims, Christians, fanatics from Saudi Arabia or fanatics from the USA?

This thread shows a schism in the atheist community, but the atheists really are only united by courage to face reality, so we’re a pretty diverse bunch.

I just finished watching all Pat Condell’s videos on youtube ( http://www.youtube.com/user/patcondell#p/u ) and the back and forth between my liberal conscience and his anti-Islam rampage was pretty much the same experience as reading these comments.

I really am dead in the middle on this issue. I honestly and unrepentantly do think the Enlightenment ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights are ethically superior to any religion in the world – that they are universal values derived from Reason that transcend culture and are more important than this or any country.

But the anti-Islam lobby – especially the anti-mosque contingent in Europe – trouble me. If those European countries had establishment clauses like our constitution, this would be a non-issue, because there would be no legal room for radical Islamist lobbies to threaten the law of the land. If we could get the American godhumpers the hell off our establishment clause, we could rally united behind it as the shining beacon to the rest of the world it should be. But the USA has squandered any right to moral high ground in so many ways…

I just don’t like rubbing elbows with racists. As much as the Pat Condells of the world cry that they aren’t, the kind of thinking where you pin a whole community with the failings of its worst members is honey to those scumbags.