Having your own personal blog is honestly quite a nice change of pace compared to Reddit. I could put a funny GIF of George Bush getting hit by a shoe on here and the worse case scenario is that no one even notices.
You put that on a big subreddit and you get your eyes gouged out and a heap of political discourse underneath your post.
Sorry, Christian atheists, but “Christianity traumatized me” is not a get-out-of-accountability-free card for upholding Christian supremacy through your treatment of members of minority cultures, reiterating Christian evangelism and colonialism but for your WASP brand of atheism, promoting Christian purity and hierarchy but with the serial numbers filed off, insisting that the Christian model of culture is the only one that exists and shouting down members of non-Christian cultures about their own cultures and experiences, etc.
Oh, you don’t like members of non-Christian cultures pointing out the ways in which your behaviors continue to normalize and uphold Christian hegemony?
THEN MAYBE STOP ACTING LIKE CHRISTIANS.
As an Atheist, there is a place for Atheists calling out Religious Harm, especially if members of that Religion fail to, but it actually has to be harm. A person believing in some god and/or choosing to abide by some rule system you don’t understand isn’t harm. The best way I’ve found to look at religious harm personally is control. Does the religion force their views onto other groups, and/or force their own members to stay. When we are talking about freedom, people should have the freedom to believe in whatever they want, and they should have the freedom to consent to any system of rules they want (even religious ones), however they should also have the freedom to decide not to, and when they decide to leave they should be able to live completely free from those rules.
No, there’s a place for atheists in supporting and boosting the voices of people who criticize or want to leave communities said atheist isn’t part of.
When people who enjoy privilege from a hegemonic cultural background start going it on their own and criticizing the same minority cultures that their background marginalizes or tries to eliminate they, AT BEST, make fools of themselves and at worst align with white supremacists and other genocidal bigots.
If you want to mitigate or neutralize the harm done by minority cultures you’re not part of and whose practices don’t affect you, center the people who are actually being harmed. Don’t wank over theoretical harms.
I did specify Actual Harm did I not? I’m not one to support speculating on harm, but if there’s people who are trying to speak out and their community isn’t listening, there’s absolutely a place for those outside to say something about what’s going on. (Heck I even said cultural rules you don’t understand doesn’t constitute harm so long as nobody is being forced into following them). I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear enough.
And I’m saying the only place for your voice is in echoing and boosting the voices of actual members of the community.
Because when people outside minoritized communities try to lead, we get things like banning hijabs instead of what Muslim women were actually asking for.
You seem to be mostly in agreement with each other, as far as I can tell. I could be wrong.
Maybe. I deeply distrust gentile atheist interest in criticizing Judaism.
I think the trick is that there might not actually be such a thing as “Religious Harm”. There’s definitely Christian Harm, but it’s hard to pick out a form of harm that’s common to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, the Cult of Reason, Satanism, Pastrianism, Jainism, Wicca, Sikhism, Chinese folk religions, Zeusism, Taoism, the Order of the Solar Temple, Jediism, Ashurism, et cetera, but never ever seen amongst agnostics or atheists. (Also at *least* three of the above are atheist-friendly religions, requiring no belief in any form of divinity. Jediism is included because people keep claiming it on censuses. Ireland had 1800 Jedi Knights in 2022.)
So if you’re talking about the harm that Christianity does, call it Christianity. If the problem is authoritarianism, call it authoritarianism. Call it Christian Authoritarianism, if you like, when it’s specific to Christianity – but you do not require a religion to have authoritarianism, nor do all religions have a significant authoritarian faction.
Yeah, antitheists like to make religion out to be something uniquely mind-numbing, but there’s nothing religion does that non-“religious” ideologies don’t do just as effectively.
I also think it’s incredibly telling that in general, very few atheists who talk up a generalized concept of “religious harm” actively acknowledge the fact that most cults / high-control groups today are not even religious in nature. The US in particular is drowning in extremely culty MLMs and non-religious wellness gurus, and many of these groups take even the completely non-religious elements their playbook directly and explicitly from religious movements such as Evangelical Christianity, and especially Mormonism. If there’s a category of “Religious Harm” that includes missions and tithes but doesn’t include LuLaRoe, then why the hell doesn’t it? And conversely, if “Religious Harm” does encompass both actual religious doctrine and also a secular legging-based ponzi scheme, then in what sense is it useful to categorize the harm as “religious”? I think a lot of this goes all the way back to the (incredibly Christian) idea that religion and culture are separable – that a religion and culture that share the same fundamental fabric are nonetheless two entirely individual entities, with entirely individual harms. It’s a very eurocentric way to see the world, and what’s more, it’s factually wrong.
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