In recent years I came to a revelation: Christians are actually worshipping the Antichrist. Not all Christians, of course. Consider, for example, the Christian youth who come out to me after a presentation to a church group to explain their disappointment with their leaders and how they despise everything their churches preach, obsessing over abortion and gay rights and the whole conservative political regime, while they just want to do “Jesusy things,” like end poverty and alleviate suffering. They are worshipping Christ. Everyone else, everyone driving the likes of them out of churches worldwide for being, basically, unwanted heretics, is worshipping the Antichrist. And I think that does track most Christians the world over; but especially conservative Americans. Every cardinal and preacher driving a luxury car, jaunting about in private jets, or living in a million dollar home? Antichrist. Obviously. But I mean something far more pervasive and substantial than that. Bear with me here. Your eyes will soon be opened.
We don’t need to believe in Jesus or God for my conclusion to follow. We can adopt a simple truth both believer and unbeliever agree is the case: whether supernaturally real or just a memeplex, people can “embody” Christ as an ideal, doing what the character of the first five novels of the New Testament preaches and does; and in this sense one can be said to be truly worshiping Christ: rather than just bumbling through rituals and rendering lipservice, instead literally being Christlike. This is what it is to embody the Spirit of Christ: to become as he is, and do as he taught. To live the life of Christ. That is what it means to really worship Christ. And no such person need exist for that to be the case.
Now here is the kick in the head. The word “Anti-Christ” means, literally, the opposite of Christ. In other words, if you embody the Spirit that is the opposite of what Christ taught, you are embodying the Spirit of the Antichrist. You are therefore, really, in truth, worshiping not Christ, but the Antichrist. Literally or figuratively, the Antichrist has claimed your soul, and commands your obedience. You teach what that dark monster teaches; you do as that dark monster does; you live as that dark monster would live in your same circumstances. Thus, you can either embody the spirit of Christ, or the spirit of the Antichrist. How do you tell the difference? By whether, and how much, you teach and do and live what is exactly the opposite of what the character of Jesus Christ teaches and does in the Gospels—and the book of Acts (where, people sometimes forget, Jesus also appears and speaks, and animates the actions and choices of his flock; just less frequently).
There is a lot that’s actually pretty awful about Jesus the Christ (see The Real War on Christmas: The Fact That Christmas Is Better Than Christ). I am in no way endorsing the “wholly” Christlike life. Jesus Christ is actually a bad example to follow; and his teachings aren’t all that wise nor at all sustainable for a society. But even with that being said, there is a lot that the New Testament character of Jesus is quite unequivocal about that are at least closer to the Light Side of the Force, which most Christians now do, believe, and teach the exact opposite of, thus unmistakably embracing the Dark Side of the Force.
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Evidence: Most Christians want to pray in public, even fighting for the privilege of doing so before an unwilling public at sports games and in schools and Congress and government meetings; but even more so in general, in front of family and peers, even on national television.
But the Spirit of Christ said: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues,” in other words, even churches, “and on the street corners to be seen by others.” Christ warns: “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” But, Jesus commands, “when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” What is the opposite of this? All public prayer—even voluntary, even at home or in church—is the way of the Antichrist. If you pray in public, even in front of family at home or peers in church, and certainly if you support public prayer being imposed on people at events, in schools, in courts of law, in councils and legislatures, you are of the Antichrist. Because you are thereby embodying the opposite of Christ.
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Evidence: Most Christians approve, indeed often even insisit upon, all manner of violence in self-defense, imagined or real. They support gun ownership for that reason. Vicious guard dogs. Baseball bats by the bedstand. Prison rape—and all manner of other forms of suffering for the incarcerated. The death penalty. War. Police beatings and killings. They even fly blue flags advertising their support of police violence. They back extraordinary amounts of public money being spent to maintain a whole machinery of global violence, while opposing diverting any dime to national health. Many wouldn’t hesitate to shoot an intruder dead. Nor feel bad about it. Most, refraining only for being squeamish, would still pat on the back anyone who did. Their demands for violent cruelty against immigrants and refugees can even be heard across the nation.
But the Spirit of Christ said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth’. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”
Jesus thus commanded you not to resist an attacker, or even a thief or enslaver. You aren’t even to defend yourself in court against lawsuits. He is so absolute, we must conclude he means you not even to resist a rapist, a wartime invader, or a home intruder. You must abstain from all violence—even in self-defense. You aren’t even to allow the legal system to step in and provide protective violence for you—as his quote of Torah law directly entails, as also his command that you not defend yourself even against lawsuits. Any Christian, therefore, who is not an absolute pacifist is embodying the Antichrist in some measurable respect. But all warmongers and violence-gloaters, promoters of guns and police violence, are wholly in the service of the Antichrist. Because they are embodying exactly the opposite of Christ.
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Evidence: Most Christians despise immigrants and the homeless, striving to spurn them and turn them away and take away any refuge or welfare given them. They want the homeless arrested or driven out of sight; some even would like them killed. They howl at any aid or home given to the refugee. They regard and treat immigrants as little more than thieves or vermin, an invading threat to be loathed and literally walled off from home or aid.
But the Spirit of Christ said: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” And the damned, Christ tells us, will then ask him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?” And He will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Every homeless person, every refugee, every immigrant looking for a better life is Christ himself. Your Christ told you this.
Even John the Baptist said, indeed to announce the way of Christ, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” And this is reflected in Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan, who was the moral equivalent of a refugee: set upon and robbed of their livelihoods and left to survive in a foreign land. Christ commands you to help him, not turn him away. The homeless are in essentially the same pickle, and deserve essentially the same return; as Christ commands, you are to take them in, clothe and feed and house them. So if you take the opposite position on these things, if you do not do all within your means to give the homeless homes, the starving food, to give refuge to the refugee and the immigrant (the “stranger”) alike, if you oppose social policies that do these things, you are serving the Antichrist. Because you are serving the spirit opposite to that of Christ.
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Evidence: Most conservative Christians in America oppose public health care (the last nation in the developed world to not finally create and enjoy universal health care). They want to spend billions on a war machine, none on any machine of public good. They want armies and navies to spread abroad; but don’t want to cure their own sick at home; even less to help the mentally ill.
But the Spirit of Christ said: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” Freely give. Just as you shall then freely receive. Heal the sick. Christ commands you. Raise the dead. Christ commands you. Cleanse the diseased. Christ commands you. Drive out demons. Christ commands you. If you take the opposite position, of opposing rather than acting to provide all these things freely to all, of opposing rather than supporting universal physical and mental health care, you have taken the position opposite that of Christ. You are serving the Antichrist.
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Evidence: Most Christians promote hatred of their enemies, often even minorities, and love only for their own. Their lipservice to Christian love does not hide their actual true beliefs and behaviors. Their hatred has led many to commit hate crimes, join insurrections, threaten peers with violence; they fly blue flags in support of beating and killing minorities; and many more than do these things, endorse or defend them, or look the other way, secretly in their heart sympathising with them. Acting on hate. Thinking with hate. This has become a Christian norm.
But the Spirit of Christ said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you [only] love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Any Christian who expresses or feels hatred or disdain for anyone—whether neighbor, minority, or political foe—and does not chastise themselves for this and change their attitude more toward Christ’s, the more they instead indulge in their hatred and despite, the more they are embodying the opposite of Christ, and are thus serving the Antichrist.
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Evidence: Most Christians defend their right to property and wealth, to be richer than others, to have more money and goods and property than others, and to this end even oppose taxation or any other redistribution of wealth (least of all foreign aid).
But the Spirit of Christ said: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven … For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” For, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Jesus thus commands everyone to not care about accumulating possessions but to count on their community, their society, to ensure they have all they need; in other words, he commands us to embody socialism. This is in fact one of the clearest and most repeated themes defining the Spirit of Christ.
As Matthew relates, when a rich man asked how he could secure himself a place in heaven, Jesus answered:
“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Likewise in the Parable of Lazarus, a rich man is condemned to the eternal flames of hell, explicitly without any chance of forgiveness or reprieve, simply because he did not share his wealth with the poor and needy. And again, Jesus approves the socialism of Zacchaeus, who vows to give half his wealth to the poor and repay anyone he cheated four times more than he took; and Jesus says he has thereby followed the Lord’s teachings well and thus will be saved. In many ways like these, Jesus repeatedly condemns the rich, and indeed anyone opposed to substantial sharing and redistribution of wealth. He instead commands sharing, redistribution, selling your goods and properties so you can give the poor whatever they need.
Jesus also fully supported paying taxes (which even then funded social welfare programs like infrastructure spending, municipal water supply, and food aid: see Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy). Indeed he never opposed taxation in any form. His ideal inspired community, in fact, adopted the Marxist credo: from each according to their means, to each according to their needs (just read from Acts 2 and Acts 4). A Christlike government would do the same; and Jesus already endorsed using compulsory taxation to do it with. Jesus also commanded that you share your wealth without boasting of it or even mentioning it. So, no putting your name on buildings, or expecting any personal return on investment, whether glory or favor.
If you do not endorse the same—if instead you oppose all these things Jesus taught—socialism, taxation, substantial wealth redistribution—if you pursue the opposite (clinging to your money, not letting anyone tax it, accumulating capital, enjoying luxuries, voting for lower taxes, making merely token charitable contributions—remember, Zacchaeus gave half, and the rich son was expected to give all, whereas typically Christians give trivially, and that mostly only to the coffers of their own wealthy churches rather than anyone genuinely in need: see Myths of Charity: The Enduring Sham of Arthur Brooks), if you live obliviously doing not a thing for every Lazarus who could benefit from your sharing, every needy stranger (remember Jesus’s commands on that matter; we just went over them), then you are embodying the opposite of what Christ taught. You are thereby worshiping the Antichrist. You are realizing in your behavior and actions not the world desired by Christ, but the world desired by the Antichrist. You are thus the Antichrist’s servant. That you call them Christ is just another Satanic disguise. In truth you have chosen to build and serve the Antichrist’s world rather than Christ’s.
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Evidence: Most Christians not only judge others, they even use those judgments as excuses to take away the rights of others (either by law or social pressure), rather than regulating their own conduct alone. Instead of just following their own religion in abstaining from sex (gay or straight), or abortion, or only adhering to their own gender norms, they seek to empower society to suppress and repress human sexuality at every turn—gay and straight—and to enforce their own gender norms on everyone else, and to hinder others’ access to abortion. They block sex education. They aim to prevent people learning the history of racism. They hinder access to birth control. In countless ways they use their judgment of others to control others, peoples not even Christian, or Christians who do not share their judgments.
But the Spirit of Christ said: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” And: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you,” for “with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Christ condemned stoning sinners, literally and figuratively. He commands to love, not condemn; to treat others as you would want to be treated—which when carried to its own completed sense can only mean, “were you them” (see Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider). If you act the opposite of this, if you think the opposite of this—if you judge rather than forgive, and even use your judging to oppress and control other people rather than regulating yourself alone, in any of these ways or others—then you are embodying the opposite of Christ. You are serving the Antichrist.
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Even Christians who accept divorce, or don’t mutilate or castrate themselves when merely experiencing lust, are leaning toward the camp of the Antichrist. But Jesus’s backwards and toxic ideas about marriage and sex (and even germs) are vile anyway, so here we’d rather have the Antichrist among us. Less so the rest. And at any rate, Christ’s commands to love your enemies and sinners alike, to forgive all things, to treat others as you would want to be treated were you in their shoes, indeed not to judge at all, or to judge as you would want to be judged—in every case, one way or another, to do no harm—when conjoined with modern scientific knowledge about human psychology and sociology, compels any Christlike person to abandon those backwards, factless teachings attributed to Jesus, as well as any others the following of which would in fact violate all of those higher commands. Like admitting we ought to resort to the use of force, legal and physical, but only when legitimately necessary and never with glee; or forgiving toxic people only when they have legitimately reformed and made good their wrongs. But that is philosophy. And here I am talking about a religion.
In all these ways, there are Christians and Christianities that trend more Christlike than who pursue a fanatical servitude to the Antichrist. But they are mostly liberal progressives (only a minute number by proportion are politically or even socially conservative), as I wrote about before in Giving Christian Liberals Their Due (see also my remarks in The Carrier-McDurmon Debate, my discussion of Randal Rauser on Treating Atheists Like People, and my series on Justin Brierley, particularly on The Folly of Christianity). And they are the minority, both a minority numerically and a minority in respect to their share of political and social power. If it wasn’t for non-Christian voters backing progressive candidates and policies, we would literally never have any. On average, in the developed world, non-Christians are more Christlike than most Christians. Christendom today prides itself on doing good for the world, yet a vast swath of it now condemns everything that does that, from vaccines to social welfare, opposing even condoms in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, or defending pedophiles rather than protecting children from their predation. Christianity is thereby becoming a global cult of the Antichrist. Satan has captured and planted his ideological flag in almost all the churches of the world. Christians mostly obey him now.
The struggle to recapture Christianity for Christ exists, but does not appear to me to have much chance of success—those advocating for the genuine spirit of Christ are now more likely to be driven away from the church and from Christianity altogether, leaving only servants of the Antichrist to populate it. See, for example:
- Peter Wehner, “The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart: Christians Must Reclaim Jesus from His Church,” The Atlantic.
- Thomas Curwen, “CRT, Trumpism and Doubt Roil Biola University. Is This the Future of Evangelical Christianity?,” The LA Times.
- Bob Smietana, “A $100 Million Campaign Aims to Fix Jesus’ Brand from Followers’ Damage,” The Washington Post.
- Suzette Lohmeyer, “A Mass Exodus from Christianity is Underway in America. Here’s Why,” Grid.
- Kyle Edward Haden, Embodied Idolatry: A Critique of Christian Nationalism (Lexington 2020).
- Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdman’s 1994; with a new 2022 preface confirming its predictions in subsequent events).
- And more: see the books I reference in Giving Christian Liberals Their Due.
One might say that Isaiah 32 predicted this capture of Christianity by the Antichrist:
5 No longer will the fool be called noble
nor the scoundrel be highly respected.
6 For fools speak folly,
their hearts are bent on evil:
They practice ungodliness
and spread error concerning the Lord;
the hungry they leave empty
and from the thirsty they withhold water.
7 Scoundrels use wicked methods,
they make up evil schemes
to destroy the poor with lies,
even when the plea of the needy is just.
So.
Dear Christian:
Your own Bible warns you to judge people by their fruits, not their words; to be wary of false Christs and those preaching “another” Jesus, to watch out for deceiving spirits (1 John 4:1 and 1 Timothy 4). What are the fruits of the Antichrist? What are the fruits of those who serve him? What is the deceiving Spirit? What is the “other” Jesus? All the things opposite Christ. You know this is true. You needn’t trust me in this. You can confirm it yourself. The things of the Antichrist are all ruthless conservative ideals, from opposition to socialism and taxation for the common good, to support for violence and savagery, whether at home, by the police, or abroad at war. They beat plowshares into swords. They rage with anger and hate. They insist on public prayer rather than private. They oppose both access to knowledge and public responsibility (refusing masks, vaccines, even polluters paying the cost of polluting). They oppose health care and homes for the homeless. They even defended human torture in the ironically-named “war on terror.” They even blaspheme the name of God, using it in vain against God’s own Law, by insisting it be stamped on their money. They give trivially to charity, and almost none of it really to the needy. They despise sharing. They instead hoard wealth and defend those who hoard yet more. The Antichtist has won. He has claimed the dominant command of Christendom.
So much for the true Christians, those who want to embody the actual Christ; to do “Jesusy things.” They face in nearly every church, instead, a mass of Christians serving the Antichrist, damning gay people, extending no Golden Rule to them or anyone, even gleefully seeking to trap women in unwanted pregnancies they cannot afford, rather than helping them avoid or afford them. So they care more about the non-existent suffering of hypotherical people, than the real suffering of actual people. Christ didn’t even speak any word against abortion or being gay, yet Christians will direct more hate-filled effort and concern to those matters than to love or forgiveness or social welfare or any of the things Christ did command. This is the end of the Christian church. The Devil has tricked its devout into following him under the mere name of “Christ” and forgetting about the true Christ and all he actually taught.
As I wrote in response to observing the same sad fate befall Hinduism today:
Christianity has indeed been retooled to serve this same opiate function on the successful in the U.S. ([as I note] in The End of Christianity, pp. 338-39), and this may be one of the factors sustaining high religiosity among the successful members of the middle and upper classes in America. It’s thus not all just about fear of death, or loss of meaning, or loss of control over society or one’s neighbors or children, or the need to justify one’s prejudices (all of which are obvious functions of American religion; we can all point to examples, no matter how much believers deny any of it).
[Christianity today is now] also about resolving the cognitive dissonance over wanting to be selfish and pampered and privileged without feeling that oh-so-terrible guilt (which results whenever anyone realizes they have become the very villains they otherwise once despised [and that Jesus himself repeatedly condemns]). It seems implausible that a religion originally invented to emphasize that guilt and its alleviation through abandoning one’s wealth and privilege and sharing it with the disadvantaged, has become a religion emphasizing exactly the opposite. And yet, as implausible as it is, this has undeniably happened. Christians now worship the Antichrist. And apparently their God “has sent upon them a powerful delusion” so that they don’t even realize it.
Christians now falsely believe they are the righteous; when they are now, in fact, the damned. And this is by their own Book’s description; by the words of their own supposed Christ—whose teachings they have abandoned, for exactly their opposite. Christ they have repudiated and spat upon; the Antichrist now they serve.
So here we are.
I have abundantly shown that most conservative Christians are actually behaving in accord with the ideals of the Antichrist. Christians are warned that even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light; the Antichrist, likewise. It’s simple math. To worship and follow Christ means to embody in your beliefs, teachings, and actions the spirit of Christ, living by those ideals. And the “Antichrist” means “the opposite of Christ.” Therefore, if you embody a spirit opposite that of Christ’s—if your beliefs, teachings and actions conform to that spirit instead, if you live by that spirit’s ideals, the ideals opposite those of Christ—then you are embodying the Antichrist. You are thus following the Antichrist. So whenever you think you are worshiping Jesus Christ as the one who endorses those values, values actually the opposite of Christ’s, you are actually worshipping the Antichrist. It is then the Antichrist that you have embraced with your soul and let govern your heart. You are thus in league with the Antichrist. You are agents of the Antichrist. You are the cogs creating his world. Because you are then realizing the Antichrist’s dreams and ideals—not Christ’s.
You might want to rethink that.
Thanks for another inspiring and educational article.
I would dispute a couple of the points. You say “They oppose both access to knowledge and public responsibility (refusing masks, vaccines …)”.
a) The evidence has shown for years that masks (especially non-fitted ones used outside controlled environments, ie by the public) do not prevent spread of aerosolized viruses – this was known before Covid-19 and to date there has not been a single peer-reviewed RCT showing a significant effect on transmission. (Masks stop droplets but those arent the primary vehicle.) The lockdowns / distancing did slow the spread by a few weeks at great short and long term cost – widespread rapid testing and granting paid sick leave earlier would likely have worked better. See Great Barrington Declaration.
b) Access to knowledge is precisely what the government and social media have been suppressing. Anyone who spreads “vaccine hesitancy” is ruthlessly shamed and cancelled, despite legitimate concerns – including researchers whose studies found harms but had to alter their conclusions to get things published and keep getting funding.
c) The Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission and were never even tested for that (as admitted by the companies and visible in the clinical trial writeups) – they reduce risk of severe disease and death for the small portion of the population at high risk. CDC and WHO even changed the definition of vaccine to fit the product (from “provides immunity” to “elicits an immune response”).
Furthermore, the products never completed clinical trials to be proven safe and to calibrate dosages correctly, and evidence from the FOIA’d FDA documents plus accumulating public data is showing they are a net harm. Those who read the reports could see that early and refused to get injected on solid scientific and ethical grounds. Just because someone has the title of chief public health official doesnt mean they know what they are talking about. Follow the evidence (and the money) to find regulatory capture, profiteering, etc.
I suspect you were making the point wrt Christians who refused these things out of ignorance and reactionary attitudes and selfishness. Sadly society has become polarized and somehow everyone who opposes the Big Pharma Covid products has become conflated with Trump or libertarians or haters.
Typos in the article:
– 3rd para last sentence: “just lest frequently”
– 1st para under Dear Christian “pulluters”
a. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/27/facebook-posts/great-barrington-herd-immunity-document-widely-dis/
b. https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/media/674/open
c. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgsb86irdYo
Thank you.
My own feeling our this. Anyone who embraces the two fold child of Hell ” Their Orange Jesus” has been turned over to a Reprobate mind! And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth…
Thank you, Greg.
Thanks i will check those references and get back to you, as their validity is important to me. However, the Covid arguments are tangential to the point of the essay regarding Christians, so perhaps we dont want debate on that here.
Well, it is relevant insofar as it ties into the potential justification for evangelical Christians to so strongly resist all of these things. The big thing I would point out is that people can have your kinds of concerns and still agree that, for example, calling for us all to just wait for herd immunity under the reasoning that it’ll just kill the old and weak is perverse, and deeply anti-Christian. So too is the entire rhetoric that was common in these spaces that vaccines and masks are a sign of weakness (hey, remember that idea that the meek shall inherit the Earth? No?) In other words, the values that are on display show the problem even before we get into facts.
Yeah, so, these are ideas you clearly arrived at a priori. All of these ideas have been tested over and over by the scientific literature. Even the Herby et al. meta-analysis, rife with methodological issues, still found “only” a 3.2% reduction in mortality from lockdowns… thousands of lives saved. The idea that it would somehow be acceptable to kill six thousand people so Elon could keep meeting his production targets is intolerable. We shouldn’t endure 9/11s (and in fact much, much more) for business.
The reason why everyone shifted to recommending masks is because COVID-19 as a pandemic was just not like other bugs. You yourself note that droplets “aren’t the primary vehicle”. Who gives a shit?! Even by your own laughably incomplete accounting, “Here’s something that the vast majority of people can do cheaply and easily that imposes mild discomfort that will stop a secondary vector of transmission” is a fucking slam-dunk epidemiologically… if you care about people not being. And I say this as someone who hated masks. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But I found ones that fit better, and I took chances to breathe away from others if I was outside of six feet, and I toughed it out. If you had just been skeptical about particular lockdown approaches, you’d have been in good company. But you just had to hit all the tired COVID denialism talking points, even ones that are facially bankrupt even by your own stated standards.
And no one has been suppressing access to “knowledge”. Even lies have been allowed to propagate. What people are opposing, through things like YouTube shadowbanning and deranking, is outright misinformation. Which means “shit some people just made up”. Like the idea that the vaccine has nanoparticles or tracker bugs or interferes with collective immunity through psychic transmission. You not mentioning any of that as a valid concern shows your priorities. Anyone who wants to seriously look at anything besides trade secrets can see studies, mechanisms, etc. Should the process have been even more transparent given the necessary waiving of some standard regulations and tort approaches? Sure.
And the CDC/WHO change is just tired rhetoric and is beneath you. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-976069264061 . To anyone who is scientifically informed (and you clearly are well enough informed about the basic idea), any definitional change that has been documented is inconsequential. “Immunity” has never once meant absolute immunity. These are all games of chance. But because of people promoting BS like you are here, the public needed to understand what was and was not being promised. If they hadn’t done this, you would have excoriated them for promising beyond what they could to a layperson. You invoking this argument shows a total lack of good faith.
So what is your woobie here?
Thank you, Fred.
Apart from the typos, which are now fixed, everything you just said, Krishna, is false. If you are sane and rational enough to do a proper critical review of the evidence, you will know that’s the case. That you haven’t done that already suggests you are either not sane or not rational. In which case, I cannot help you. You are lost in your delusion.
Everyone else, competently fact-check their claims before believing or repeating any of them. Please be a more responsible citizen and thinker than they are.
The issue of efficacy of masks, distancing and eye protection was established by meta-analysis (as well as any can) published in The Lancet, June 27th, 2020. I think, in fact, not was the data which lead to physicians in leadership (Fauci et al) to change their recommendations (including the increased availability of masks for frontline staff, without whom many of us would have died).
The vaccines are doing what they were designed to do, ~90% reduce ton in hospitalization and death, and were never thought of as preventing the superficial cold like illness. Vaccines have never really successfully controlled the common cold, since that illness is largely on the surface of the body (airway passages, nose, sinuses, upper trachea-bronchial tree).
Randomized clinical trials of masks, distancing and eye protection are neither feasible nor ethical; lockdowns were a best guess, and probably worked but were hard to avoid.
Note there are ample resources for reconstructing the history of policy decisions during the pandemic and on what evidence they were based, and changed. So if anyone really wants to know about that, they just have to sincerely do the research (which means, e.g., finding and relying on reputable sources rather than bullshit mills). You’ll find the whole process was mostly quite sensible.
And the actual reason we don’t have vaccines against the common cold is that (1) no such thing exists in particular (we use that word as a vague stand-in to refer to hundreds of different viruses) and (2) it isn’t dangerous enough to warrant the costs of the required research and implementation (it’s actually just better to let human immune systems take care of it, because the mortality cost of that policy is so low).
Nevertheless, some money is being speculatively spent by companies to try and find cold vaccines; just not very much, because we don’t need it as badly as other vaccines, and to little effect, because there are too many viruses in question and they mutate too rapidly.
So when I got COVID finally earlier this year, I had been vaccinated with no booster. It was terrifying once we knew what it was… and then it was one of the easiest bugs of my life. I was a little hot and flushed but never outright feverish, I coughed, I had a constant runny nose, I had mild aches. It was totally benign and lasted a few days. I definitely felt fatigued for a few weeks afterwards and had to get back up to normal and in that respect it was bad, but I’ve had serious infections that felt like someone stabbing me in the sternum with a prybar. I definitely didn’t get the symptoms of not being able to eat or smell (which for me would be hellish!) Obviously I can’t conclude that the vaccine was why I had a mild reaction in my specific case, I could have just gotten lucky, but man, I sure was glad I had done my duty when I finally got the bug after having had that aura of invincibility we sometimes get. So, yeah, this anti-vaccine rhetoric bothers me personally.
Your a very confused person..
I agree with the article substantially. Here’s a nitpick: you said “Thinking with hate. This has become a Christian norm.” and pointed here:
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/after-the-ballots-are-counted-conspiracies-political-violence-and-american-exceptionalism/
The cited paper talks mostly about Republicans, not about Christians, and doesn’t quite make the point you want it to. For example: “Roughly four in 10 (39 percent) Republicans support Americans taking violent actions if elected leaders fail to act.”
If you add evidence that a high-enough fraction of Republicans are Christian, that would close the gap.
There’s precisely zero need to do that. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/christians/by/party-affiliation/ . It’s 82-18%. Conflating Republican and Christian, especially given that he makes clear he is talking about conservative Christians , causes precisely as little confusion for anyone who isn’t deluded or nine years old as saying “The sky is blue” and not mentioning the sky at night or with cloud cover or with pollution.
You should be more charitable here, Fred. Tim’s request for more precise sourcing was reasonable. It only missed my idiom (I’m not aiming for thoroughness here, just the tips of icebergs). But that’s easily done. I don’t think you need to take him to task for what even he admitted was a nitpick, and even proposed the gap-fill for himself. 🙂
Fair enough, I just tend to find the request silly as someone who knows the really, really obvious points of the demographics. I read your opening as being pretty clear that you are trying to talk about a particular subset, so I don’t personally feel that it’s critical to say twice :”I don’t mean all Christians are conservatives and I don’t mean all conservatives are Christians”. The constant need for some to demand that NAXALT repeatedly in all permutations just tends to dilute conversations with endless caveats. I do this in my own writing, saying “Most” and “The vast majority” etc. etc., and I have found it doesn’t add much in terms of clarity (the people predisposed to be serious don’t need to constantly hear it) and reduces the strength of statements.
What may be more useful (in a world with no practical limits on attention and word count) would be specific examples of Republican Christian thought leaders, because it would be possible for most Republicans to be Christian and yet Christianity to act as a braking rather than an amplifying pressure on the violent extremism. But, again, in terms of speaking truth to power, the need to document this passed long, long ago. This is visibly obvious. Anyone who is curious to test this hypothesis in good faith will find their answer instantaneously.
Indeed. I wasn’t being thorough. You’ll notice each time I hyperlink “most” I only link to a start of an evidence-thread, and only a sample, not a complete accounting.
If anyone wants to really test the claim, in each case, the link will get them started. There is a lot else out there (e.g. in the case you mention, it’s not just pro-insurrectionists who count toward the claim; that’s just one category of many violence-promoting ideas, which though with some overlap often also stack). So I welcome people really researching this (in each and every case). Because it will expose them to chastening fact after chastening fact. And it won’t be coming from me at that point.
But also, this article is really aimed at Christians who already share the attitude in question. So they won’t be able to hide from that fact by claiming “other” Christians don’t share their attitude. If any don’t, they don’t need this article. Those Christians probably already agree with it.
Typo: Bob Smietana, “A $100 Million Campaign Aims to Fix Jesus’ Brand from Followers’ Samage,” = Damage
Thanks! Fixed.
Thanks great stuff! What is the book you wrote regarding your personal views and mantra. I recall you put a lot of time and effort into that and would like to review it myself. Cheers.
Assuming you are not a bot, I think you mean my book on my worldview, my philosophy of life, which is Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. Which was published way back in 2005; so there have been a s,all few changes of position from that since, which I summarize in “Typos List for Sense and Goodness without God.”
Beyond that see Quick Guide to My Books: What to Get & Why.
Richard, what is it you want?
Forget Christianity. For that matter, forget Hindus, Jews, Muslims and whatever other groups you seem to think are getting in the way of “what you want” — and just tell me: what do you want?
And then, tell me why I should care if you get what you want. Tell me why it matters to me why “what you want” is important.
That doesn’t matter. As I noted in the article already, one doesn’t need to trust me or even care what my motives are. Everything I am saying one can confirm for themselves. They don’t need me; they can check it all and realize I’m right independently.
So genetic fallacies won’t work here. Either you listen, or you don’t. So either a Christian stays damned by their own Christ and thus goes on serving their own Antichrist. Or they get back with Christ, and hence become a boon and not a bane to their society. If even any percentage do the latter, the law of compound interest betters the world. Whereas if none do, then we know they are a lost cause and can write them off as unpersuadable social poison.
If however you want to know what I really think people should do, and not just what Christians within their own worldview should do according to their worldview’s own principles, it’s obviously to go all the way to evidence-based secular humanism. To abandon supernaturalism altogether and get with factual reality in deciding mores and policy. To learn more about that, see the categories drop-down menu on the right of my blog to explore any topic you want to know my own position on.
Richard –
ok. so you want everyone “…to go all the way to evidence-based secular humanism. To abandon supernaturalism altogether and get with factual reality in deciding mores and policy.”
that’s fine. and, that’s all I asked.
I don’t know why you wasted everyone’s time with that then.
This whole website is about my secular naturalist mission. And you know that. As does everyone else here.
This article is just one separate effort to argue from within the Christian’s own worldview.
You seem not to grasp the need of that or why it could be more effective than merely attacking that worldview as I have already extensively done and continue to do.
I cannot explain your pointless question otherwise.
I can tell you what I’d like, Dennis.
I’d like people who parrot beautiful ideas to believe them.
I’d like to not be lied to.
Even as flawed as the Gospels are, my beloved Dr. King assembled a worldview using them as well as secular ideas. There’s ideas there that I find worth defending and learning from.
So when Christians do this, just like when Buddhists preach hate against Muslims or Muslims do not act as if they have been told to embrace peace or when atheists who preach the values of science and reason fall to naked opportunism… I find it grotesque.
As for what you want: What do you want, Dennis? Because if you’re not already on board after Richard pointed out that these people are engaging in awful behavior against their own scripture, then something is wrong with what you want, and we need to have a conversation about it. And if you are, I fail to see the point of the question.
Richard and I want a lot more than that, to be clear, and you can look at Richard’s writings for extensive discussion of what he’d want as a positive vision (and my Quora answers go into mine extensively), but the answer I gave should be sufficient, frankly. And anyone with integrity should agree.
Fred… .
re: “… I fail to see the point of the question.”
Why do you think my question had any point? It was a question.
A pointless question is JAQing off, Dennis.
Hey, Dennis. Notice how I responded to the question, trying to engage with you, but also noted that the article in question should be a basis for you to understand the point above and beyond everything else? Cutting out all of that, including the fact that me asking the point came after a forked conditional, doesn’t seem particularly constructive, man.
Oh, also, buddy, I asked you a question. And you didn’t respond. Want to do that now?
Not a bot. I’ll buy your book soon. Finishing a couple others.
Excellent! Thank you for not-a-botting. With AI comment spam now that can actually intelligently compose things like that, it’s hard to tell, so I appreciate the confirmation.
This fact is such a strong piece of evidence against the moral argument. Either God does not do anything whatsoever to coherently communicate The Absolute Good(TM) through texts or prophets or anything else, or that communication is useless, or God doesn’t exist. If every religious person alive was indeed a robot programmed by their scripture exactly, then we’d have something to discuss. But it is transparently clear that religions do not strongly encode singular values. We’re not even talking about a fringe movement of Christianity: We’re talking about its loudest plurality if not an outright majority. The fact that a counter-cultural movement could metastasize into that, and really be some variant of that (a friend to power and violence and authoritarianism for most of its history), is indicative that religions are not at all guarantors of moral consistency let alone virtue. I always find it so funny how the moral argument always is trumpeted as if religious texts and teachings give this clear, unambiguous standard everyone agrees upon. It’s so obviously false even to the people saying it that it exposes the entire enterprise.
As for Jesus: As a Buddhist, I’ve always taken the ideas in the Gospels that are challenging, the ones demanding non-violence and forgiveness, as a goal. When we really interrogate ourselves, we often find that what we thought was a potential justification for violence or for judging or for not forgiving were nothing of the sort. There was another way. We could have chosen a different kind of emotional management. Putting the terms as starkly as Jesus did acts as a guide for people like King who would try to live up to an ideal that is not intended to be achieved.
And there’s even some nuance in the Gospels. Matthew 5:13-16 broadly describes doing good in public, which is a bit of a contradiction with the commands to do prayer and alms in private… but a nuanced read of this would note that a) Matthew is clear that doing good in public is only justified because it models good behavior in others and encouraging good communities to form and b) the specific focus on alms and prayer seems to suggest that those who do any kind of religious ritual for the mere sake of it to gain applause are hypocrites.
It comes down to what King himself noted. He explained that it is possible to view Christianity as an ethic or an aesthetic . (A key sign of the distinction is the degree to which someone emphasizes Jesus as Lord rather than Jesus as man and teacher and rabbi, or the degree to which they prioritize John over the Synoptics). The Christian aesthetic is one that forms exclusive and conservative communities with a love for power and evangelism. The ethic is the counter-cultural stuff. And countless people worship at the altar of false idols, of stained-glass windows and white Jesuses in movies, rather than the ethic of the teacher.
I forgot to mention the paucity of Christian excuses for this. The most common is “Well, we believe in those things [charity, forgiveness, not judging] voluntarily and in the private sector, not in the state sector]”. But that’s fractal bullshit.
First of all, is any of that in the Bible? Nope. Jesus never differentiates between voluntary and involuntary. This idea is an Enlightenment concept. He does differentiate between Caesar and God, but not only is that not terribly clear, but nothing either Paul or Jesus ever say would imply not supporting social policy that is less cruel and brutal.
Second, Christian communities are supposed to internally establish these kinds of norms. Basically, being Amish. The fact that so few Christian communities are like that even internally show that this is horseshit.
Third, nothing Jesus demanded suggested that Christians should be supporting these fucked up policies. “I personally would love to give, but I don’t believe in making others do so through taxes” is already specious as Richard noted. but “I personally would love to forgive criminals, but the law can’t” or “I personally would love to help migrants but the law shouldn’t” is infinitely more dishonest, because that is actually supporting violent state action.
Fourth, what are the attitudes among these kinds of Christian communities? Are they eager pro-immigrant supporters? No, as the Martha’s Vineyard stunt demonstrates profoundly. Vicious homophobic, racist, anti-immigrant, COVID-denying rhetoric is omnipresent in these spaces. And the COVID resisters are violating the idea of non-violence and giving in to governments, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar, which supposedly justifies their beliefs elsewhere.
Lastly, do these people avoid banning gay marriage or getting involved in trans peoples’ lives? Of course not. The state can be pro-Christian when it comes to regulating the lives of minorities but not when it comes to controlling the rich and denying them power and privilege, or extending any mercy, or practicing peace.
Of course, this is just a subset of how conservatives in general play the ideological game, which is ironically what Jesus called out in the Gospels: hypocrisy. A belief in immutable hierarchy and sanctioned power is inevitably going to fall into hypocrisy because there’s no norm that one can say out loud that sounds remotely coherent that will not pretend toward universalism.
All well put.
We need only remind Christians that Jesus did explicitly say they were to let people take anything from them and to give anything people asked for, without a fight or refusal, not just that hoardining wealth and not sharing will damn you (although he says that repeatedly too). Combine Jesus’s point that you are not to refuse to give anything asked of you, with his approval of paying all taxes, and there is no argument for the “voluntary only” notion. That is definitely the spirit of the Antichrist. Christ said to let them have it. Indeed, even to let them have it to work evil, should they do; so he certainly would endorse letting them have it to work good.
And the novels make this explicit: Ananias and Sapphira were voluntarists. God killed them for it. That’s not just socialism. That’s Stalinism. Ananias and Sapphira are of the Antichrist.
High taxes for the wealthy and broad social welfare policy are thus entirely of Christ. Opposing them is entirely of the Antichrist.
Moreover, what they don’t condemn with their time is telling. Even if this whole “We are opposed to violence so we oppose taxation” business would somehow be squared with Jesus of the Gospels, why is every pulpit not seething with Sanders-esque fiery excoriation of billionaires, corporations, conspicuous consumption, etc.? Why isn’t every church pastor sounding like a Friends of Jesus from the 60s? Why, because white evangelicalism is in thrall to power.
To be fair, I should put on my Tim Wise hat and point out that your criticisms do implicitly ignore an important distinction as well (though it would be included in the distinction between the worst Christianity and the progressive Christianity): black evangelicals and Christians (and, globally, some non-white denominations, though the fundie virus has hit pretty hard). It’s well known that even when black evangelicals share some of the more regressive social attitudes of their white contemporaries in terms of lionizing toxic masculinity, homophobia, etc. they tend to have a much deeper focus on community, giving, social justice, equity, etc. For really obvious reasons. White evangelical Christianity and to a lesser extent European-dominated mainstream Christian sects are really a peculiar metastasis.
I hope that you won’t mind “selecting” me as a person who would like to contribute to your discussion, even though I subsist on a British state pension and have to be careful about my donations.
I have often thought that the Calvinistic insistence on faith rather than works is an important factor in the attitude of protestant Christians towards all the people whom Jesus identifies (e.g. in his parable of the sheep and the goats) as deserving of care. But because Paul insists on the importance of faith as opposed to works it is easy for people to suppose that if they “truly” believe that Jesus died to save us they will be entitled to a place in heaven, whatever they do. Although Luther, who seems to have taken this line, despised the epistle of James, it seems to me to have been wise of the early church to have included it in their canon as a corrective, because it is clearly in line with the teachings attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Works do actually matter. If the tree is known by its fruit, then clearly the good Christian will bring forth good works, and (according to the gospels) Jesus has told us what good works look like. So faith can’t be enough, after all, if it doesn’t prompt good works.
Conservatism, I think, is the political extension of our instinct for self-preservation, so the idea that one can be “saved” (from eternal hell-fire) simply by believing that JC died for our sins is seized on by many conservatives as allowing us to continue in a completely selfish way of life and still get to heaven. Christianity as practised by so many in America (American Christianity being the topic here) has been conveniently adapted to suit the attitudes that Jesus condemned, so it is clearly antichristian. If Satan wanted to subvert everything that we think of as good, inventing this version of protestant Christianity would be ideal.
So God (in the person of Jesus) consorts with tax-gatherers and sinners, is loved by women (and accepts their gifts and even has conversations with them) and heals the sick (even the gentiles) and feeds the hungry. And this is because he has compassion, and this puts his remarks about faith in a rather particular light. And Peter gets God to kill people who do not offer all their wealth… Eyes of needles?
That is indeed part of the rhetoric used to support following the Antichrist and to thus ignore Christ altogether.
It’s even biblically dubious (Paul’s position was actually more nuanced than that, e.g. notice the “bad works” guy he commands his congregation to expel and leave to the depradations of the Devil). But it wouldn’t matter. Even if Paul had outright said “ignore what Jesus said in the first five novels of the New Testament, you don’t have to do any of that,” Paul himself would then be of the Antichrist.
I concur. That was my observation in response to Nanda’s book on Hinduism, that I quote in my article above: Christianity has been captured by the Antichrist, such that it is now simply a tool to justify evils actuallty condemned by Christ, to preserve the bigotries and selfish desires of its adherents, rather than a tool to realize any vision one can honestly attribute to the Christ of the New Testament novels. They have abandoned Christ entire.
Yeah, the faith-good works distinction, while important to Christians, is I think for the reasons you identify irrelevant to the rest of us. Even with the problems that people like Dillahunty have pointed out with the “good fruits” idea (namely that all people are a mix of good and bad fruits and so that doctrine exposes you to gullibly accept all prophecy from someone who has yet to reveal themselves as either wrong about a prophecy or a bad and cruel person), it’s fairly clear to me that the Jesus character (and the community) included that as a method of internal policing of conduct for exactly this reason.
Whether good works are essential for salvation or merely are the inevitable outcome of someone who is saved, everyone else has a very clear litmus test: jerks aren’t saved. Only someone who has the spirit within them to do good works are saved.
Meaning that huge swaths, if not the vast majority, of Christians remain damnable hypocrites. By their own standards.
Probably not a convincing, let alone a winning, argument to anyone not in your congregation already.
“Consider, for example, the Christian youth who come out to me after a presentation to a church group to explain their disappointment with their leaders and how they despise everything their churches preach, obsessing over abortion and gay rights and the whole conservative political regime, while they just want to do “Jesusy things,” like end poverty and alleviate suffering.”
The tried and tested solution is to schism and set up their own church to accomodate what they think is the Xtian message, dogma, and theology. Not channeling Augustine arguing with his Manichean bishop. They know where the door is and all they should mind is it doesn’t hit them on the way out.
All I get from a close reading of the NT, Early Church Fathers, and the Heresiologists of the Second to Fifth centuries they didn’t have a clue themselves about their own religion. None of the literature seems to cohere with the majority of the rest of it and none of the individual texts appear to be coherent or self-consistent themselves.
What is the original Xtian message, dogma, and theology? God knows and He ain’t telling; we have zilch to tell us anything reliable before mid-Second Century. All Xtianity has consisted of since then is heresies all the way down. Some have been a lot more successful than others, but that tells us a whole lot of nothing and the last thing we need is more of the same bollocks.
Your’s is basically the same Xtian crazy, Richard, which is only to be expected as like all of us you’ve been swimming in Christendom your whole life, and these things are culturally determined.
I was never a Christian. My only prior faith was Taoism.
But whether conservative Christians will wake up and be chastened by having the truth of them reflected back at them to see it, and thus relocate their heart and soul back to the bosom of Christ, and stop serving their own Antichrist, time will tell.
It all had to be said. Now they have but to listen.
If despite being told, having their own Lazarus rise to warn them thus, they nevertheless persist in their evils, then they have no excuse left. They are damned by their own Bible.
Whereas if even 5% of those who read this join those youth who want to do Jesusy things (whether by forming or backing new churches or simply by collective individual action) instead of continuing to serve the Antichrist, compound interest entails we win in the end: good will prevail over the evils of conservative selfish bigotry. It just takes time. And the internet is forever.
I sometimes wonder whether the main reason for the existence and continued creation of so many christian “schisms” is the conflict between the conservative mind and the people who actually worry about the naked, the sick, the imprisoned and the hungry. Given the power of a state religion (as Christianity became in the Roman empire and beyond into mediaeval Europe) there would be a golden opportunity for many to exploit belief to keep poorer people in subjection and maximise their own wealth (I think that the desire for security, in the form of wealth, is what it is ultimately about, and explains the behaviour of the people who actually run the various churches. Well, all right, there is also the male desire to keep women under control, but even Paul doesn’t help here).
The conflict of mind, therefore, also exists in the people who create new movements, because power is a rather fundamental motivation for many of us. So any new sect will be corrupted from the beginning. Therefore there is a sense in which it is difficult to determine the original message of the first Christians. Nevertheless, the “five novels” of the New Testament are fairly uncompromising in their view that faith and works go together, and the exemplified works constitute something like a manifesto for christian behaviour. Paul seems to have understood this, because he does not seem to be attempting to gain anything personally: he simply believed what he was saying. He fought against corruption, but has ultimately lost the battle. The instinct for self-preservation is too powerful. It is too easy to “interpret” old words the way you wish.
Most schisms, alas, have been over obscure trivia, not ideological disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Comparatively few (though there are famous examples) mark that actual divide.
Christians are more obsessed over The Trinity (a completely pointless dispute with no relevance to the world whatever, much less to policy and social action and attitude) than over whether they should be hyper-tolerant pacifist socialists like Jesus said they should.
It is true that doctrine has been a major cause of Christians’ persecution of their fellows. However, it has sometimes struck me that the Roman Catholic Church, while teaching the importance of good works, predominates in many countries in which widespread destitution contrasts with very right-wing and authoritarian government. And Catholics are far more vigorous in their persecution of priests who try to challenge injustice. Until recently the Protestant countries have generally done better, despite the view that faith is more important.
Gordon: That’s a fair point, but remember, the Catholic Church effectively defined “good works” as “giving to and being loyal to the Church”. That authoritarian conflation of the organization’s needs and goodness is precisely how a counter-cultural idea like early Christianity can be turned into an authoritarian one. The Cartoon History of the Universe made this point in context of the Protestant Revolution and it was an eye-opener to think about it in that framing, that the Protestants by reemphasizing faith alone had basically tried to attack the institutional power of the church.
@Fred
Incidentally, in case you’re not familiar with it, back in the 12th/13th century there was also much of that kind of religious fervor, which was either sculpted into a highly controlled form or stamped out as heretical for exactly the same reason. Perhaps most famously look up Beguines if you’re less familiar with the time period.
Frans: I was somewhat aware of that but definitely would need to study it in more depth. Thanks for the point!
Steven: If I see people preaching a message of hate, I have a duty to try to stop them, even when it’s not superficially similar to my message. That duty to my neighbors doubles when the hate poses as if it’s my belief system. So these young Christians should be fighting for their churches. They shouldn’t automatically concede to the jerks.
And, of course, whatever some original, “pure” ideology is or isn’t, the Gospels aren’t obscure. So if we are going to be lectured about the Jesus of those Gospels, as we are, maybe those people should live up to that Jesus. No need for some kind of deep historical dive necessary.
What I really like about Richard’s essay is how un-Christlike today’s Christianity actually is. You don’t need to know the true Church history, or the assembly of the books, or the nuances of Christianity and how it came to be. It’s simple, elegant and dead accurate. Proving Christianity from the very texts that claim Christianity.
We’ve all tried to argue from reason, fact, history and evidence – and it rarely works. Christians refuse to hear any of it, and the rare individual that will engage in the necessary research to “find out for themselves” is exceedingly difficult to find.
Richard’s essay bypasses all of that, thankfully. No Christian actually “needs” to know anything else to understand that if they embody the anti-Christ spirit then they are not actually following their Biblical Christ. If you wallop them upside the head with historical accuracy, archeology or anything outside of the Bible as they know it, their eyes will glaze over and they will tune you out.
Thanks Richard. Concise, honest and accurate, this should be read by every Christian throughout the world.
Jonathan: Having made these points before, you will find that Christians will very often tune them out too.
First of all, you’re a filthy atheist, so they can just put you into the “ignorant” box in their head and ignore you. You’re speaking lies to them. Even the Devil uses scripture for his purpose, right?
Second, many have heard this point before. They hear it from liberal Christians. This is viewed as an internecine Church squabble. And Christians are actually often pretty good at those. That’s where they very often are quite informed. It is very often shocking to see someone who is just utterly ignorant on history, archaeology, biology, etc. very suddenly go off on a very long tangent about their Church’s specific interpretation of “good works” or dispensations or what not with great erudition and Biblical references.
See, these viewpoints they have aren’t really from their Christianity . Logically, we know that ahead of time: many Christians don’t share that viewpoint, so it’s not Christianity in isolation that makes them have these viewpoints.
Rather, it’s a culture of power and domination. That’s why black evangelicals are overwhelmingly more likely to vote Democrat even if they share many of the same retrograde social beliefs and why their messaging so often focuses on the real ungodliness as being poverty, callousness, etc.
Christianity is paired with conservative and American “patriotic” (read: dangerously jingoistic) culture among many of the people Richard is referring to. Each one buttresses the other. They hold onto these beliefs because they have a need to maintain a worldview that not only lets them think they’ll meet their family when they die and lets them feel the awe of worshiping an amazing entity but also allows them to continue to not worry about their masculinity, their heterosexuality, their whiteness, or their affluence. They get a divine sanction to be “tough on crime”, to feel like their own backyard is safe, to beat back those evil socialists. And because the specific incarnation of the religion evolved in part to be a defense mechanism for other beliefs they want to hold for other reasons, it will resist inoculation into a more liberal form.
OK… Interesting thread.
I think Richard is totally off-base with the accusations that “Most Christians…” or “Most conservative Christians…”. But, maybe I’d just need to see some real stats on those things. It might very well be true that “Most Christians” just despise immigrants. I’d need some supporting info – and – I could be wrong. But, whenever I see somebody posting what appears to be unsubstantiated generalizations, a flag goes up…
But, that’s really neither here nor there.
What interests me is this: in 2020, about 31% of the US population said they were Christian. In 2022, about 22% (in a separate study) said they go to church weekly.
Now, the only thing about those bits of information that I’d note is this: Christians are a MINORITY in this country. Those that claim to be Christian, and those that actually go to church on a regular basis. By both counts, they’re a minority.
Why is it so important to bash a minority that is getting even more marginalized by the month?
Richard — you yourself are part of the overwhelming majority in this country: non-Christian cisgender and white. You’ll accept LGBTQ – they’re a marginalized minority. But, that doesn’t mean you engage in their lifestyle. Nonetheless, you accept their views of gender and sexuality.
So, why do you bash another marginalized minority? I’m speaking about Christians now. They have their views of gender and sexuality, but you – being a member of the large majority that is non-Christian, cisgender and white – actually reject Christians and those views.
You support one marginalized minoirty (LGBTQ), but, you don’t engage in their lifestyle; so, why do you attack another marginalized minority (Christian) – you certainly don’t have to engage in their lifestyle.
So, at what point does the “social justice and equality” kick in? On what basis do you accept one marginalized minority, on one hand, but on the other, attack another marginalized minority?
Do you plan on attacking, say, members of the Sikh community any time soon?
The truth is that you just want to maintain your “majority” position; it’s nothing but power. You like being in a group that makes up the majority; you can feign magnanimity to whichever marginalized group, and you’ll do so as long as it profits you to do so.
But, other marginalized minorities?
They either have to become acceptable to your majority by denying the very thing that makes them minority and marginalized – and, makes them who they are – or, they’ll be done away with.
Have I got this right?
I have no idea where you are getting your information but you don’t have any correct facts here. The percentage of Christians in the US is far above “31%.” Double that in fact. And the percentage of Christians who are conservative has in every poll come out above 50%.
Christians are a majority numerically, and in respect to majority power, in the US (look at the percentages in Congress; all present and past Presidents; the Supreme Court and courts in general; voting public; etc.).
Christians are not a marginalized minority here. They are barely marginalized even where they are minorities. And all religious interference in law and life here is Christian. There is no plague of Sikh policy or social pressure anywhere here.
And in the rest of the developed world (with very few exceptionsm, e.g. Japan), Christians make up by far the majority religion, among declared religions, and thus are the most prominent and influential superstition affecting society. They also dominated and governed all the empires that defined and built the entirety of the modern West.
A very distant second by that metric is not Sikh, but Muslim. And I have written an entire Primer on critiquing Islam and have even debated Muslims in public. But they are such a minuscule minority with no relevantly distinctive beliefs from conservative Christians that there is hardly any need of additional treatment. An argument against god is an argument against god. And a denunciation of homophobia is a denunciation of homophobia. Indeed, Islam basis its homophobia on exactly the same text as Christians: the Jewish Bible (there isn’t anything about that actually in the Quran; even it’s recounting of the tale of Lot only explicitly references heterosexual rape).
Thus all critiques of that Bible are critiques of all three religions. As are all critiques of god, the afterlife, and the supernatural. No “special” critiques of these are needed.
But again, Muslims pose no significant electoral threat to any human rights in any developed nation on Earth, and even less so in the US. Whereas Christianity is still driving human rights violating policy in the US, even threatening to overthrow the government. There were no Muslims storming the capitol on January 6. Those people were flying Christian nationalist flags. And almost all public figures egging them on and defending them are Christians. Not Sikhs. Not even Muslims.
So, try getting your facts right first. Then you can have useful opinions. So far, you have neither.
You are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!! My numbers were WAY, WAY off!!!
So, let’s totally agree that my numbers were wrong, and yours are much, much closer to the reality of the thing. Fine. I’m totally OK with that. Consider me completely corrrected.
But what I was trying to get to was a question on a more “philosophical” level – and, that question still remains, which I’ll take another shot at:
Let’s use LGBTQ as a marginalized minority.
And, let’s use RELG as a religious group that is also a marginalized minority, and they believe in only two genders, and consider homosexual activities as perverse, disdainful, morally wrong, and so on.
Now, we’ve got our “minorities”, but they’re minorities in comparison to what? A majority that is cisgender, and is not RELG. It’s only that majority that is capable of doing the marginalization, thus, only them that can reduce the marginalization.
The question is: at what point does that cisgender, non-RELG majority decide to try to non-marginalize the RELG, as they do with the LGBTQ?
Or – does that simply NEVER happen, because the majority agrees with LGBGQ regarding gender, homosexual activities, etc?
If it NEVER happens, then, how can that majority ever claim to be promoting equality, inclusion, social justice, and so on? They are the ones doing the marginalizing.
Dennis, I have no idea what your argument even is at this point.
Can you try explaining what your point is more clearly?
Please…
(1) Start from the beginning (what are your premises and conclusion; no digressions or meandering). And (2) relate it to the article you are commenting on in some intelligible way.
Dennis: I really don’t know how to proceed when someone talks like this. You seem to be an adult. I don’t think you have any good reason not to understand the point.
A group merely being a group, that exists, in the world, is not the same as an oppressed group. I really hope I don’t need to explain what a gender wage gap is, or what a death camp is, or examples like that. You should be able to understand why a group that just recently got the right to marry is not comparable to a group who count the vast majority of former and current Presidents in their ranks, have huge fundraising organizations to advance their political agenda, basically own a political party, and have numerous national holidays in a secular country that are based on their religion including the holiday we are going through right now. If Christians were persecuted, Christmas wouldn’t be a national holiday.
This distinction is like the difference between dollars and donuts, or sky and sea, or head and foot. There’s nothing else to discuss with you. Even if criticizing a marginalized group’s practices wasn’t okay, and even that isn’t true, that wouldn’t mean it’s not okay to criticize a group with power. In fact, criticizing a group with way more power than they deserve is morally obligatory for the exact same reasons that being careful and measured with criticisms of those without power is. This is elementary morality. You clearly can write a coherent sentence and ask good questions. You can make an argument from statistics.
Maybe there’s a breakdown of communication here. I really hope so. Otherwise, I think neither Richard nor I are going to be able to figure out where your objection lies, because it’s going to be on some incredibly basic fact or distinction.
Maybe it’s useful to just ask: What is so objectionable about what Richard said, in general?
Like, okay, it was critical, but didn’t he just go down the line of what the Gospels say and find where at least some Christians aren’t living up to it? There’s a Christian left – you do know that, right? They actually do live up to what Richard said. Richard would still disagree with them as would I on many issues, but nowhere near as many as on this one. They’re not running a fascist death cult. But that is what evangelical Christianity is, at least in the United States (and that infection is spreading): a straightforward excuse to defend power, rationalize hierarchy, and create a foundation for an anti-human violent ideology.
Yeah, Dennis, I don’t know where you’re getting your demographics, but that is simply not the consensus. There’s no plausible methodology that doesn’t have Christians as a majority. Moreover, trying to pretend that non-church goers aren’t Christians is a very poor no true Scotsman fallacy. Many people think that there is no need to go to church, once saved always saved and all that. Others think that the current churches are corrupt (and, frankly, they have a point, don’t they?)
But let’s grant for a second that they’re a plurality, since there is no way even if Christians are a minority that they are not the largest single religious group. “Plurality” doesn’t mean “marginalized”, so your argument falls flat on its face. Rich people are a minority statistically and are also not power minorities. They are not marginalized. And neither are Christians. In fact, if Christians were a minority, that would be even worse than the status quo because that would mean a minority of special interests were successfully bullying the majority of politicians into needing to at least kowtow to their rhetoric.
With that confusion eliminated, there’s nothing else to really discuss. You provide no evidence of marginalization. You allude to people disagreeing with Christians and criticizing them as marginalization. This alone tells everyone that you have no goddamn idea what marginalization is. You don’t know what it means to have your neighbors look at you like you’re not human and don’t belong, to fear every interaction with the police, to be stalked in public by security and randos, to learn as a nine year old girl recently did at the hands of a Republican politician that some Karen can call the cops on you and you can potentially die because of the color of your skin ( https://www.yahoo.com/news/local-republican-calls-cops-9-214922501.html )
But even if you were right about all that, and weren’t grotesquely minimizing what actual marginalized groups go through by this rhetoric (hell, even insulting Christians in countries where they really are oppressed – often thanks to US guns and support for dictators, by the way), you still would be goddamn wrong. And I suspect even you know this. I’m going to guess, based on your rhetoric, that you’re the kind of guy who doesn’t think it’s racist to paternalistically wag one’s finger at the black community because of black-on-black crime or out-of-wedlock births or whatever other racist excuse is trending this week among right-wingers for their dehumanization of people of color. If so, you know damn well that it would be perfectly possible for Richard to both recognize whenever there are serious problems that face Christians that those must be called out and identified, and also that Christians can be jerks too . Just like I can recognize that, say, Kanye’s current anti-Jewish rhetoric is awful. Or that anti-Korean rhetoric among African-Americans is an issue that needs to be dealt with. It’s not hard. Unless you’re making excuses for crap behavior. Which you seem to be.
And what’s so noxious about this is that this boy who cried wolf stuff will mean that any actual threats and problems Christians do face will be laughed out of court because you poisoned the well. Like, say, all those children who get molested thanks to the inability of churches to deal with it. Or real threats to black evangelical churches even today. You are hurting even your own cause with your emotionally-driven outburst to not listen to real criticism made with love.
“They aim to prevent people learning the history of racism.”
I would like just once somebody who makes claims like this to cite a textbook used over the past thirty years in American public school history classes that do not cover the history of racism and slavery in this country but that do cover other topics (think here of a general American history course as opposed to say a course on history of Buddhism). What people oppose are teaching concepts derived from CRT to children who both lack the intellectual maturity to critically analyze those concepts AND the teaching of them in a dogmatic fashion. I assume nobody on this site would want Eco-Feminism or Logical Positivism or Freudian psychology taught to sixth graders dogmatically, right? CRT isn’t “history” but an offshoot of continental philosophy that utilizes science fiction (think whatever the Nation of Islam believes and tone it down slightly). The worst Biblical scholarship (if you can even call it that) that I’ve ever had to read came from people utilizing concepts borrowed from CRT, but with a Christian spin on it. Read anything by Gale Yee or Jennifer Harvey then compare said authors to FC Bauer or Ehrman and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Higher Critics shouldn’t mess with low level stuff except to critique it anymore than philosophers of physics should mess with Scientism except to critique it. Saying that banning CRT in public schools is akin to banning the teaching of history is as dishonest as saying banning the teaching of eco-feminism is akin to banning teaching climate change or that banning logical positivism is banning the teaching of physics or that banning the teaching of Freud is the equivalent of banning the teaching of real psychology.
Actually, if these people really wanted to teach the history of racism, they would include entire chapters on white slavery in the US and modern-day Arabia, the origin of the word “slave”, the fact that Arab Muslims sold their African Muslim brothers to white slave owners, etc. Ironically there are Muslim congresswomen who insist on teaching CRT yet are unaware that their own prophet owned black slaves and considered their worth less than slaves with lighter skin!
https://news.yahoo.com/rashida-tlaib-blasts-critics-critical-204900883.html
“There came a slave and pledged allegiance to Allah’s Apostle (ﷺ) on migration; he (the Holy Prophet) did not know that he was a slave. Then there came his master and demanded him back, whereupon Allah’s Apostle (ﷺ) said: Sell him to me. And he bought him for two black slaves, and he did not afterwards take allegiance from anyone until he had asked him whether he was a slave (or a free man)”
https://sunnah.com/muslim:1602
You haven’t given any examples of false CRT in school textbooks. You are attacking a bugbear—a myth. You have bought into a new religion. Rather than attending to the facts.
You are also using troll tactics (particularly whataboutism). For example, white slavery never had any significant systemic impact on the entire history of the United States or Western imperialism. And indentured servitude (not the same thing) already is covered in most schoolbooks.
You also haven’t cited any evidence that any Muslim congresswoman is “unaware” of the slavery in the Quran (that’s quite unlikely; unlike Christians, Muslims actually read their holy book; but like Christians, most Muslims don’t actually follow what their holy book says but regard it as in many respects outdated or to be freely interpreted—after all, the Bible, unlike the Quran, doesn’t just mention slavery, but in the very words of God commands it, and Jesus even uses it as a positive example, yet no Christian in congress endorses it; and not because “they don’t know” it’s in there).
Your tendency to replace facts with your own racist fantasies is really showing here.
Dude, what color exactly do you think most of the slaves in Europe were before the 1600s? The word “slave” actually comes from the word “slav” which implies what we consider slavery rather than indentured servitude. Ancient Greek literature is littered with examples of Greeks owning other Europeans. This existed all the way into the Christianization of Europe when a pope saw two white slaves and said, “they’re angels, not Angles” which could only happen if there was a slave hierarchy in Europe amongst other whites. Most if not all of the slaves Vikings (I know some people don’t like the word “Vikings” but I’ll use it anyway) owned were other Europeans. I’m actually descended from a Viking sex slave as are many other people with Norse ancestry.
That doesn’t show racism on my part, it shows my understanding of world history. Also I’ve spoken to two black Islamic leaders, one of whom has taught at both Berkeley and U Michigan and both were ignorant of the fact that Muhammad owned black slaves. I cited hadiths from Sunni websites before one of them said that I couldn’t get reliable info on Islam from the internet in spite of the fact that it was a Sunni website, and he was a Sunni as well! If even two professors at R1 institutions can be ignorant of this fact, then certainly the average Muslims who ISN’T a scholar would be as well, right?
You say that Muslims read their Holy Book unlike Jews and Christians, but that’s beside the point since the slave owning Muhammad’s deeds with his slaves aren’t mentioned in the Koran but the Hadith! The Koran can be read or recited in less than one day, the Bible takes a lot more time and even then at least the Bible has so many authors one could just ignore the parts that seem redactions or interpolations. The Koran has a very different textual history and that affects our interpretation of it. It is impossible in theory to find the original Koran since all competing manuscripts were burned by the Caliphat hundreds of years ago. That is simply not the case with any Biblical book. From the very beginning, the Bible was a multi-lingual book. You can find Ugaritic, Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and even Proto-Tamil in it. In the Koran you just have Arabic.
Most importantly, you haven’t addressed my question: would you think it anti-science to refuse to teach Eco-Feminism, Logical Positivism, or Freudian Psychology to students below the college level? If not, then what is the relevant difference between CRT and those other schools of thought? How can you, an analytic philosopher be so supportive of an offshoot of Continental Philosophy yet not also support other offshoots such as Eco-Feminism? It’s not like one has a butt-load of science behind it that the other lacks, right? If CRT is “history” then why isn’t Eco-Feminism “Environmental Science”? Why aren’t college freshmen in physics classes being taught ideas that came from Hempel, Schlick, or Carnap?
You have your dates wrong. The 1600s is after the Age of Exploration began at the end of the 15th century, which created the white/black distinction (“before the explorations, there were no white people” is a seiminal fact, per W.E.B. Dubois). That is when slavery became overwhelmingly black. Western Imperialism began on and was built on that basis; the American slave system was almost entirely built on that too.
That is why there is no systemic racism against white descendants of slaves. No one even knows who they are. Blackness was invented by white slevers who created that system in the 1500s, so you could know. The end result is centuries of white-black racism, both systemic and individual. All because of the 1500s retooling of slavery as predominately a black occupation. That’s why you cannot understand the modern world without understanding this.
As to your question, I have no idea what you are talking about. Freudianism was refuted scientifically half a century ago. Logical positivism was abandoned as a philosophical model half a century ago; it was never a science. And eco-Feminism is not even a thing (it’s a vague slogan for any amorphous intersection of those two interests; there is no distinct theory that goes along with it). By contrast CRT has been vastly confirmed scientifically; it is a central tenet of modern sociology and political science. It is backed by literally thousands of empirical studies. And continues to be every year now. See my comments above where I link to my discussions of this fact in other articles.
Yes, Bill, and the Slavic slave trade was heavily done by the Europeans not just the Muslims. This is contrary to the dishonest attempts of people like you to imply that Europe basically had no slavery post-Rome and it was all the evil Muslims and Africans who were doing it and then the innocent Europeans showed up. This is false.
So then when the Europeans entered their phase of colonialism, they combined elements like the myth of Ham, proto-racial science, a racist metaphysics, and Christian nationalism to create a potent combination that justified one-drop laws, anti-miscegenation laws, working slaves until they died, “all their further increase” rules of perpetual chattel slavery, 3/5 compromises, and using slaves to work on land taken from exterminated people. There was a specific ideological root that goes to the heart of many concepts that are important in America, ideas like manifest destiny.
That’s the point everyone is making when we talk about how Southern planters and their ideological allies deliberately fomented racial division between white indentured servants and black slaves to divide the working class and create a psychological wage of whiteness. Not that slavery was historically new in 1492 or that the slave trade triangle was the only slave network on the planet or anything else. Rather, it is to point out that
1) a very specific racial ideology was woven into the fabric of the United States (and other European countries) and
2) the wealth that the US presently has comes from the intergenerational growth that came from colonization and participation in a brutal slave trade
Both of which facts are the only reasonable place to start with if we want to talk about, say, black poverty or white fascism today.
This is why I brought up the critical legal studies I know you’re fucking clueless about, Bill. CLS argued that the law’s apparent neutrality is a smokescreen for the fact that the law is designed to work for the wealthy and power, not as an accident or fluke but by its structure. CRT came along and pointed out that it’s not just political and economic power that the law fundamentally discriminates along the lines of, but also racial power. Like, say, voter ID laws that allow gun IDs but not student IDs. Or a crack-cocaine sentencing disparity.
You invoke the hadith, but, Bill, the hadith is of secondary canonicity, always, so who the fuck cares? But yeah, Muslim history has had slave history in it. And notice your fucking brazen hypocrisy. You’re against CRT because it’s apparently akin to the Nation of Islam to bring up the ongoing significance of slavery that ended in the 1860s (and was kept on life support unconstitutionally for decades longer)… but Muslims better not ever bring anything up about slavery because of texts from more than a millennium ago? Fuck, Bill, I’m glad you have double standards, because otherwise you would have none! This is such mendacious villainy, Bill. You should be fucking ashamed. If a Muslim can’t talk about these issues, neither can fucking you. (And don’t make me start talking about pre-Chinese Tibet and Ashoka’s dharma and all the times Buddhism has been complicit with massive fucking crimes, if you want to keep this collective responsibility bullshit up).
When you ask, “Most importantly, you haven’t addressed my question: would you think it anti-science to refuse to teach Eco-Feminism, Logical Positivism, or Freudian Psychology to students below the college level? ” First of all, nice change of question after I called you out on it: because you originally asked if it would be okay to teach it dogmatically . Now that’s fucking gone so you can retreat to your nice little motte when your bailey got called out. Good work! What’s your next lie going to be?
But, no, of course not, buddy. Because those aren’t really appropriate topics for a course they’re already studying.
But they’re already studying history, Bill. So having a historical curriculum that doesn’t lie to them about race and uses the best data and scholarship about race as a basis? What could possibly be objectionable about that?
Right! I forgot! If white people ever feel bad, that’s racism against them!
Drop the act, Bill. We all know what your objection is. Otherwise you would be loudly calling for the change of the current curriculum because it too is contaminated by ideology: namely, right-wing Christian nationalism. Strangely, though, that doesn’t seem to bother you.
Have the argument people are having or don’t. But drop the strawmen.
Fred, you know those were BLACK politicians who pushed for harsher crack sentences, right? Also, crack is easier to distribute than cocaine, hence it makes sense to have harsher penalties for it. Also, you can’t be an orthodox Muslim and not accept the authority of the hadiths. The contrary is called the Koran-Only school and it is heavily persecuted even among Muslim communities in the west. One Koran-Onlyist was stabbed to death in America (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashad_Khalifa). I also explicitly stated that slavery among white Europeans existed after the Christianization of Europe. In fact I stated it twice, once when referencing Pope Gregory, and again with my own ancestry from the “Vikings”.
When orthodox Muslims stop stabbing people, especially their fellow Muslims, then they can lecture me all they want about slavery, though I’ll ask them quite a few questions about the slavery of Indian immigrants in Saudi Arabia, UAE, et.al which of course continues to this day yet I see very few white liberals demanding an end to tourism in these countries. You can go to freaking Mecca and find western designer brands that you can’t find in rural West Virginia. Likewise EDM artists who push for CRT in American public schools ignore the present day slavery in UAE that is well documented. That my friend is hypocrisy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quranism
https://mattersindia.com/2017/06/indian-woman-escapes-slavery-in-saudi-arabia/
https://nycfpa.org/05/12/reportmodern-day-slavery-in-dubai/
Jesus Christ, Bill.
Yes, there have been members of the black community who as far back as Nixon have supported various anti-drug enforcement efforts because of the damage being done to their communities. Not one of them insisted on racialized discrimination and enforcement in the law, of course, and many turned on the ideas when they saw how people like Nixon explicitly and consciously weaponized these laws against political enemies and racial minorities. Drug laws remain on the books not because they’re a good idea or work to stop drugs as we now have decades of empirical research on. They do so because huge swaths of all populations use illegal drugs so you can pretend that the law isn’t expressly discriminatory when you
But here’s a brief logic lesson, Bill. Does X policy being recommended by some black leaders mean that the policy isn’t structurally racist in its impact?
No?
*Then why the fuck did you bring it up, unless you want to play the identity politics game, Bill * ?
The CRT answer to your little duck-and-jive there would be to point out that the black community begs for shit all the time, like cleaning up lead from their communities or having cops work with them rather than against them or have functioning schools and social work systems, and they don’t get them. Yet mysteriously they do get the things they ask for that end up policing blacks more harshly than whites. So even if there’s some policy environment that would make that proposal make sense, that’s not the policy environment that crack-cocaine sentencing disparities were deployed in , get it?
Nice cherry-picking that objection and trotting out yet another conservative dead horse to beat.
Of course … https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jun/29/len-bias-death-basketball-war-on-drugs . The reason the 1986 bill was passed had to do with a bunch of racist mythology and bullshit. And it was pushed through by a ton of very white Republicans and Democrats, back during the Reagan years. Please, Bill. Sell to me with a straight face the idea that we got crack-cocaine sentencing disparities and a harsher drug war only because some black leaders asked for it. As if no white politician had ever been interested in the idea independently. Fucking seriously.
And why the hell does a drug being easier to distribute mean it should be punished more harshly for use or possession or even ownership? Right, no fucking reason at all, but because you are ideologically all-in on anti-left rhetoric, you have to defend every single discriminatory policy, no matter how fucking nonsensical it is.
Again, Bill, the drug war doesn’t fucking work *. Not at its stated goals, at least. (It does work at the *actual goals , which is the point of CLS and CRT: That policies stick around when their actual function, in this case social control and imprisonment of excess population as Michelle Alexander documents, operate, no matter how little sense they make otherwise). It doesn’t matter how bad crack is compared to cocaine. The entire idea of trying to criminalize a mental illness and health problem is fucking dumb. There is no justification for any of it. Even someone without a libertarian commitment to people being able to do what they want with their lives whose only goal would be to deal with the drug problem would still favor decriminalization along with rehabilitation, drug counseling, mental health, etc. That empirically works. Lawmakers know this, Bill. They get told every year by nice glossy publications that nice liberal academics put out with nice accomodationist rhetoric. Do they change the policy? No. Stop selling everyone on the idea that a policy whose impact is racist and which cannot achieve its stated goal and has massive externalities is somehow sticking around because of some kind of coincidence or because black people really desperately want it.
As for “You can’t be an orthodox Muslim…”: First of all, citation fucking needed. Muslims absolutely vary on their acceptance of hadith. More importantly, you referred obliquely to Muslim politicians. Almost certainly a certain member of The Squad, right? Calling most Muslim politicians in the United States, especially Democrats, “orthodox” is fucking stretching. But you remained deliberately vague so you could strawman your opposition.
Again, why are you sticking to just Muslims? Every Republican who claims to be a Bible-believing Christian must all be pro-slavery and so CRT must be right, right? Except that wouldn’t be convenient for your argument, so fuck that. When do the lies stop, Bill? When will you try not having a blatant double standard?
Great, so you get why talking about the history of “slav” doesn’t actually disprove the idea that Western culture has deep roots of slavery ideologically within it. A CRT prediction that you concede. So… why the fuck did you bring it up?
As for Muslims stabbing people: Cool, and when Buddhists stop being terrorists, they get human rights. And when Christians stop invading Muslim majority countries, we can stop treating all of them like genocidal lunatics. And when atheists stop making Communist dictatorships, they get human rights too.
*This is mealy-mouthed horseshit, Bill * . Collective religious responsibility isn’t a thing. We’re only accountable for our behavior and for our specific communities we’re actually a part of. But you are perfectly happy to invoke the specter of Muslims needing to criticize violence as they always do every single time while balking at CRT because it’s apparently being radical like the Nation of Islam to observe that there are structural inequalities in the United States that current policy perpetuates. Seriously, will you ever stop being a mendacious liar? Just once, will you hold non-white people to the standard you hold white people to?
Lastly, the old “BUT OTHER COUNTRIES DO SLAVERY!” line. Yeah, so does the US! And most Western countries! Not only do we integrate into slave economies around the world, happily getting our fucking iPhones and batteries as a result, we also straight up import slaves. It’s well known among anyone who studies human trafficking that the destination countries for human trafficking victims are affluent countries, because of course it works that way that’s how economies work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery_in_the_United_States
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/la-garment-factories-investigation/
Funny how you fucking missed that, Bill. Funny how your woobie about ever feeling bad for the color of your skin or anything else, no matter how measured the criticism someone is making of a culture is, always manifests in this blatant whataboutism and never you admitting that there are problems in the US (aside from problems shrieking right-wingers bring up) that need to be addressed. Nope, it’s always the big bad Muzzies! Never me! This is fucking transparent, Bill.
But, yes, there is a serious modern day slavery problem in the Middle East. You know, that region that expressly has huge connections to the West, like building all those nice stadiums people are at games at for FIFA’s World Cup, right? Building all that infrastructure for “expats” and Western travelers? Making deals with the WWE? If Western countries wanted to crack down on slavery, they could, and not just by starting at home. They could impose serious sanctions on Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc. But then that’d mean we don’t get the oil! So that’s not acceptable, for some reason!
It doesn’t matter that other countries do slavery. We all know this. It’s fucked up. It’s evil. Anti-human trafficking advocates talk about it constantly. And so people like John Oliver can have segments on modern day slavery, like with his FIFA segment… and also segments on American institutional racism, and our own legacy of slavery. Because two people can do bad things, Bill . But you can’t hold two ideas in your head at the same time on this topic.
So, when we subtract misrepresentations, conceded arguments, whataboutism, and bullshit, what do you have left against CRT, Bill? Right, fucking nothing . You’re still not engaging with CRT as a literature. You’re not quoting Delgado and finding anything you find objectionable. You’re not analyzing the policy landscape as they do. You’re just still making excuse after excuse not to look into this. Why, Bill ? What are you so fucking afraid of? That maybe you’ll realize that people can think racism is a real problem in the US, traced to structural factors, and not be hatemongers? That maybe then you might have to do something about it, and learn about it, and demand policy change?
Whatever it is, Bill, grow up and accept the truth. We live in a society marred with institutional racism. The last years of Trump should show that so clearly to any honest person. That doesn’t make Americans evil or bad or ignorant (though some are), it doesn’t make us fascist (though we are dangerously close to that), it makes us human. Just like the UAE and China and countries in Africa and Latin America, we have a specific history of racial ideology, racial injustice and racial violence. And our duty is to deal with our shit , fix our communities , not wag our finger at other countries. If personal responsibility means a damn thing to you. But because you are ideologically a reactionary… it doesn’t.
And that sucks.
Correction: ” They do so because huge swaths of all populations use illegal drugs so you can pretend that the law isn’t expressly discriminatory when you enforce it”.
Also, you may be able to find people who advocate for CRT who are quiet on abuses in the Middle East. You may even be able to find some who are, say, making brand deals with the Middle East. You can also find anti-CRT advocates who do the same fucking thing, Bill. If we want to talk about hypocrisy of certain advocates of an idea meaning that the idea isn’t advocated, no idea, especially none of your conservative bullshit , is ever valid, Bill. This is a non-argument. If we really want to talk about who kowtows to Muslim extremism, we can, and every reasonable person will see that it is the Republicans, always , who maintain these fucked up alliances with brutal dictatorships. Like Suharto’s Indonesia! If we want to talk about Western hypocrisy on Islam, the shrieking hate spewed by people who then go on to happily make deals for oil and tourism and sports with tyrants who back Wahhabist extremists is going to be priority number one…. unless your concern isn’t hypocrisy but just shutting up liberals. Who, as Richard keeps pointing out, can quite easily condemn those specific Muslim people, cultures and groups who do specific evil shit without also being Islamophobic, because they don’t treat Muslims like they’re infected by some kind of evil fluid.
Jesus Christ Fred, now you’re gonna get me cursing! Most of those dictatorships the US supported in the 80s were SECULAR! They weren’t militantly enforcing Christianity in Latin America or Wahabi Islam in 1970s Iran (Wahabis hate “innovators” or any Muslim who deviates from strict Sunni beliefs, don’t ya know?). The Shah’s Iran was at least westernized with movies and no mandatory burqa. So Suharto executed some people who wanted Indonesia to be a seventh century Islamic state. Maybe he could have done better to “educate” those people but twenty years in Afghanistan and Iraq shows that westernizing an Islamic country takes longer than you’d think. I’m not justifying what he did but equating him with actual Islamic extremists isn’t helping you when your whole point is that the US supposedly supported Islamic dictatorships. The only example that I can think of the US directly supporting an Islamic dictatorship (really, a monarchy) is Saudi Arabia. A dictator usually arises through a coup which isn’t the case here. The King of Saudi Arabia is more properly called an Islamic monarch. A dictator would be Zia ul-Haqq who was elected then suspended elections.
As regards dictatorships: First of all, who cares what dictatorships the US supported in the 1980s? Doesn’t that single-handedly make it silly as hell to talk about Muslim hypocrisy?
But, second, I reject your framing. The Latin American death squads may have been nominally secular, but all of those societies were heavily influenced by right-wing Catholicism, and the few people like Archbishop Romero who opposed this were at risk of censure or murder. And you know that whole “Iran-contra” thing? You know, the sale of weapons to radical Islamists to kill Nicaraguan Christians? We backed the Shah who was definitely not strictly secular.
More importantly, the US has never stopped supporting dictatorships, ever. Including religious ones. So why did you decide to just stop the clock at the 1980s? Did you do that because it was convenient to your argument?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/americas-most-awkward-allies-103889
Pakistan. Uzbekistan. Egypt before the revolution. Bahrain. Azerbaijan. Tajikistan. Qatar. The UAE. Please, tell me again, Bill, that all of these are secular governments.
Trying to pretend the US will not back Islamist militants as it needs to is just historical revisionism, Bill. It’s beneath you. Why do you want to die on this hill?
Notice, of course, how this is relevant to our conversation about critical legal studies and critical race theory. Nominally, the US stands for democracy… while overthrowing democracies and backing dictatorships. Similarly, the US nominally stands for Christian hegemony (at least across a large part of the political spectrum)… but they are actually perfectly willing to back Muslims and kill Christians. And that fact, the US’ backing of dictatorships, is exactly the kind of thing that the people you are stanning for would want to eliminate from the textbooks. Even though it actually tells us a lot about this country. Precisely because it tells us a lot about this country. It tells us that so many of the public commitments that the US government makes are never honestly believed, and that policy has to do with crass power and wealth calculations. The only thing CRT adds to that is to point out the additional element of race in that power structure.
As for Suharto: https://www.grin.com/document/110780 . There’s no reason to even address you even weakly trying to defend the brutal Suharto regime. Suharto did not just murder Islamists. He murdered trade unionists, Communists, and any dissidents ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/suharto-one-of-the-greatest-mass-murderers-of-the-20th-century-777103.html ). This is fucking noxious. But what is interesting is, as that GRIN article discusses, that Islam actually was a key part of the pro-democracy movement there. But hey, keep talking about how uniformly awful they are while you are defending the backing of murderous dictatorships.
This is what denying things like CRT gets you, Bill. You have to end up stanning for death squads.
Even you know that the US backs Saudi Arabia, the most dangerous source of Wahhabism in the world. All you have to offer is some mealy-mouthed shit about how dictatorships usually arrive through a coup so therefore… I guess… brutal Islamist monarchs are fine? Hey, remember when you pretended to care about slavery in Islam? But now I guess because Saudi Arabia is a US ally and isn’t a dictatorship it’s okay that they are deeply involved in the slave trade? Yeah, I guess the Saudis don’t suspend elections. No need to suspend things that you never have , right?! I guess the real concern is that an election is suspended rather than the concern being that an election needs to be conducted ever ?! Democracy is just another thing you’ll toss onto the altar of defending your implicit racism, Bill. Your fee-fees matter more than freedom.
Bill. Stop. Seriously. Stop. Look at how you’re squirming. Look at how you’re having to make excuses for your belief system. Why? Why are you bothering? How is this pitiful behavior easier for you to go through than just saying “Hey, actually, you may have a point, I guess I should do some research on CRT?”
So, like I did last time, I’m going to go back to educating you whenever you try to squirm out of it.
https://jordaninstituteforfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Delgado_and_Stefancic_on_Critical_Race_Theory.pdf
This article goes on to discuss what CRT advocates tend to think about how much racism there is in the world. They do not say that America is no different from Jim Crow. They do mention that racism continues and discuss specifics.
So, please, Bill, tell me again that this is indistinguishable from the Nation of Islam because you disagree with it.
You say, “What people oppose are teaching concepts derived from CRT to children who both lack the intellectual maturity to critically analyze those concepts AND the teaching of them in a dogmatic fashion. ”
Ummm… bullshit, dude. Flat out bullshit that you cannot sincerely believe. It may be nice for you if it were true, but it’s not. The anti-CRT hysterics are not coming from people who have ever read Delgado, or ever looked at a syllabus for a class on CRT, or sincerely examined the textbooks. If that were true, we wouldn’t have had right wing cabals basically deciding to put racist nationalist garbage into our textbooks for years. This is straight up culture war nonsense, and borderline fascist since it is trying to deny readily observable facts about the world. If we want to say that teachers can’t teach dogmatically, then get rid of classes whitewashing Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims, get rid of the Pledge of Allegiance, get rid of lionizing Columbus. The right never wants those things eliminated because this isn’t about avoiding indoctrination, just making sure theirs sticks. Aron Ra has seen this happen when he’s fight right wingers on textbooks.
You say, “I assume nobody on this site would want Eco-Feminism or Logical Positivism or Freudian psychology taught to sixth graders dogmatically, right?”
Yes, because I don’t want anything taught dogmatically. You knew that that would be everyone’s position, even conservatives who actually do want dogma taught but don’t want to be honest about it. So this is just fucking white noise, Bill. It’s static. No one is going to tell you they want this stuff taught dogmatically. But they will say they want it taught. So the only argument worth having is whether it should be taught, and what safeguards should prevent it from being taught dogmatically. And since you have nothing to say on that topic, I know even you know you’re full of shit . You know full well that CRT is essentially correct, that reasonable people can disagree with a conclusion here or there (and the scholarship which I have actually read and which I have no doubt that you have not ) without abandoning the idea, and that our current textbooks are whitewashed to the point of propagandistic uselessness. Please don’t make me have to factcheck your ass again. We both know that if we open up an average high school textbook that we’re not going to get the People’s History of the United States. (Which I think should be taught, in conjunction with another textbook that is more consensus-based, in at least some classes).
You say, “CRT isn’t “history” but an offshoot of continental philosophy that utilizes science fiction (think whatever the Nation of Islam believes and tone it down slightly).”
No it’s fucking not. I will quote Delgado at you if you want to try this shit again until you choke on it. Back in high school debate, I debated critical legal studies, critical race theory, Latin/x theory, etc. I studied it in college. This is precisely as fucking dumb as saying that the universe exploded out of nothing. You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about, Bill . If we had a conversation about Buddhism, I bet we’d be able to both have an informed conversation; hell, you almost certainly know a lot of things I don’t. But on this topic, you are incompetent. The only excuse I can give you is that you are so hysterical on race topics that anyone suggesting that institutional racism is real makes you think that white people are about to be lynched. But we had this discussion, and I exposed you as being just utterly disingenuous and two-faced in terms of what you will view as racist or dangerous.
As Tim Wise pointed out when he handed David Horowitz his ass: It is possible for people of good faith to disagree about the salience of race and to think differently about institutional racism in this country without becoming reality deniers, racists or grifters. Simply perceiving a barrier and making an argument that it exists is not anti-white, it’s not hysterical, it’s not race hustling or whatever other right wing phrase you’re going to bring up this week as an excuse for not having this conversation.
CRT emerged from very real study programs like critical legal studies. It is actually quite reasoned about what it does and does not say. https://libguides.mjc.edu/crt is a good guide if you’re ready to stop running your mouth about shit you don’t know about. https://quotecatalog.com/communicator/richard-delgado has some Delgado quotes. Want to come back here and try to lie that any of those, however strongly they are worded, sound like some Nation of Islam or Black Hebrew Israelite nuttery, you fucking hack? Trying this shit after Kanye has shown the rot at the heart of that kind of ideology in recent weeks is particularly noxious.
And, by the way, it has criticism in the academy . Back in high school debate, for the mental health topic, we defended language access for Latin/x people in mental health care. One of the tactical reasons we did that was that CRT is a really popular Kritik in policy debate, but Latin/x studies have really strong criticisms of CRT in that CRT advocates have sometimes failed to be intersectional and have assumed a color binary (which to be fair isn’t really characteristic of people like Crenshaw who is actually a big intersectional person but the “cards” we had were still really good). We would bait people into running CRT against us and just crush them with our module that their own criticism was flawed. If I wanted to spend time schooling you, I could probably find five different kinds of criticism of CRT, from postmodern to Marxist analysis. But you don’t give a shit. You heard FOX or Breitbart or some dumbass friends on Twitter shrieking about this topic and so you parroted their shit. It’s painfully transparent to anyone who actually knows this stuff.
Seriously, bro. Take an introductory, 00 level undergraduate course on this topic. Any community college professor would be sufficient to make you not this incompetent.
” Higher Critics shouldn’t mess with low level stuff except to critique it anymore than philosophers of physics should mess with Scientism except to critique it. ”
Wow. “Higher Critics”. Up your own ass much? You cite Ehrman, the guy who has shown for all of his incredible scholarship that he is fundamentally unreliable when his fee-fees are invoked by his attacks on mythicism, on this blog ? Seriously? Ballsy, dude. Of course, there are CRT philosophers, but hey, screw them, right? They think racism affects non-white people, so clearly that means they’re pond scum? This is just another way for you to not engage with arguments you don’t like.
You say, “Actually, if these people really wanted to teach the history of racism, they would include entire chapters on white slavery in the US and modern-day Arabia, the origin of the word “slave”, the fact that Arab Muslims sold their African Muslim brothers to white slave owners, etc.”
They fucking do. They just don’t make the inference you want to make that therefore racism is just fine because everyone did it (because, you know, that’s not candy-ass moral nihilism or anything) and so therefore there was nothing structurally or ideologically different about Western racist thought specifically. Which is like saying that Christianity and Buddhism are identical because they’re both religions.
This is the kind of insight you think is brilliant, Bill. Something that would get people sighing in frustration at the Young Republican dipshit who really thinks this is schooling the Ph. D.
And I really don’t think you want to think about the origin of the word “slave”, given what it says about European culture. (Hint: think for a second about whether it was just the Muslims involved in the Slavic slave trade).
Bill, I hate being this intense and dismissive of you, but you just keep doing this. There’s no place to start with you. I seriously would need to just sit you down on Skype and walk you through what would basically be a free class on race and ethnic theory and studies in sociology. You’re just Dunning-Krugering (assuming Dunning-Kruger holds up) your way through this conversation. There’s no reasonable place for me to begin. If you were to make some point of disagreement that wasn’t just, say, a genetic fallacy (who gives a shit if it’s Continental philosophy, Bill? is that a reason to ignore it?), I could maybe start clearing up your misconceptions. But at this point, I seriously would need to start dropping pretty basic information on institutional racism . Like, saying that CRT isn’t history… what the fuck was the 1619 Project then, buddy? It’s like trying to deny there are Marxist historians. It takes five seconds of Googling to correct that misconception. Which means you didn’t do even that, because you don’t want to, because this is your woobie . And after the double standards you’ve shown where you will simultaneously argue that even bringing up racism is bad and divisive but also whites are the real victims of racism… you don’t have a position on this topic, Bill. You just have memes you uncritically parrot.
And I can’t help you out of that mental maze until you want to. Nor can Richard or anyone else.
Fred, Derrick Bell wrote an entire book utilizing science fiction to drive his points home! Here it is: https://www.amazon.com/Afrolantica-Legacies-Derrick-Bell/dp/0883781999/ref=sr_1_12?crid=EKNTLWFRQ1MS&keywords=derrick+bell&qid=1670132876&sprefix=derrick+be%2Caps%2C637&sr=8-12
I also know what critical legal theory is and that it spawned CRT. I know a little history of philosophy. There are Marxist historians but Marxism is not history: it is a school of thought, like CRT, that may have influenced historians but is certainly not “history” as people disingenuously call it. I’m also not a Republican but you are free to think so if you wish. I’ll also skip on the community college. I went to one for three semesters and the instructors couldn’t find Nepal on a map (I wish I was joking). I’m not saying CRT is BS because it spawned from Continental Philosophy. I’m pointing out that it is a school of philosophy and its origin is Continental Philosophy, something the goons on cable news and the middle class moms wanting their kids to learn this crap don’t seem to understand.
I’ll say though that I prefer the Nation of Islam to the BHI. I had a classmate in grad school whose friends were into that shit and NOI at least gets people off drugs whereas BHI is nothing but racist trash.
CRT isn’t a school of philosophy. It’s an analytical model in social science. One that is now mainstream in sociology. It’s principles have been thoroughly empirically proved. It’s science now. Not “philosophy.” Much less a “school” of it. See my recent article on an example of it (and the literally thousands of papers confirming the CRT model linked in the conclusion); and my discussion of Fryer (which is likewise; claims otherwise were the mythology, not the other way around).
P.S. Note however that just because CRT is scientific fact, it does not follow that every claimed instance of it is. People misuse science all the time. Just as in the Korean Comfort Women Dust Up case: that was a bogus application of Game Theory; but there being bogus applications of Game Theory does not mean Game Theory isn’t scientific fact. There are ample legit studies confirming it. So you have to look at the real stuff. Not any pseudoscience trying to capitalize on it.
Oh, someone wrote science fiction, therefore neither they nor their entire philosophical movement ever made any scholarly arguments and I can just ignore the metaphorical point of the science fiction! What? Rousseau, C.S. Lewis, Sartre, Voltaire… who?
For fuck’s sake, dude. This is childish. You’re on an atheist philosopher and historian’s website. This is such an obvious non sequitur.
Yeah, bro, I know you don’t know what critical legal studies are. It’s fucking obvious. It’s obvious that you have no idea what the philosophical and scholarly movements you’re talking about are, what they argue, who they were arguing against and why, what their assumptions are and how they are in conversation with each other. So why do you keep goddamn talking about them ? Why don’t you, I don’t know, do some reading ?
I’m glad you clarified what you meant by “history”. Yeah, buddy, CRT isn’t “history” either then. Nor is any “history book”. How did you get confused by your own category error ? By your reasoning, I guess we can only teach history by time travel or maybe by shoving kids’ noses into monuments on field trips or something and hope the history drips down into their skull. We better not have a single textbook, or history class, or historian talking, right?! We always teach history by historical theory and methodology, bud . You just are objecting to CRT because you don’t like its conclusions so fuck its premises and methodologies, because that is mega super-duper rational. But like so many people, you confuse your political beliefs for apolitical ones. You know, “There’s two races: white and political”.
So what things like the 1619 Project do is look at confirmed historical facts (and you can tell this because the totally bogus, bankrupt 1776 Project written largely by non-experts shamefully in defiance of all legitimate methodologies still had to basically concede all of the arguments of substance and then do some lame pearl-clutching and whataboutism just like you did) and apply a different perspective on it. Look at it through the lens of slavery, racialized experience, etc. It’s all the same history, except for those pieces of history that have been whitewashed out by actual revisionism. If you want to call it pseudo-history, or other CRT-inspired historical projects pseudo-history, go ahead! Get ready to get drubbed again though. Because nothing they are saying is actually that controversial .
And you’re not a Republican? Then why do their talking points spew from your mouth ? Either get some self-awareness and/or stop lying to me.
So you flatly admit that just mentioning that it’s continental philosophy meant nothing, informed nothing, really clearly was just an attempt to poison the well… and you still fucked that up because you actually don’t know what you’re talking about .
Again, Bill, I can’t help you if you’re deliberately ignorant. Richard, a historian, and I, someone with a degree in sociology who has been writing about this stuff for more than a decade now, are both telling you you’re full of shit. When are you going to exercise basic humility and honesty and actually do some research? Delgado’s work is actually fairly accessible. You can just go and fucking read it, and can probably get free stuff. I know for a fact that there’s a free version of Oliver and Shapiro’s Black Wealth, White Wealth online. Some of Steinberg’s stuff is also free online. You could read these works and find out that they’re actually very measured scholarly works.
Until you do, all I can do is just keep correcting your lies.
This article is just one separate effort to argue from within the Christian’s own worldview.
You seem not to grasp the need of that or why it could be more effective than merely attacking that worldview
I have found explaining this quite seriously difficult to do at times. The response from fellow sceptics has sometimes been confusion, as though they suspected me of being a believer after all, but I think that the real problem is that sceptics don’t spend enough time becoming familiar with how believers actually view the world, which is so differently from that of the sceptic that mutual incomprehension is a genuine hurdle. The problem, it seems, is that sceptics too often assume that they know about belief and are too dismissive to take the trouble to understand it, and are confused and incredulous when they confront it clearly expressed. As a matter of fact, this seems to me to be an actually anti-sceptical position.
There is a similar problem with the pro-life debate. Unless sceptics truly engage with and understand the sincerity and depth of the emotions involved and the concerns that pro-lifers express they will never help to secure progress in women’s battle to win freedom to determine their lives as fully as possible.
That is very well said. I concur.