Alternet is an online magazine which, daily, features anti-religious, primarily anti-Christian articles and comments. Any time you look at it you will find that anti-religious, primarily anti-Christian posts are among its biggest attractions for an audience that obviously loves to hate them some Christians.
Here's something up there right now
Americans Are Leaving Religion Behind and It Scares the Hell Out of the Christian Right by the professional religion hater, Amanda Marcotte
A partial list of others in Alternet's regular stable of religion, primarily Christian haters include:
C.J. Werleman
Valerie Tarico
Dan Arel
I linked to the authors where you can find a list of what they produce in large quantities for Alternet.
Four regular writers whose primary focus is writing anti-religious hate posts for one magazine. What would you make of a print magazine that regularly carried articles saying the kinds of things these guys say about Christians, only saying them about Jews or Muslims? If a magazine carried stuff like that about Jews it would be known, primarily as an antisemetic rag, its hate content discrediting the rest of its contents. If I had the time I would hold my nose and go look at the archive of magazines infamous for their antisemitism to see how the percentages of articles dedicated to hating on Jews compares to Alternet's archive of anti-Christian hatred. I can guess that the results wouldn't compare to Alternet's credit. I can assure you, if it's news to you, that even with the pervasive acceptance on the alleged left that for most people hate messages directed against them do discredit the other content of magazines and even political identities associated with them.
There are other Alternet writers who would qualify as hate mongers, even if they don't make that the primary focus of their writing. Many of their other regulars write anti-religious, primarily anti-Christian articles, perhaps when they need to get their click counts up. I used to notice the numbers of comments on articles and there are few topics, other than the promotion of commercial sex, that can compete with a good old-fashioned hate post against Christians to run up the old click numbers on Alternet and on Salon which regularly carries Alternet hate posts and has some of its own regulars who specialize in hatin' in the faith-heads. The few times they might carry nice things about religion hardly makes up for their regular content. It looks like window dressing, which it is.
Considering that after more than a decade of the atheist war on "Xians" and other "faith heads" that the vast majority of Americans surveyed identify themselves as Christians or members of other religions, this is about as good a political strategy as the Republican strategy of slamming women. Though it might be even stupider since 1. women are slightly more than 50% of the population whereas far more than 85% are religious and, 2. religious identification is higher among women than it is men.
Atheist vitriol is ballot box poison for everyone except atheists. I looked in at the "Friendly Atheist" the other day to see them whining about a recent Pew study that shows that Atheists poll as being the religious orientation that is the least popular with Americans, Muslims ranking down there as well. Some of them seemed to be surprised about that. Considering that Hemant, the "Friendly Atheist" is about as snide and snarky about religion as any of the other online atheists, if that's their idea of making friends, they're entirely benighted.
I haven't read the Marcotte article, but I assume its based on anecdotal data from the internet.
ReplyDeleteAs I like to point out to people who make these claims, 800 comments at a website means probably 400-600 distinct commenters (probably less than that, actually), which is roughly equivalent to the number of students I encounter in about two calendar years.
Which means I have more influence over people than any internet website, and who am I? After all, the only thing people do on internet sites is get their preferences and prejudices confirmed.
Atheism is, what 1-3% of the US population? And "young people" are turning away from the church? You mean, like they did in the '50's? And '60's? Yeah, there were "Jesus Freaks" in the early '70's, but still pastors were noting a rapid decline in attendance by "youth" (Eliot noted it in the '20's), who eventually returned when they had kids of their own.
Yes, overall church attendance is down from it's post-WWII peak, but that peak was an aberration, not the norm. We're slowly settling back to normal.
But then, context is also not important on the internet. The world was invented with the World Wide Web, and all that came before or that never got on-line, is unimportant.
Of course, more people still watch CBS Evening News (which I haven't watched since before Cronkite retired) than go-online or even watch FauxNews, but that doesn't stop FoxNews from being more important than God, and internet web sites from controlling the national conversation and destroying religion.
At least, according to people on the internets.....
Though it might be even stupider since 1. women are slightly more than 50% of the population whereas far more than 85% are religious and, 2. religious identification is higher among women than it is men.
ReplyDeleteThis, too, is same as it ever was. You can trace that back into American history as far as the point when the churches stopped running Plymouth Colony (while Bradford was still alive and writing about it, IOW). The more the church drifted away from being a governmental power in America, the more men abandoned it to women, and it became a social power.
That hasn't changed since.