Salon, Alternet Style Hate Talk Promotes Facism: Your Provocative Idea for Tuesday

Salon's Jeffrey Tayler seems to be in some kind of competition to out-hate the other atheist hate-talkers who regularly appear there.   His current screed of hate up at Salon now says:  "We must offend religion more: Islam, Christianity and our tolerance for ancient myths, harmful ideas".   Considering the recent execution style slaughter of three students, obviously because they were Muslims by someone whose online activity would seem to fit right in on a Salon comment thread, Tayler could well have been among those who inspired that act.   His hate screed is exactly of the kind that Christopher Hitchens spouted as part of the Bush II sales pitch for the invasion of Iraq for which the costs include the empowerment of ISIS and hundreds of thousands of lives as well as the empowerment of theocratic governments and movements in Iraq and the entire region.

In many ways the atheist war against religion we're seeing in America is a continuation of the old line bigotry that has blighted our history.  In its anti-Islamic form - it seems so long ago when the God-haters were feigning disapproval of Islamophbia a week ago - it is clearly racist and imperialist, in its anti-Catholic form it is old line British religio-ethnic hatred and its American nativist form.   In the minstrel dialect "Jeebus" jive talk so common among atheists online, it is clearly old fashioned white racist sterotyping of black people.   All of it feeds exactly the same kind of discrimination and division and increased hatred that eventually leads to violence and away from democracy.

Tayler and his fans tout their "enlightenment" from a demonstrated and total ignorance of the "enlightenment" and its far from enlightened history.  As I have been demonstrating this week, while such heroes of the enlightenment as Jefferson, Madison, Washington, even Franklin were keeping black people as slaves, in Jefferson's case raping and bearing children with one young enough to be his young daughter, it was religious people, very serious Christians, who were calling for the abolition of slavery, something Christians had been doing since at least the fourth century.   They had actually raised the status of women from their position in pagan societies and certainly children, especially female children who were routinely killed in pagan societies.

Most absurdly one of the main points in Tayler's screed is his praise for the loony attention-seeking of "Femen" the topless pseudo-feminist group who, like Tayler and the rest of the professional haters, gets attention for themselves by being anti-religious.   That is in keeping with the decay of the real feminism of the second-wave into the pornographic freak show of "sex-pos" feminism, the product of the promotion of the porn-prostitution industries,  which promote a fictional, phony view of one of the most oppressive and woman destroying industries in history.   It is an industry that promotes a view of women not that much different from the one ISIS clearly holds, of women as chattels to be abducted and sold by men, kept as slaves for sex and other purposes.  Something which is certainly not in keeping with the Koran but which is promoted in much of the online porn which is championed by such publications as Salon and Alternet as an expression of enlightened thought.

I don't think a society which feeds on hate talk can maintain civil peace. Societies saturated in hate can't  avoid the hateful violence that is the product of hate talk. The secure myth that the haters can avoid retaliation is clearly wrong, note Charlie Hebdo and the shoot up in Denmark which Tayler uses to further his hate talk, inspired by previous hate talk.  With the increase in violence the spiral of that will, eventually, become so intolerable that it can't be allowed to continue without some disaster for democracy, either the suppression of one side or the continual violence of the kind that plagued Northern Ireland for so long.  If such a society will sacrifice everything else, many other rights, including that to life and equality, in favor of the perpetuation of hate talk is the only question.  Hate talk is a potent tool of every fascist regime, as FOX and the other venues of right-wing hate talk prove, it is a potent weapon against egalitarian democracy even under the free speech absolutism that permits it here.  The choice is between suppressing hate talk and democracy, in the end.  I think that it is a choice America can't continue to avoid, I just hope we don't fall for the slogans and lose far more in the process.  I'm not optimistic.  Needless to say, the results will be benighted, not enlightened.

I have a feeling the atheists are counting on provoking a violent reaction from the majority of Americans, a variation on the old Marxist dialectical dream of making things so bad that they'll, magically, get their way.  They've been pushing that nonsense since Marx adopted Hegel's silly idea of the imaginary force behind history.  If you want to see how well that works, look at that experiment that was held in Russia in the past century, we get the kind of thing that Pussy Riot became famous for protesting.   This wave of atheist hate talk will lead farther into the nightmare, not out of one.