Yeah, you can tell how well religion "keeps the proles in line" by the activities of The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr., Diane Nash, The Reverend Jesse Jackson, The Reverend Al Sharpton, Father Daniel Berrigan, Sr. Ita Ford, Sr. Maura Clarke, Sr. Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Ceasar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, the Six Jesuit intellectuals martyred for their role in resisting the El Savadoran fascist government, Penny Lernoux, Fr. Ernesto Cardinal, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The students of the White Rose society, the Tappen brothers, the Lane Theological Seminarian-abolitionists, Dom Helder Camara, virtually everyone who's ever been involved with Maryknoll, Pax Christi, The American Friends Service Commitee, virtually the entire United Church of Christ and so many others ..... And that's just off the top of my head. I could probably fill a double page if I took a few hours. It doesn't count all of the huge numbers of unknown people who resisted slavery, chattel and wage, who agitated for the extension of democratic rights, who agitated to feed people, get people healthcare, etc. but whose names aren't recorded.
And, of course, you can see how well atheism freed the people in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, etc. Those "proles" living under atheism are sure free and rebellious, aren't they.
For an ignorant atheist like you to make that claim is what I've come to see as typical of the ignorance, the dishonesty, the lying and the conceit of atheists. I didn't think that of atheists before I started reading them in large numbers online, I think it would have to be the honest conclusion that those are typical of atheism for anyone who has engaged and read lots of them, unfiltered, unedited and uninhibited since the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens unleashed the atheist fad fifteen or so years ago. That's one of the reasons I have every confidence the fad, if not past its sell-by, will be before long. Atheism is both an intellectual dead end and its own worst enemy. There are atheists who aren't assholes, but they would seem to be a small minority. I haven't met many of them online.
Materialism is quite comfortable with oppression, that's no surprise as materialism denies everything necessary to assert the reality of equal rights. Atheist government is characteristically and massively oppressive. There are no more oppressed and cowed people than those who live under the atheist regimes of the 20th century.
Whatever happened to the atheist fad? I ask seriously. I know Hitchens died, but Harris is still alive. Dawkins embarrassed himself with his racism and elitism and chauvinism and eurocentricsm, and he finally disappeared up his own self-importance, but what happened the atheist movement that was gonna sweep the world and save us all from darkness?
ReplyDeleteSeriously. Hitchens died and it fell apart. Even Harris is silent and invisible, and no one took up the cudgel.
Just as well, but it didn't last long at all.
You could throw the Rev. William Barber in there, too. His work in North Carolina has shaken and challenged and probably changed the political culture of that state.
ReplyDeleteFunny, I can't think of one prominent atheist whose had the same impact, for good or ill, in the country. Not one to compare to Barber, or King, or Malcolm X (and avowed Muslim, as was Muhammed Ali, another powerful figure of change and inspiration), or....
Well, I can't think of one outside Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and she was a nasty a piece of work as Hitchens or Harris or Dawkins or Coyne or the Amazing Randi, or Penn Jillette or (some of whom, honestly, aren't nearly as offensive as she was, but still, what good have they done in the world?).
O'Hair's activism was geared mostly to being a jerk who was out to get her name in the news and, especially later in life, to try to steal money. I especially found the time she tried to get her hands on the estate of the equally awful James Hervey Johnson to be instructive.
DeleteFor me the most notable effect of the new atheist fad was that it forced me to go look at their claims and I found in just about every case that those were false and false in a way to twist narratives to support their ideology and from there to older atheists who mostly did the same kind of thing. It led me to conclude that atheists mounted a force that did enormous damage to the left and which is destructive of human dignity and democracy. I should have understood B.F. Skinner's title along those lines as a clue to that forty years earlier. Only shows how that information was lying there in plain sight but I was too cowed by their coercion to face it when I was young.
Meeanwhile, shithead, stop calling me an atheist. I am not now and never have been. As you well know, because I have told you on occasions too numerous to mention, I am a lapsed agnostic -- I used to not know, but now I just don't give a shit.
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