I'LL GUESS WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING that the "atheist blog" "CD" mentions is Hemant's blog so I'll go check it out to see what it says.
Later: Yeah, I found it, a post of mostly Twitter shots from a hash tagger asking people who went to "Christian schools" to tell their horror stories and, guess what, they got a bunch of horror stories.
And from that the "Friendly Atheists" of Hemant's "hate the Christians +" website concludes, with minimal ass covering:
There are so many more responses where those came from.
And obviously these don't represent all Christian schools or even all kinds of conservative Christian thought, but the fact that these things are happening in plain view at all should be troubling. The fact that the Christians who work at those schools and the parents who pay for their kids to go there see nothing wrong with all this ought to be a giant stain on the entire religion.
The question should be what moderate or progressive Christians are doing to fight back against the extremists in their midst. Doing nothing isn't an option.
I'm almost tempted to learn how to use Twitter so I could post a hash tag asking for people to document atheists who act badly to children to see what kind of reaction that would get. I think you could post such a thing and if it went viral you'd get an eyeful though, as is always the case with online commentary, who the hell knows if any of them are the truth or accurate? Since I slammed the DC Press Whores yesterday, let me say that online ideological sources such as this one, feeding off of the raw feed of unverifiable Twitter shit is even worse than they are. You could probably get as many or more responses hatin' on chocolate ice cream or any aspect of pop kulcha.
Since the comment sent my way riffed off of one of the Twits* who said that they were told at their "Christian school" that Black People were made for slavery and got an answer that said "most Christians think they're superior to other people, . . .
I'll break in here to ask Christians think they're superior to other people? That's as opposed to ideological atheists, such as at THAT PARTICULAR BLOG, than whom I have never found any identifiable group except, perhaps the graduates of the prep-Ivy system, more inclined to believe in their own superiority.
Though that's hardly a rare character flaw in any identifiable group I've ever seen except, perhaps, the destitute, the poor, the working poor and other groups acculturated to accept their own degradation. A status that the Gospel of Jesus, the teachings of James and Paul and others who wrote the New Testament provide the greatest refutation of that I know of in human history. That follows on the radical egalitarianism of Moses. Christians who believe themselves to be superior and exalted do so when Jesus taught that the last will be first, those who exalt themselves will be humbled and that to enter the Kingdom of God you had to become as humble as a little child would have been in First Century culture, a nobody. That the destitute go to heaven and the rich go to hell. For any Christian to be anything other than a radical egalitarian is for them to not only deviate from but to betray the central teaching of a figure they claim to believe spoke the truth with divine authority. On the other hand, I've never seen an atheist expression of egalitarianism that was influential within atheism as a whole, either. Or even widely agreed to among atheists.
. . . I decided to check out what Black People might think of that as a characterization of Christianity and found that that go-to source of online atheists, Pew, would seem to say People of Color and especially Black Women, are far more likely to profess Christianity than us people of pallor. In short:
Roughly eight-in-ten (79%) African Americans self-identify as Christian, as do seven-in-ten whites and 77% of Latinos, according to Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Most black Christians and about half of all African Americans (53%) are associated with historically black Protestant churches, according to the study. Smaller shares of African Americans identify with evangelical Protestantism (14%), Catholicism (5%), mainline Protestantism (4%) and Islam (2%).
Which would sort verify a number of things, starting with the fact I learned during the atheist fad of the 00's is that most atheists seem to not understand that Black People, other People of Color hold religious belief, most of it in the United States, Christianity, as a belief, many of them have it as a much more significant part of their lives than many White people who profess Christianity. I always found it bizarre that such white atheists of the alleged left were dead set against religion in political and public life when the greatest force for progressive change in our history has been religion, much of it coming from Black Christians, first in abolitionism and then the long, hard, dangerous and far from complete struggle for equality. Christians have also been instrumental in the struggle for Women's' equality, universal suffrage, economic justice, the rights of workers, protection of the environment. As a student of the history of the struggle for LGBTQ rights, attaining those rights are and have been dependent on the support of straight people who are religious, many of them on the basis of Biblical egalitarian justice. Perhaps I'll go into detail sometime soon on what Pew says about that, including the problematic features of Pew's tendency to choose to pretend that "unaffiliated" was the same thing as "non-believing."
I will, for now, refrain from going into details but I think the white dominated atheism of most online atheists is liable to be rather condescending to the views of People of Color, figuring religion is a childish mode of thought that they figure is tolerable as long as it's People of Color professing that belief. I think that practice is endemic to the culture of organized and culturally expressed atheism, especially among those among the college-credentialed who learned it as the required received POV during their credentialing as respectable members of the White dominated, white-collar class.
* I checked the pseudonymic identity of the Twit who posted it and I'd guess it's just another piece of unverifiable online lie, what you can expect to get when you ask people for something like that.
There's so much to honesty condemn among such "Christian" schools that this is just a lazy-assed, self-discrediting and stupid thing. It's like that ass who tried to get Jen Psaki to go out on his limb without naming his sources, only that's what 99.9999 % of online commentary is. What percent of it is true and accurate is hardly possible to discern but I'm betting it's less than anyone would like to rely on.
And a note to "CD" I hope you're getting help, you need it badly.
I like your response better than I’d have done. The whole “you Xians are responsible for the Xians who don’t do what I like” line is so decking tedious. Would the critic also say all blacks are responsible for black criminals, all Jews responsible for whatever Israel does? You can get ugly quickly with that line of “reasoning.” Which is not to say it’s inherently racist or anti-Semitic, but it is baseless and stupid. And lazy, as well as looking to make someone else responsible because that’s so much easier. “See what they’re doing? Why don’t you do something about it?”
ReplyDeleteFeh. But as I say, your response is even more to the heart of the matter. It’s always easier to complain about someone else than to pay attention to yourself. Xianity is about that, actually. Too many people claim the label but eschew all the teachings. I can’t do much about them; nor am I required to, by my Xianity or my humanity.
Thank you.
DeleteI would like to know how Hemant is friendly towards his friends if this is his idea of friendliness. Looking at his blog, it makes me think I should take less time with these guys, I'd hate to turn into the mirror image of his place.