Must read of the day, Educated, predominantly white, and middle class, New Atheists live comfortably in the well-to-do suburbs of developed nations. They might experience the typical hardships that life too often hurls towards us, but they don’t know the despair realised in former Western colonies. They don’t know what it’s like to survive on less than $2 per day under a regime that crushes personal liberty and freedom. New Atheists don’t know what it’s like to be racially vilified, profiled by security agencies, tortured, bombed, occupied and imprisoned without trial. Nor do they know what it feels like to have absolutely no control over their future. Instead of seeking to understand the Other, or to put themselves in the Other’s shoes, New Atheists pontificate their material superiority. The fixation on religion as the root of the world’s problems is completely at odds with reality. In fact, it’s utterly delusional. What is at fault in the Middle East is not Islam, but despotic, autocratic regimes that rule with the benefit of America’s patronage. What is at fault in the West is not Christianity but free-market fascism: free trade, mass pollution, climate change, income inequality, wealth disparity, racism and immigration overflow from countries that have descended into social chaos – many as a result of Western policies (free trade, climate change, war on terror and the drug war). And what is at fault in Israel is not Judaism - as many of Israel’s founding fathers and current leaders were or are atheists - but apartheid, land theft and humiliation of the Arab populace. The rape-and-rescue fantasy blinds New Atheists to theses problems at home. It’s the “uncivilised” abroad who require saving by our Western civilisation evangelists, or so they say. The focus on social injustices carried out in Muslim majority countries goes hand-in-hand with the normalisation of the fact that 50 million Americans live in abject poverty, that nearly 20,000 Americans are killed each year by gun violence, and that America has 25 percent of the world’s prison population. I was a New Atheist. I am no longer. I’m now an old-fashioned, vanilla atheist. I lived in a Muslim majority country for a decade. I now live in the US. Having called both the East and the West home, I can assure you we treat life with no greater sanctity than those we bomb, drone, occupy and belittle. If anyone needs rescuing, it is most likely ourselves.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 02:46:49 +0000
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