• darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
    58·
    9 months ago

    Conflating atheism with radical liberalism. In a Marxist space?

    I happen to be an atheist. In fact you’ll find us all over the place in Marxist parties. Guess communism is cancelled because we’re all just rad-libs.

    • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
      35·
      9 months ago

      Yeah…that is very strange to include in this meme since it is well known that communists historically have been predominantly atheists.

      But i will give OP the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant the liberal/reactionary kind of atheists, the Dawkins/“Rational Wiki” types.

      • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
        31·
        9 months ago

        Maybe, then again considering they’ve been spamming memes about reclaiming god from capitalists I think there may be another reason. I don’t mind religious people in Marxist spaces one bit. I mind when they start punching me in the face and telling me I need to be more tolerant unprovoked which is what this is.

        • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
          261·
          9 months ago

          Reddit Atheism is built on Islamophobia and racism. I get having a fondness for it, I found /r/atheism helpful at first when I left Islam. But there was so much racism and support for imperialist wars of aggression in the middle east that I quickly got turned off that sub. It was toxic and the toxicity came from racist white people who couldn’t see how their racism was leaking through.

          It’s disappointing that New Atheists end up swinging right now, but it isn’t that surprising having seen this.

          • Flamingoaks@lemmygrad.ml
            4·
            9 months ago

            i just looked at the tittles for about the top 200 post on r/atheism right now and 1 was about Islam (an ex-muslim complaining that libs were calling them Islamophobic) and one talking about all abrahamic religions, most were about the concept of religion or christianity, and in my own personal experience being very far into the entire skeptic “movement” back when it was an actual thing, i think that while Islamophobia was around it wasnt core to whole thing and most people were concerned with Christianity much more than other religions.

            dont get wrong reddit atheism is mostly a western and specifically and english speaking thing, that is not explicitly leftist so it reflects that in the people who take part so there more racism and Islamophobia and everything else than u would find in other groupings of people but it certainly never seemed to me like reactionary views were core to it or that it was built on them.

            • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              5·
              9 months ago

              Now? Ok whatever, maybe it’s changed.

              12 years ago when I was on there? The racism was recurrent. It wasn’t everywhere, but it was frequent enough and offputting enough to poison the space, and like I said, it’s not a surprise how many prominent New Atheists ended up being reactionary shits. Christopher Hitchens supported the destruction of Iraq, Sam Harris is vile, Richard Dawkins is an asshole, and the people who venerate them without acknowledging (or perhaps because of) their reactionary bents are sus as hell.

              Or maybe you’re not as good at noticing it because you haven’t been forced to become hypervigilant about it. Are you Muslim or from a Muslim family?

              • Flamingoaks@lemmygrad.ml
                11·
                9 months ago

                maybe u are right and i am just bad at spotting it, i have nothing to do with Islam nor have i ever since luckily i was raised atheists. Maybe we are just operating on different understandings of what it mean for something to be built on racism because to me new atheists seem about as racists as any other random grouping of westerners, like racism or Islamophobia doesnt seem to be any more prevalent than in say online gaming discourse or in shitposting spaces, like it seems to me like the racism is there just because a bunch of white people are there and they arent explicitly against racism which is fucked up but its like background levels of fucked up.

                • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  new atheists seem about as racists as any other random grouping of westerners

                  Maybe it’s just that discussing religion lets the racism show more clearly anytime Islam is brought up. Perhaps “founded on” wasn’t the right word, but the racism is inextricable from those spaces because they’re so white and refuse to be antiracist.

            • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
              10·
              9 months ago

              What made me leave was a purely emotional shattering of my ability to have faith. It wasn’t intellectual. It was the agony of having my family broken by the white supremacist racism of AmeriKKKa post-9/11. I’m sure we’d have been hit hard living in my parents’ home country, but living instead in the imperial core was rough. I don’t want to go into details too much because it’s really upsetting, but my siblings’ lives are ruined, my parents’ lives are ruined, I got out but with major scars and PTSD. We keep living and suffering and I think we woupd be better off dead – better to have died on 9/12/2001 than to endure what came next, and then live with the permanent damage that came from it. And where was Allah for any of that? He didn’t protect us. We were just little kids being tortured by an evil, racist system, and he didn’t help us. I hoped for years that our lives would improve but they just got worse and worse, because trauma compounds and compounds. My ability to believe in a benevolent omnipotent god broke by seeing how he abandoned my family, then by noticing how much other and frankly far worse horrors were occurring globally. What my family went through is nothing compared to the torments that are visited upon the innocent people of Iraq and Palestine. And Allah did nothing to protect anyone. If I had the power of God I would fix things immediately, here on Earth in the present, defend the vulnerable and execute their oppressors. God does not do that. The promise of an accounting in the afterlife is empty – too little too late, we’ll be racked by PTSD which can make a Hell of any Heaven.

              It’s the old Problem of Evil – cliche, but true. He cannot exist, belief in him is just cope.

              I grew to hate him and turned to Satan, then realized the entire framework of Gods and Devils is just a fantasy to help people cope with how horrible the world is, and that is when I went hard into New Atheism before getting turned away by how racist it was too. Now I just don’t believe in any religion. I want to, but my capacity for faith has been brutally broken. I wish I could believe, because my faith brought me comfort and the hope that Allah would see fit to make things right kept me from killing myself. But it was all a lie and now I’m so allergic to false hope that I’m peobably overly pessimistic and apocalyptic. Both my parents and one of my siblings remained religious and their faith hasnt helped anything. So I see I was right.

              I didn’t make my way back to the theological part of it, but as I’ve developed as a leftist I’ve noticed how much my old religion set me up to become a Communist. From Islam I learned to fight oppressors, to stay true to what is right no matter how outnumbered, to care for the vulnerable, to pursue liberation for everyone regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, to never bow down to oppressors even under threat of death. Maybe I’m ethnically Muslim? A secular atheist Commhnist Muslim? I don’t know what label fits. I just call myself an atheist and a Communist. But I’ve used religious language to pull a Catholic friend further left

              • tarbeez@lemmygrad.ml
                1·
                9 months ago

                Late reply, didn’t see.

                Something to keep in mind is that a heavily externalized idea of God is a bit simpleminded. We are not owed anything.

                The theist/nontheist discussion is a dualistic one. While dialectics as a method and process is sound, the idea is ultimately to unify opposites, not pick one or define yourself in opposition to one.

                It’s possible to take the very valid misgivings you have and turn them into questions rather than using them as conclusions.

                When you look at the history of the occident, it is built on things that weren’t organically grown by its people, and the Abrahamic tradition, as well as the Greek, was adapted in a strange way to try to claim it – The actual producing tradition is foreign to it, and so you see that even foundational, culture defining output like Dante’s Divine Comedy was essentially lifted from Ibn Arabi & Co. The conceptions that informed this appropriation and further developed from it can easily color your thinking and put a veil over your eyes when you are forced to live among its proponents.

                Keep in mind that Islamic Theology is not as literal minded as the western approach. Basic things like God not being an external entity as such, and certainly not a man-like one, and man is not created in God’s image and so on. It’s subtle, as are its interpretations, because it (and its interpreters) belongs to a long tradition. Ditto for Orthodox Christianity.

        • Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml
          10·
          9 months ago

          Indeed, reddit atheism helped me to come to terms with being categorically/affirmatively atheist, in a space where I was constantly being told that only I feel how I feel, and that nobody else feels this way.

        • RedClouds@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          9 months ago

          Okay, unrelated but I gotta ask because it’s the first time I’ve seen this. What’s up with the hammer and sickle hamburger? Lol.

      • Flamingoaks@lemmygrad.ml
        10·
        9 months ago

        why? if thats the case they are saying all atheist are reactionaries otherwise they would have specified, or better wouldn’t have said atheist at all. also im not inclined to give anyone who upholds reactionary ideologies the benefit of the doubt and no one but a theist would have made this.

      • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
        8·
        9 months ago

        Would not surprise me.

        Though Lemmy world is obviously awful and full of fascist-boot-licking reddit left-libs, getting banned there for -that- and getting angry is pretty sad if true. I’d rather be upset with their support of Nazis in Ukraine or their hatred of China and Sino and Russo-phobia that goes far beyond “hating the government”. For their weak stance on Palestine and the zionist fascists and so on.