The real bullies
Let’s take a look at who is really being bullied and shouted into silence. Let’s take a look at a case where in real life
the mob arrives; insults are flung around; the character flaws, motivations, psychological makeup, etc., of the original [dissident] are dissected at length
and a high school kid is disowned and thrown out of the house by his parents for attempting to stop his public high school from having an unconstitutional official prayer at graduation.
A student’s public prayer at a pre-graduation “Class Night” event was turned into an opportunity for the school and community to gang up on Fowler and publicly close ranks against him — teachers as well as students. (Here’s video).
Check out that video. This isn’t a blog post; this isn’t a set of comments on a blog post; this is an auditorium full of people baying their majoritarian triumph at a lone student who in fact has the law on his side. This is a real example of “we can mobilise large numbers of people and use scorn in order to communicate our “community’s” disapproval of a particular kind of “harmful” behaviour.”
Why are there so many secular liberals so eager to pretend that the worst bullies and majoritarian silencers around are atheists when in the real flesh and blood world (and the online world too, in fact) this kind of thing has us beat by orders of magnitude?
Stockholm Syndrome. It’s the only thing I can think of. It’s the same reason the Democratic party was horrified whenever Howard Dean dared to call W out on his dishonesty and incompetence.
Metaphorical Stockholm Syndrome is a little like “God” as an explanation sometimes – it just seems to push real explanation back a step. Ok they’re embracing their captors…but why?
Because you don’t get the same smug sense of superiority from pointing out the misdeeds of blatant bullies and thugs. But when you write about how much nicer and more enlightened you are than someone who’s actually fairly nice and enlightened, why, look how great you must be!
Following up on my earlier comment, that’s also what I think is the impetus for a lot of atheists using the Courtier’s Reply. You see, it’s considered cheap and vulgar for someone like Richard Dawkins to “pick on” the versions of religion that 90% of believers actually hold; instead, he’s supposed to take on the “challenge” of arguing with those sophisticated theologians who have cleverly hidden their god behind a wall of words and equivocation.
The treatment Fowler has received is quite appalling, and as you say much worse than the occasionally nastiness of online message boards.
I’m quite convinced that the bullying is due to fear. I can remember faith. It was fragile. Of course it was fragile, it was faith. We were supposed to work at faith, and survive periods of doubt. How dare someone challenge that faith so blatantly and publicly? How dare they say that when we are shutting our eyes and listening for Jesus we hear nothing but the static of our own minds? Without faith we would be desolate, stranded alone in the dry desert of nihilism and atheism. Faith is a drug, and people need their fix and need to believe that the drug does them good. Atheists don’t want to breathe the smoke of what believers are inhaling. They don’t want to have to deal with people shooting up in public, with people puking their prejudices out late at night.
Atheists are just so terribly rude and awful.
Oh, please. Didn’t you read McLaren? We can’t mobilize anyone for anything given our complete incapacity for community-building. I mean, see here for more about our utter failure to support people:
http://www.alternet.org/story/151086/high_school_student_stands_up_against_prayer_at_public_school_and_is_ostracized%2C_demeaned_and_threatened/
(Donations to his scholarship fund now at over $31,000, slightly more I think than has been raised for Camp Quest this past month.)
Oh, I see you have that link in your post.
After the announcement of the moment of silence someone should have switched off the microphone for 30 seconds!
That was an exceptionally disturbing video, and the story of that brave young man’s treatment by his peers, by adults, teachers, and especially by his parents is almost beyond belief. Well, they are Christian, after all. That just might explain it. I remember a friend of mine, a priest, used to say, of some of his parishioners, “Ya’ know, s/he is just the most awful person, sour and unfriendly — imagine what s/he’d be like if s/he wasn’t a Christian.” It always seemed to me that they might have been much more sweet tempered if they weren’t.
However, it’s good to remember things like this when people come out with the old chestnut that religion is about love and compassion. It manifestly is not. It’s about power, and anyone who forgets that religion is about power is bound to get a surprise sooner or later. Read the Colin Slee memo about his experiences with the appointment of a bishop of Southwark (the diocese in London South of the Thames. It’s really quite shocking. (Colin Slee was Dean of the Southwark Cathedral.)
Again, religion is about power. I understand what Steve Zara means when he says that religion is a drug, but I think it’s relationship to power is far more important. What makes people feel better is believing that they are on the winning team. You can see this being expressed in that disturbing video from the Louisiana school.
Atheists, by the way, are a fairly gentle lot on the whole. It’s not, for them, about being right, or being on the biggest team. It’s about responsible belief. That’s why we are troubled when people come along suggesting that we should temporise with religion just to “keep the peace.” Just remember, religions have nothing to do with peace. The are really about power, and if they are afraid of losing it, they will act ruthlessly and relentlessly to regain what they think they have lost. Indeed, one of the things that should be obvious is that it is the response of the religious that has led to the fencepost sitting atheists, trying to keep the peace. That will satisfy the religious only so long as they are not obviously losing. When they do lost, they’ll behave like religionists everywhere. There’ll be anger, recriminations and triumphalism aplenty.
Imagine how much worse this could have been if the law had not been on his side but on the side of the godists? A look back in history is all you need to do to see what Christianity in Power looks like; turn on the TV to see what Islam in Power looks like. Power, conformity, obedience, submission. Islam has it right on the box; a Muslim is one who submits. None of that for me, thank you.
Not Bruce – oh quite. That’s doubtless one reason we don’t just shrug off these violations of church-state separation: we don’t want to revert to that time.
Damon Fowler was on this past weeks Non- Prophets. As bad as it was one of the more gauling instances was, after serious physical threats were made against Fowler, the FFRF suggested that the school provide increased security for the graduation. The school did but claimed it was because the atheists were threatening attacks, not because the Christians were threatening Fowler.
You’ve rightly phrased the question as “pretend.” It’s impossible, I say, that even the dimmer ones actually think the real bullies are atheists. They know better.
Well they’d better know better! If they’re not they’re not fucking paying attention, and if they’re not paying attention, they have no damn business shouting at us.
Excuse me. But this stupid lopsided raging away at a tiny minority whose more vulnerable members (no not me, people like Damon Fowler) are subject to ferocious bullying while the giant majority that shields this ferocious bullying is ignored – it gets up my nose.
Jeremy certainly can’t claim not to know better, for instance. He once admitted that he’d learned better. At CFI in 2007 he told the people there in a talk that he felt sheepish for not having understood before how bad it could be for many Americans. We’d been hearing stories of how bad it can be for the past week.
But now somehow it’s way more important to search for pretexts to call us morons and idiots than it is to say one stinking word about the people at Love God or We’ll Kill You High School.
Blegh.
From the previous thread on the topic:
This is totally unacceptable – first, because religion is so frequently opposed to human rights and justice in so many other areas, and second because it’s absurd to think that one specific issue can be isolated and addressed while leaving the edifice intact. “OK, those Stalinists are terrible to the kulaks, but other than that Stalinism isn’t so terrible and provides some real benefits.”
Because those atheists dare to criticize them and call them out on their bad arguments (and occasionally, on their dishonesty).
Besides from that, if your plan is to build interfaith cooperation and mutual understanding and warm feelings in order for the religious to accept one particular scientific theory (namely, evolution), it must be awkward for you to point out how evil real religion actually is and how harm does to actual people everyday. Better just to ignore it and get angry at atheists for pointing it out.
***how much harm it does to actual people.
Let’s hope someone takes legal action against the school.
Now it looks like the bullies are getting some official backing: Appeals court lifts ban on Texas graduation prayer
Oh FFS.
(Thanks for the link, Hamilton.)
I’m worried that if the ban lift goes to the Supreme Court that it will be sanctioned just like they ridiculously sanctioned the cross as a “generic” cultural symbol instead of the plainly obvious. Liars for Jesus. Also, they daftly thank God for a ruling made by humans on the appeals court, as usual.
Gosh, but we’re really silencing our critics by…
…ummmm…
…wait for it…
… by quoting their own words back at them and showing them to be false. By putting up a mirror to their own words and deeds and attitudes, and showing them that they are the very things that they dishonestly claim about us. And, ultimately, because we stand up and shout “NO!” at the bullies that the accommodationists are devoted to protecting. When you don’t cave into the demands of bullies, you make the bullies scared and you make the accommodationists ashamed for their cowardice and subservience.