Category Archives: Atheism

As we all know, the BBCs adaptation ofSally RooneysNormal Peoplewon lockdown. It secureda place in the hearts ofmillions worldwide for youngcouple Marianne and Connell (and Connells chain) and putCounty Sligo on the world map. To follow it up,Hulu and BBC Three have turned to Rooneys debut novel, Conversations with Friends, and another pair of Irish students, Frances and Bobbi, for a coming-of-age story of love, friendship andironicchatsabout atheism.

Expectations, fuelled by the heart-wrenchingturmoil and loved-up euphoriaof Normal People,are high. The audience comes pre-prepared this time, with Hulu hoping Americanviewerswill respond toanotherburst of millennial love and heartache. The cast hasa more American flavour, perhapswith that precise audience in mind,and the presence of Taylor Swifts other half, Joe Alwyn, in a key role that will draw inthe curious. Will it match Normal Peoples 62 million streams? Here are some clues.

All 12 half-hour episodes land in May on BBC Three in the UK, Hulu in the US and RT in Ireland. Expect to be able to stream it on Amazon Prime in Canada, Australia, Africa and New Zealand, and the newly launched HBO Max in other European countries.

A BBC trailer broke in February with the tagline: Prepare to get intimate. Theres a Huluonefor the US, too, and its alot racier than the more demureBeeb version, if youre into that kind of thing.

As any Rooney stan will tell you, the series is adapted from the Irish novelists 2017 debut novel. The voice of a generation label can be an painful one youre forced to speak on behalf of all millennials and will, at some point, be compared with Lena Dunham but Rooneys smart, empathetic, economical prose definitely captures the uncertainty and rootlessness of a generation coming of age in the 2010s. A less comforting book in a lot of way than Normal People, Conversations with Friends should make for emotionally flooring telly.

Like Normal Peoples Marianne and Connell, it follows two Trinity College Dublin students: Frances (Alison Oliver), the narrator, and her American ex-girlfriend-turned-BFF Bobbi (Sasha Lane). The duo perform as a spoken word poetry double-act and fall into the orbit of thirty-something married couple, actor Nick and photographer-writer Melissa (Joe Alwyn and Jemima Kirke), when Melissa agrees to a profile piece. Slowly, and without the knowledge of either of the others, Frances and Nick begin an affair. Its the exact nature of their relationship, and its impact on Francess bond with Bobbi, that Conversations with Friends grapples with over seven months of surreptitious shags, summer holidays and deep soul-searching.

The shows breakout star is Alison Oliver who plays Frances, a student from County Mayo with a judgy mum, an alcoholic dad, and that thirtysomething actor lover. The actress is a graduate of the same Dublin acting school as Normal Peoples Paul Mescal, The Lir Academy. The Daisy Edgar-Jones comparisons will no doubt follow, but unlike the Londoner, Oliver is a first-timer on screen who has mostly stage work to her name until now. Its a heck of a showcase role, alongside more experienced actors like American Honeys Sasha Lane, Girls Jemima Kirke and the shows biggest name, The Favourite actor Joe Alwyn. Co-directing with Leanne Welham (His Dark Materials) is Normal Peoples Lenny Abrahamson. Lennys deep affinity for Sallys writing and talent for finding actors to bring her fictional creations to life played a huge part in bringing Normal People so successfully to screen, says BBC director of drama Piers Wenger. In casting Alison, Sasha, Joe and Jemima, that same flair and instinct is in evidence and we cant wait to see how they will bring Frances, Bobbi, Nick and Melissa to life.

Like Normal Peoples Marianne and Connell (and author Sally Rooney herself), Frances and Bobbi study at Trinity College Dublin and the uni features in early episodes. Much of the shoot took place in Belfast, while the series swaps the books summer holiday destination of Brittany for the sunnier climes of Stari Grad on the Croatian island of Hvar.

Conversations with Friendsis streamingin May.

Where was Normal People filmed? The seriess Irish, Italian and Swedish locations uncovered.Anatomy of a Scandal: everything you need to know about Netflixs must-see thriller.

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Conversations with Friends: plot, cast and everything you need to know - Time Out

The recent report of the Commission on the Defence Forces has recommended change in the chaplaincy service to reflect the religious and non-religious beliefs of modern Ireland. It also wants an end to exclusionary religious practices such as convening Masses during induction.

If implemented, these changes would show respect for personnel of minority faiths or with non-religious philosophical convictions.

There is similar religious discrimination in our equality laws, which the Department of Justice is now reviewing, and in the religious oaths in our Constitution for the president, judges, and the Council of State, which includes the taoiseach and tnaiste.

Ireland is no longer a Catholic country. We are now a pluralist country with outdated privileges for Catholics.

Atheist Ireland, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Ireland, and the Evangelical Alliance Ireland, made a joint submission to the commission seeking change in its Catholic culture that discriminates against all of us.

While the three groups have very different world views and policy emphases, we campaign together for secularism and human rights. Every person should be treated with respect, as should our right to hold our beliefs, and the State should treat us all equally before the law by remaining neutral between religions and beliefs.

The Defence Forces is a microcosm of society and should have a clear neutral policy on religion and belief. It should not promote any particular religious or atheistic belief, or oblige personnel to participate in religious rites as part of military events.

The Irish Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and religion. The State is forbidden to discriminate between religions, or between religions and those with no religion. Despite this, Catholicism has always been part of the culture of our Defence Forces.

About 9 per cent of Defence Forces personnel are non-Christian or have no religion, yet 15 of its 16 chaplains are Roman Catholic and full-time, and the other is Church of Ireland and part-time.

Catholic chaplains are responsible to Catholic bishops of their dioceses and provincials of their orders for religious ministrations and promoting the spiritual and moral welfare of all members of the Defence Forces under their spiritual care.

They must also co-operate with the head chaplain and the commanding officer in promoting the social and recreational welfare of such personnel. The duties are therefore seen as both sacramental and pastoral.

This means all full-time Defence Forces chaplains are responsible to a Roman Catholic bishop for promoting the spiritual and moral welfare of all members of the Defence Forces under their spiritual care, while merely co-operating with the commanding officer.

Does this mean Roman Catholic chaplains are responsible for the spiritual and moral welfare of Evangelicals, Ahmadiyya Muslims and members of other religious minorities, as well as atheists, humanists, and secularists in the Defence Forces?

Or does it mean that only Roman Catholic personnel have this privilege? Neither of these options is satisfactory. Over the years Defence Forces personnel have had to attend mandatory Masses, participate in ceremonial duties in churches and be generally deferential to Catholicism.

There are no rules or guidelines to ensure that personnel need not participate on the grounds of conscience in religious rituals.

While there have been some reforms, the commission has identified the chaplaincy and Masses during induction as outdated practices that must change or end. It also wants an end to other discriminatory practices, including the treatment of pregnancy and childbirth as an irregular absence from duty, and not permitting certain facial hair including beards.

The rights of minorities to freedom of conscience and religion cannot be reconciled with fully State-funded employees of the Defence Forces being appointed by Catholic bishops, or by forcing personnel to participate in religious practices.

It is time for the Defence Forces to embrace pluralism and equality in relation to religion or belief. The phrase religion or belief is important here. While it is obvious to most that the conscience of Evangelicals and Ahmadi Muslims should be protected, the Venice Commission has stressed that the belief aspect of this phrase includes deeply held conscientious beliefs that are fundamental about the human condition and the world, including atheism.

The Department of Justice is now reviewing our equality laws. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has recommended that the religion ground in the Acts should be amended to religion and belief, to bring it in line with EU law.

This would help us move to a more inclusive culture based on human rights.

Atheist Ireland, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and Evangelical Alliance Ireland welcome the report of the Commission on the Defence Forces, and we look forward to a time when all State bodies recognise and include all minorities.

Jane Donnelly is human rights officer with Atheist Ireland

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Ireland is a pluralist country with outdated privileges for Catholics - The Irish Times

In recent years, American Catholics have found our country violently at odds with many of our firmly-held beliefsfrom traditional marriage to defense of the family to defense of the unborn. In response, many of us have looked to the outside world for a Christian country that would emit a glimmer of hope.

Some conservative Catholics have found Russia as a potential ally. However, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps we need to look a bit more closely.

It is true that President Putins Russia defends the family and traditional marriage, but so does President Zelenskys Ukraine. Both countries are about the sameon gay rights, and both vehemently oppose same-sex marriage. On this issue, both countries are quite conservative.

When it comes to abortion, President Putin and President Zelensky oversee countries very open to legalized abortion. Russia has the worlds highest per-capita abortion rate, while President Zelensky wishes to makeabortion more accessible in Ukraine. President Zelensky also wants prostitution and other immoral practices legalized. While prostitution is also illegal in Russia, it isonly punishable by a minimal fine. Thus, prostitution is very popular and even lauded by President Putin himself.

Russia and Ukraine, while both Christian on some issues, are pretty much like any other nation when it comes to their lawscafeteria Christian and non-Christian on the preeminent issues.

Yet, even with all of these facts, you will hear that Russia is a Christian country, as if Ukraine is less of one. You will hear justification of Russias aggression as a type of a Christian crusade against Western atheism. But such an outlook fails to line up with the facts.

When looking at the demographics, Russiais actually less Christian thanUkraine. Furthermore, and more importantly, Russia is also less Catholic than Ukraine. Ukraine not only has a higher percentage of Catholics (~7.8% to ~0.5%) but also has more total Catholics (~3,354,000 to ~717,101).

In addition, Ukraine is home to the largest Eastern Catholic Church, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Its former mother church is in Lviv, where the United States and many Western allies have beenplacing their embassies. Lviv is amajorityUkrainian Greek Catholic city and oblast. Two other oblasts (provinces) in Western Ukraine are mostly Catholic as well. Lviv has been and still is home to the Roman Catholic Church (Latin Rite) and Armenian Catholic Church (another Eastern Catholic Church) in this region of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is not only the largest Eastern Catholic Church, but it also provides a direct connection back to the Christianization of Kievan Rus as one of the successor churches to the conversion of St. Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kiev to Christianity in 988. Therefore, the Catholic roots for Ukrainians run deep.

In addition to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Ukraine also has the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, with its mother church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. This church is for Ruthenians/Rusyns, another East Slavic groupwho make up a sizable minority in Ukraine, in addition to other areas of the Carpathian Mountains where they live. This area is calledCarpatho-Ruthenia and includes Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, and is actually in the same region where the White Croats originate from, one of the tribes that founded the strong Catholic nation of Croatia.

In Ukraine, the Ruthenians inhabit the Zakarpatska Oblast in Western Ukraine where the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church is the main Catholic jurisdiction there. The Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church can trace its origins to Saint Cyril and Methodius converting the Slavs of Great Moravia to Christianity in 863.

It is true that a Russian Greek Catholic Church exists too, but it has never garnered as much membership or sense of national identity as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has garnered.

Due to the changing borders of Ukraine, Ukrainians at one time lived under Habsburg Rule in places like Lviv and thus have more deeply Catholic roots. Many of the Ukrainian diaspora, especially in the United States, are part of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The same cannot be said for Russia, where there are not any significant cities, regions, or history where the Russian Greek Catholic Church plays a major role.

As one can see, there is a deep affinity between Ukrainians and the Catholic Church that is not present in Russia. And these Catholics are usually the most fiercely patriotic to Ukraine. There is a reason for that. Ukrainians have often looked West, as they did under the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia when they looked for protection from the Mongols in the 1200s. This kingdom and the Galician region were centered on Lviv as their capital.

Lviv and the other Catholic Ukrainian regions of the West were also key in the struggle for Ukrainian independence in the Rukh Movement that saw Ukraine achieve independence from the brutal Russian-led USSR in 1991with 92.5 percent of the vote, and a sizable majority in all oblasts except the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and a city with special status, Sevastopol, where there was still a majority but with extremely low turnout.

Ukrainian Catholics and their countrymen sought independence from the abuses Russian-led empires had committed on the Ukrainian people over the years. Just take Catholic clergy in the Soviet Union for example. There were many martyrs and confessors, such as 128 bishops and nuns of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church who were sent to gulags and 36 Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests who were murdered.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, meanwhile, was outlawed by the Soviet Union from 1946-1989. In 2014, in Crimea,many Catholic clergy were forced to leaveafter the Russian takeover. Some may think these abuses were merely because of communism. But in fact, as seen in this Crimean example, it appears to be a Russian Federation problem too.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine will come with much Catholic heartache. As loyal Catholics, we must remember that the quest of other large Slavic experiments has not boasted proudly for our Church or most others in the recent past. Russia often has revanchist goals, and while it may seem like Russia will stop at Ukraine, there are always worries its invasion could spread to other parts of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.

Catholic countries like Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary could be next in line for Russian onslaught. Beyond that, other Catholic countries like Croatia and Slovenia are just a stones throw away. Already, Catholic Lviv is in the crossfire. For Catholics, the threat of Russia is very real, not just inside Russia.

Catholics should not only hesitate to support a Putin invasion because unnecessary wars are against our Faith, but we should also be against a Putin invasion of Ukraine because our Faith is strong in Ukraine. If conservative Catholics desire a more Catholic world, then we should do all we can to support Ukraine, one of the few countries with a truly Catholic heritage.

[Photo Credit: SERGEI GUNEYEV/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images]

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The Myth of the Crusader Putin - Crisis Magazine

When I left the Church, Ill admit I didnt get far.

I spent a few years not attending services and happily proclaiming my agnosticism/atheism, but during college I was drawn back into religion quite easily. My dad was a pastor, so it was a constant conversation whenever I visited our home and I found I deeply enjoyed religion classes, reveling in learning about the Hebrew Scriptures and the Book of Revelation.

I was one of those Im an atheist! types walking around reading Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

For me, the departure from church wasnt a rejection of spirituality; it was a rejection of institutionalized Christianity. Although it wasnt my language, I was in line with the spiritual but not religious moniker that swept our nation for a bit there. I had a deep connection with this ancient tradition and I was just in the process of renegotiating it.

During this time, I stumbled onto John Shelby Spongs Jesus for the Non-Religious. Just based on the name, you can see why it appealed to me. I tore through the book as if on a rampage, scribbling notes all over the margins, reading and re-reading passages. Throughout it were words, phrases, and stories that perfectly articulated my experience, confirmed my doubts, and validated me: I felt seen and increasingly comfortable in this liminal space.

In many ways, Spong was my main deconstruction teacher. Reading his books and watching any video of him I could find gave me language and confirmation that it was okay to leave behind the doctrines of Christianity that no longer worked for me. While my progressive upbringing had sidelined many of these doctrines (original sin, for example), they had never fully dismantled them. For me, Spong dismantled them.

An example was the literal belief of Heaven and Hell. While my progressive upbringing never focused on these places, literal or not, they were also never fully discarded or dis-merited, or even re-envisioned much from a progressive lens.

This left me with confusion. My scientific understanding of the Universe said Heaven and Hell werent possibly realbut they were still being mentioned without full explanation in sermons, hymns, and in the regular interactions of church members.

When I came across this video from John Shelby Spong, my entire world shifted.

As I reflect now on Spongs influence in my life, I can think of three key stages I went through with him:

What John Shelby Spong started would be continued by Richard Rohr in my life. Whereas Spong helped me tear apart my experience, validating my theological questions and helping me to understand at a deeper level, Rohr would later help me to pick up the pieces that most mattered.

I was able to meet Spong briefly in the early 2010s while he was in Seattle and I remember being awe-struck by his kindness. He was frail and one of his eyes appeared cloudy, but he would look each of the people in front of him directly in their eyes: he would see their inherent dignity. And as a young person, possibly the youngest in the crowd that night, it was a true experience of feeling seen. This was a man who had helped me understand myself and make sense of my life experience; he was a shepherd for my soul at a time when I didnt know where to go.

Thank you for seeing me, John. And for helping me to see myself.

During February, Ill be exploring my own story with Progressive Christianity, with religion, and with my constantly evolving spirituality. It is a story from the gymnasium to the sanctuary, beyond the walls of institutionalized religion (and sometimes back again), always falling deeper into my own experience and relationship with the Divine. If youd like to read it in order,youll find them on the blogs home page.

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John Shelby Spong Helped Me to Lose Myself in the Unknown - Patheos

Many years ago, my Christian beliefs were challenged intellectually by a progressive Christian pastor. It threw me into deconstruction that took several years to fully come out of. I found out later that he himself had already deconstructed and had hoped to propel his congregation into deconstruction so he could convert them to progressive Christianity. He was very good at it. In fact, he was almost totally successful. A few of us came back around to a historically Christian understanding of the gospel, but most did not.

Because of this, when deconstruction stories started popping up in my social media newsfeed, along with hashtags like #exvangelical and #deconstruction, I paid attention. Ive been following along, seeking to understand what people mean by those words.

I witnessed a hashtag turn into a movement.

As of today, there are 293,026 posts on Instagram utilizing the hashtag #deconstruction. The vast majority are from people whove deconverted from Christianity, become progressive Christians, embraced same-sex marriage and relationships, rejected core historic doctrines of the faith, or are on a mission to crush the white Christian patriarchy. There are a few photos of deconstructed clothing (apparently this is a thing?) and a scant few sneaky posts from evangelicals attempting (mostly unsuccessfully) to convince the deconstructors that Jesus is the way. A plethora of insults, mockery, and anger are hurled at the church, along with memes stating, I regret saving myself for marriage, and Good morning! Its a great day to leave your nonaffirming church.

Online, there are countless deconstruction therapy and counseling sites which will facilitate your deconstruction and reconstruct you with mindfulness or the contemplative practices of progressive Christian favorites like Richard Rohr. There are conferences you can attend, one for which I personally paid good money (for research purposes) to be taught how to break free from toxic religion, reject Christian dogma, and learn to embrace what basically added up to warmed-over Buddhism. Phil Drysdale, a deconstructed Christian and deconstruction researcher asked people on Instagram to name the accounts that have helped them through their deconstructions. A quick scroll reveals that the leaders and guides the vast majority are looking to are accounts and people like Lisa Gungor, Audrey Assad, God is Grey, Jesus Unfollower, Your Favorite Heretics, Jo Luehmann, The Naked Pastor, and a plethora of others dedicated to providing a space for Christians to examine, reinterpret, and even abandon their beliefs. None of these accounts encourage Christians to look to Scripture as the authority for truth.

In my book, which chronicles my own deconstruction journey, I define deconstruction this way:

In the context of faith, deconstruction is the process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. Sometimes the Christian will deconstruct all the way into atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction. But the type of faith they end up embracing almost never resembles the Christianity they formerly knew. (24)

I would add that it rarely retains any vestiges of actual Christianity.

Over the past year or so, it has become common for Christian leaders to refer to deconstruction as something potentially positive. I get it. When I first heard that take, I thought, Hmmm. That could work. Just deconstruct the false beliefs and line up what you believe with Scripture. I was operating from the foundational belief that objective truth exists and can be known. But as I continued to study the movement, this understanding of deconstruction became untenable.

[Deconstruction] has little to do with objective truth, and everything to do with tearing down whatever doctrine someone believes is morally wrong.

Thats because the way the word is most often used in the deconstruction movement has little to do with objective truth, and everything to do with tearing down whatever doctrine someone believes is morally wrong. Take, for example, Melissa Stewart, a former Christian now agnostic/atheist with a TikTok following of more than 200,000. She describes how lonely and isolated she felt during her own deconstruction, and how discovering the #exvangelical hashtag opened up a whole new world of voices who related to what she was going through. Her TikTok platform now gives her the opportunity to create that type of space for others. In an interview on the Exvangelical podcast, she commented on the deconstruction/exvangelical online space:

My biggest experiences with it were people talking about what they went throughtheir storiesand it was very personal and it focused on the human beings who have come out of this, rather than on whether a certain kind of theology is right or wrong.

From my experience studying this movement, I think she hits the nail on the head. Deconstruction is not about getting your theology right. The word itself is built upon postmodernism and carries the baggage of moral relativism. For example, if your church says a woman cant be a pastor, the virtuous thing to do would be to leave that church and deconstruct out of that toxic and oppressive doctrine. Deconstructionists may even say they are simply rejecting cultural beliefs that have become entangled with Christianity. But these cultural beliefs often include doctrines like penal substitutionary atonement and biblical marriage. But deconstructionists do not regard Scripture as being the final authority for morality and theologythey appeal primarily to science, culture, psychology, sociology, and history.

Now, the narrative is evolving. Im seeing more and more posts, including an article on this site, that portray Martin Luther and even Jesus himself as deconstructionists. This, in my view, is irresponsible. If deconstruction means nothing more than changing your mind or correcting bad ideas, then I can say I deconstructed by switching from AT&T to Verizon. No one (until about five minutes ago) would have referred to Luther or Jesus as people who deconstructed. Martin Luther was trying to reform the church to get back to Scripture. Jesus is the Word made flesh. This is most certainly not what the deconstructionists are doing. In most cases, the Bible is the first thing to go.

Weve certainly seen many abuse scandals hit our newsfeeds, and there are very real people who carry the wounds, doubts, and trauma caused by those experiences. Many survivors are left with an injured faith and may wander online only to be met by a massive community of exvangelicals who triumph deconstruction and publicly shame anyone who speaks against it. This can feel like a safe place to process those hurts, but theres a specific end goal: to dismantle beliefs one subjectively thinks are oppressive or morally dubious, rather than conform our beliefs to Scripture, even if those beliefs are counterintuitive.

Rejecting any unbiblical beliefs with the goal of living more authentically as Christians should be a daily reality. But this isnt deconstruction.

As Christians, the process of evaluating our beliefs, traditions, and church culture in light of Scripture, and rejecting any unbiblical beliefs with the goal of living more authentically as Christians should be a daily reality. But this isnt deconstruction. It might be rightly called reformation or restoration or even healing.

Deconstruction has taken on a life of its own, and now is the time to accurately define our words. After all, if the word means everything, then it means nothing, yet it carries the potential to suck unsuspecting Christians into a dangerous vortex of influences from which they might not return.

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Why We Should Not Redeem 'Deconstruction' - The Gospel Coalition

In my last column, I made another reference to secularism, and it occurs to me this term and concept deserves further consideration. As it happens, a much-needed book has just been published by Routledge titled Secularism: The Basics by Jacques Berlinerblau. The author was also interviewed in the Jan. 25 edition of the Religion News Service online. My remarks here have been suggested by his book and that interview.

I have made use of the phrase steadfast secularism, intending to mean something that could also be called hard secularism or atheistic secularism. Secularism in its original form referred to the principle of striving to conduct human governmental affairs based on secular, naturalistic considerations, maintaining something of a separation between church and state.

However, there is a form of secularism, which took shape through the 20th century, that goes much further and aggressively maintains the reason for such a separation is because religion of any sort is a pernicious relic of the past and needs to be stamped out of all societies for the welfare of humanity. In the late-20th century, the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al) were of this ilk. Of course, earlier in the 20th century, Marxism took the same position.

Contrary to the above, the origin of the idea and term secularism in the English language can be traced to the British writer George Holyoake (1817-1906). He wanted a term and idea that was not as harsh as atheism, but would indicate an approach in government and philosophy whereby there could be cooperation with religions and believers of all types this is soft secularism. He did not intend that a government which accepted secularism as a principle, would seek to shut down religions or their influence on cultures. That further step, hard secularism, took place later in 20th-century fascist movements in Europe and in the communist revolutions in Russia and China. Today, some are noticing aspects of hard secularism filtering into many First World societies.

As Berlinerblau is careful to explain in his new book, there is a world of difference between hard and soft secularism in fact, they are pretty much opposites. Hard secularism seeks to destroy religion, whereas soft secularism seeks to accommodate and cooperate with religion, recognizing its value.

Making matters worse here in the United States, many if not most voters dont understand the difference between hard and soft secularism. This leads to the accusation, coming from the religious right, that the left-leaning Democratic Party wants to ram through atheistic secularism and to persecute religions and religious people. This would be absolutely true if the Democratic Party were aiming to align itself with hard secularism, but it isnt. It is only aiming for soft secularism that is to say, aiming for a government that defends religious freedom and does not align itself with any one religion to the exclusion of the others.

But the Democratic Party and politicians are fumbling this message over and over and they do this at their extreme peril. Americans are a very religious people even the ones who have stopped going to church. Voters in the U.S. are way more religious than western Europeans. So the Democratic Party cannot let itself be overly influenced by what flies in Europe with the public. It wont fly here.

We need to remember those famous words of the rabbi Jesus, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and unto God the things that are Gods. In a divinely inspired aphorism, that is exactly the type of secularism needed in order for religion and government to understand each other. These are two separate realms which, in 2,000 years of Christian social teaching, have been called the two swords and the two realms: the material and the spiritual. We live in both.

I am very much in favor of secularism, the right kind of secularism: the kind of secularism that reflects the meaning which is right there inside the words etymology. Secular comes from the Latin word saecularis (of an age/era) from the root saeculum (age/era). Secular values are values of an era, of an age, of politics). There are plenty of times when those sorts of values need some guidance from values that have stood the test of multiple eras and multiple political fights values that we sense come from a higher plain, a higher level.

I hasten to add that this does not mean they come from a literalist reading of Christian, Jewish or Islamic scripture. It means that there are core life-affirming and life-preserving values held in common by the worlds great monotheisms and their best teachers and we cannot let governments and corporations trample these values. We did not get the ideas of human rights, human flourishing and human charity from corporate bylaws or political party platforms.

The best sort of secularism recognizes its limitations. It must recognize that it cannot take the place of religious and spiritual value systems. Rather, it realizes that our societies must make a place and places for religion and spiritual development in our private and our public lives. There must be a constant dialog between the secular and the spiritual.

As humans, we live in the secular and the spiritual worlds simultaneously. When we forget that, its not pretty. When political parties forget that they either die, if were lucky; or they become tyrannical and that is very unlucky for us, indeed.

John Nassivera is a former professor who retains affiliation with Columbia Universitys Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He lives in Vermont and part-time in Mexico.

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On Faith: Secularism vs. atheism | Perspective | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. Thats it. Despite common stereotypes, atheists arent necessarily anti-religion, nor do they worship themselves instead of a god.

Atheists dont hate Godits impossible to hate something if you dont believe it exists. Atheism indicates what someone does not believe, but it says nothing about what someone does believe.

For that, other terms like naturalist, secular humanist, and even Pastafarian connote a rejection of religion while also defining the substance of an individuals philosophy or worldview.

Atheism is avaluable critique of outmoded, regressive religious systems with its vision of a universe upon which meaning was never imposed from above.

Atheism and freethought trace their roots to ancient Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on rational inquiry and curiosity about the workings of nature.Other sources included early Chinese Confucianism, ancient Indian materialists, and Roman Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Submerged during the Dark Ages, freethought re-emerged in the Renaissance.

TheRichard Dawkins Foundation is one of the premier atheist and secular organizations in the world. RDFs mission is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values and have been a division of CFI since2016.

If you found this definition helpful you can help the Center for Inquiry by sharing on Facebook or Twitter

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What is Atheism? A Lack of Belief in Gods - Center for Inquiry

In a Feb. 5 appearance on Glenn Beck's talk show which Beck called "probably the most important podcast perhaps that we've ever done" self-proclaimed critical race theory expert James Lindsay issued a dire warning. While discussing dark right-wing theories about "The Great Reset" and Democratic-run reeducation camps for the unvaccinated, Lindsay warned that a severe reckoning was at hand for the world's elites: "It's coming for them. They're going to lose all of their power. They're going to be exposed for crimes the likes of which we've never seen in human history."

Beck, perhaps a close second to Alex Jones as the reigning conspiracy theorist of the right, seemed to glow with enthusiasm as the two agreed that a revolution was coming and "if they don't have us all in cages, they're in a lot of trouble."

The appearance was one of many Lindsay has conducted in recent days, as he promotes his new book, "Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Practice," published on Tuesday and, as of Wednesday, the top title in Amazon's "philosophy criticism" section. If his digression into fantasies of bloody revolt against a cadre of bankers, media and George Soros what one Lindsay-watcher called "straight-up Hitler talk" seems like an odd detour, it's one of many he's made over the years: an academic turned intentional academic fraud, a "new atheist" who now counsels Christians on heresy, a blue-no-matter-who Obama volunteer turned intellectual leader of the far right. So meet the man behind the man behind the right's most consuming contemporary moral panic.

RELATED:The critics were right: "Critical race theory" panic is just a cover for silencing educators

In 2018, as a math PhD running a business that fused massage therapy with martial arts, and a supporting character in the foundering New Atheism movement, Lindsay became a national name by pulling off a deft hoax that made liberal academics look dumb. Along with two co-conspirators, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, Lindsay drafted 20 fake research papers with outlandish premises to research canine "rape culture" at dog parks, or a proposition that men use dildos on themselves to overcome transphobia and submitted them to a series of often obscure scholarly journals.

Around a third of the papers were accepted, and in 2018, the hoaxers, all of whom then called themselves liberals although Boghossian was closely associated with accused white supremacist and "race realist" Stefan Molyneux, who has argued that Black people are "collectively less intelligent" than other races revealed the experiment as an expos on the terminal wokeness of academia, particularly the identity-oriented fields that the three called "grievance studies."

The stunt received massive attention, including front-page treatment on The New York Times and airtime on Joe Rogan's podcast. When Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp asked Lindsay whether he feared their prank would become a "tool of the right," Lindsay took umbrage, asking, "Have you seen me go on Tucker Carlson yet? Do you think he hasn't asked?"

RELATED:Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

Lindsay still hasn't done that, but Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow credited with sparking the right's obsession with "critical race theory," absolutely has. In September 2020, Rufo appeared on Carlson's broadcast with a direct challenge to Donald Trump, demanding that the then-president issue an executive order banning CRT from any federal training programs. The following morning, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was on the phone with Rufo to sort the details out.

But while Rufo has been heralded as the little man behind the big war, Rufo himself credits Lindsay. In a joint August appearance with Lindsay on right-wing personality Jack Murphy's podcast, Rufo said that he had relied on Lindsay's theoretical explanations of CRT in order to craft his more populist appeals.

"James is really the theory expert," Rufo said. "I mean, James is an encyclopedia of theory connecting all the dots laying out the casecreating this giant content to guide all of us into this world. And then I think I come in as a complement to what James is doing, really following his lead with the praxis or the practice, which is translating the theory into the realm of practical politics and then translating this kind of esoteric knowledge that school moms and school dads can use at school board meetings and hammer their school boards with."

RELATED:Meet Christopher Rufo leader of the incoherent right-wing attack on "critical race theory"

Sam Hoadley-Brill, a fellow at the progressive think tank African American Policy Forum, which recently launched an initiative to defend the teaching of CRT against right-wing critics, has tracked Lindsay's evolving arguments for the past two years. These began with the anti-racism protests of the summer of 2020, which initially drew support even from numerous conservatives, but quickly prompted a right-wing backlash. And as corporations began responding to the movement by instituting or publicizing new diversity programs, Lindsay was ready.

That August, Lindsay and Pluckrose published a co-authored book, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everyone," that was widely-discussed on the right and landed on several bestseller lists.

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By the following spring, after the new Biden administration had reversed Trump's executive ban on CRT, Lindsay was tapped to narrate a Cliff Notes version of the conservative case against CRT for the right-wing media organization Prager U. In it, he argued that CRT "holds that the most important thing about you is your race"; that the theory was "not a continuation of the civil rights movement" but a "repudiation of it"; and that there hadn't been "a social movement so obsessed with race" since the Nazis or South Africa's apartheid regime. "Defend yourself," Lindsay concluded the video. "While you still can."

Around the same time, reported Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch, a speech Lindsay gave at the Leadership Institute a longstanding training ground for young conservative activists was turned into an e-book that the Institute used to recruit potential candidates for a right-wing "school board takeover."

And despite his long association with militant movement atheism including co-writing three books about it in the spring of 2021 Lindsay also waded into Christian communities' internal debates around CRT, warning that the best way to "end Christianity" is to "make [it] woke." As Bob Smietana reported in Religion News Service, Lindsay interjected himself into the Southern Baptist Convention's bitter 2021 feud over CRT, appearing in a documentary and a promotional video created by Founders Ministry, a conservative faction within the denomination that seeks to "return Southern Baptists to their roots." Lindsay also appeared on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler's YouTube show, where Mohler praised "Cynical Theories" as an "intellectual tour de force."

Smietana's investigation also revealed that Lindsay's website, New Discourses, is owned by right-wing activist Michael O'Fallon, president of the Christian nationalist group Sovereign Nations, who believes that George Soros has bought off most Christian leaders and who seeks "to start a new reformation to counter the social justice movement in the church."

This January, Lindsay followed up by calling on the SBC to oust leaders, including Mohler, who had failed to denounce CRT forcefully enough. "[W]e really don't want to see our large religious institutions taken over by a totalitarian ideology that's trying to infect and command everything," Lindsay said in a New Discourses podcast last month. "We want to have something that can stand up against it."

Lindsay went on to call CRT, which a number of Black Southern Baptists have embraced, "an explicit and intentional act of heresy." Christians who incorporate elements of it or intersectionality into their practices, he continued, "can damn well bet, Christians damned well bet, like condemned, like damned, like y'all demons if you're doing this you're falling for a demonic trick."

In 2021, Hoadley-Brill founded a Substack to debunk anti-CRT claims, starting with Lindsay's. In reference to Lindsay's @ConceptualJames handle on Twitter, where he's an exhaustively prolific commenter, Hoadley-Brill named his website "Conceptual Disinformation." In it and elsewhere, he chronicles the sometimes ridiculous aspects of Lindsay's crusade: He described himself in a virtual New Hampshire legislative committee session as a self-taught "world-level expert in critical race theory"; or his frenetic participation in a Dr. Phil roundtable; or his recent confounding remarks to Beck about "Fasho-Communism."

But Hoadley-Brill is motivated by a deeper concern: that as in the "grievance studies" hoax whose success largely rested on intentionally and grotesquely misrepresenting nuanced academic arguments, even those that deserved legitimate criticism the current anti-CRT movement relies on misrepresentations that most people outside the academic world will never even perceive.

"That hoax was so successful is because the entire point was, 'Look, we'll do the reading for you. People aren't qualified to go in and parse all the stuff in these fields, so we went and immersed ourselves in it, and it's all a bunch of bullshit,'" said Hoadley-Brill. "That's what led me into pushing back against these people: because the attention and credulity that people were giving them is now fueling this right-wing backlash, and people are being manipulated."

But since he started tracking the movement, Hoadley-Brill says Lindsay has continued to move rightward. "It was my perception that Lindsay was jealous of Rufo getting all this attention, and in response, he started to get more radical with his propaganda," he said. "With his messaging, the only further audience to capture is further to the right. So you start seeing him saying things like, 'CRT is just the tip of a 100-year long spear to infiltrate the United States with Marxist ideology,'" which Hoadley-Brill describesas "straight up neo-Nazi conspiracy theorizing."

While Lindsay used to acknowledge on his website that "Cultural Marxism," a term embraced a few years ago by the alt-right, was associated with antisemitism and white supremacy, and warned people against using it, nowadays such caution has been thrown to the wind. In Lindsay's new book, Hoadley-Brill notes, he argues that "neo-Marxists" have successfully redefined Cultural Marxism to smear it by association with antisemitism. Last fall, Lindsay published an episode of his podcast entitled "Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education," which argues that sex-ed classes aren't "just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times" but "a long-purposed Marxist project reaching back into the early 20th century." On Twitter, he responds to people concerned about the spread of "Don't Say Gay" bills with the pithy, "Ok groomer," effectively accusing anyone who believes children should learn that LGBTQ people are part of the human community of being a pedophile.

RELATED:A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Antisemitic conspiracy theory, reloaded

And in a Tuesday pub-day appearance on far-right commentator and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka's livestream show on Rumble, amid ads for gold, silver or Mike Lindell's pillows, Lindsay argued that queer theory which he sees as part of a grander suite of fields, alongside CRT, that comprise "woke Marxism" was one aspect of a decades-old Cultural Marxist plot to wage "a war on objective reality" and "separate one generation from the previous."

"This goes back to the first Cultural Marxist, Georg Lukcs," he said, referencing the Hungarian Marxist intellectual, "who became deputy commissar for education, and what did he implement? Comprehensive sex education. Exactly the stuff we see with the gender theory, the queer theory, these very perverted books in the school library teaching children to become sexually active and sexually aware. Why? Because what are they going to do? They're going to become, frankly, little perverts and they're going to go home, and their parents are going to say no, and they're going to use the rebelliousness of the teenage years of the youth to say you don't understand me." If you can thus "separate a new generation away from its parents," family, religion and culture, he concluded, they can be led wherever you want.

(It's true that Lukcs, who is farbetter known as the author of dense works of Marxist philosophy and literary criticism, was deputy commissar of education and culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic an embattled Communist state that existed for about four months in 1919. It seems unlikely he had time to enact ambitious educational reforms, but a century later, he's become the face of right-wing narratives about "The Communist Sexual Agenda.")

Lindsay's conversation with Gorka wound up in similarly ominous territory as his talk with Beck, complete with insinuations of violence.

"I've been screaming about this for years. It's like screaming into a hurricane," said Lindsay. "And now all of a sudden, the wind has changed. The wind's at my back now." As parents and the working class wake up to the "nonsense" of CRT, he said, and also to what he called "this radical agenda, especially with the gender and sexuality stuff and the pedophilia, that your children are genuinely in danger of groomers that the Marxists have brought in," said parents were reaching the point where they'd "die for [their] kids."

Lindsay claimed a political scientist had imparted this wisdom: "There are just a couple ways a cultural revolution gets stopped. One is you have a character like Putin come in and start killing journalists and take authoritarian power and stamp it out. The other is that parents wake up." In Lindsay's telling, those things sound eerily similar.

Read this article:
Meet James Lindsay, the far right's "world-level expert" on CRT and "Race Marxism" - Salon

The Revolution happened five years ago, but this was the first year when Soviet power was established in the whole country. How did it change the scenery?

After the 1917 Revolution instigated by the Bolsheviks, the massive Civil War between the red socialists and white monarchists began. The year 1922 officially marked the last year of the Civil War and the final operations undertaken by the Red Army in the Far East.

After the battle.

Red Army soldiers in Vladivostok. Their poster reads: Peace, order and tranquility are brought by the Peoples Revolutionary Army.

The protracted war affected the country a lot, caused many deaths and a huge hunger which children suffered the most. Pictured are children preparing for evacuation from the starving Chelyabinsk Province to Bashkiria.

A group of communists aboard the Trasbalt vessel. The poster reads: Workers of the world, unite!

Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Mikhail Kalinin, making a speech in Petrozavodsk.

The Red Square parade celebrating the 5th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.

Celebrations on the Palace Square in Petrograd.

A giant budenovka hat named after Red Army cavalry commander Semyon Budyonny.

On April 3, 1922, Joseph Stalin was elected General Secretary of the Bolsheviks party Central Committee, an important position that in the future would actually mean the leader of the country. Pictured with Vladimir Lenin.

Its still two years before Vladimir Lenins death. He is still a leader of the country and head of government. However, in 1922, he was already ill. Pictured below with his life and revolutionary comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya. Read more about the Soviet first First Lady here.

At the same time, in 1922, Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission), which was in charge of all the red revolutionary terror, became part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD) - and kept its purges under the head of an unchangeable leader, The Iron Felix (Dzerzhinsky).

In 1922, one of the countrys most popular soccer clubs, Spartak, was established. Read more about the turbulent fate of its founders here.

A mother and daughter posing for a photo.

A sewing factory (now the Bolshevichka factory) in Moscow.

Workers of a Moscow shoe factory installing sewing machines.

In 1922, the first pioneer organization was formed in the USSR - the future All-Union Pioneer Organization named after V. I. Lenin.

On a Moscow street.

Former Imperial institutions were either abolished or nationalized. The Petersburg theater of opera and ballet became the state-owned one. Pictured below is Russian ballet dancer Olga Spesivtseva performing Aurora in the Pyotr Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty.

Famous poet Sergei Yesenin married an American dancer Isidora Duncan, who came to Russia to set up a dancing school.

The Bolsheviks, busy with political and war issues, hadnt managed yet to take care of arts (and basically censorship), so the 1920s was a heyday for arts, including the famous avant-garde art, which took fine arts, films, theater and literature by storm. Pictured below: poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his beloved Lilya Brik.

Avant-garde artist and designer Varvara Stepanova preparing her innovative scenography for a theater performance Death of Tarelkin, staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Varvara Stepanova and her husband, famous avant-garde photographer Alexander Rodchenko.

Anna Akhmatova was a great poet who suffered the most from the Soviet power. A year before, her husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, was killed - and in the 1930s, her second husband and son would be sent to Stalins jails.

At the same time, the Soviet authorities launched the anti-religious campaign, pursuing the priests and assuming the church property: church items, precious metals and icons decorated with jewels. Pictured below is the interrogation of Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd, who was later executed.

The commission in charge of the 1922 confiscation of jewelry from churches.

Muscovites crowded near St. George Church (later demolished) during the seizure of church valuables.

Members of the Petrograd council opening Alexander Nevskys shrine. The remains of the Russian saint were moved from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra to the new Museum of religion and atheism.

READ MORE: How the Bolsheviks sold off Romanov treasures to the West

Bus traffic started in earnest in Moscow in 1922. Pictured below is one of the first buses of the Moscow Automobile Plant.

Leon Trotskys innovative automobile sleigh.

A group photo of rabbit breeders.

A Moscow family portrait.

The Bolsheviks launched the Likbez campaign of eradication of illiteracy. Pictured are Caucasian women during literacy class.

On December 30, the First All-Union Congress of Soviets took place in Moscow, which approved the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR.

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As an ex-Muslim woman, I once sought refuge in a vocal online atheist movement that began developing in the early 2000s, but after a few years in what became known as the New Atheist scene, I realized that many of the people I had thought were dedicated to values like enlightenment and tolerance had a lot more in common with the religious bigots they claimed to oppose.

Online vocal atheist communities seemed like a great fit for me, at first. As someone who grew up in a theocracy, it was cathartic to find a place to vent my frustrations on the topic of religion. Finding community is certainly not easy as an ex-Muslim; and when youre an immigrant and a minority like I am in Canada, where I live now, that adds a few more obstacles.

Religion was never something I was fond of, even as a child. I questioned everything and the stories in scripture didnt make sense to me. You can imagine the challenges that posed while living in a theocracy. As a result, I never really fit in and always felt like an outsiderespecially growing up as a Third Culture Kid, a Pakistani expat in Saudi Arabia.

Over time, Ive come to realize that there were several reasons I felt that way, not just my lack of belief. Identity and being an immigrant in a place where you cant even call yourself an immigrant even if you are born there (Saudi Arabia) had a lot to do with it, too.

Both countries were still very affected by problems stemming from religion, however. Especially religion interfering in government. There were so many things that ran counter to my own progressive values. Dissent was not tolerated, women were treated like second-class citizens, minorities were treated unfairly, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry was commonplace. Encountering New Atheism seemed like a release of so much pent up anger about these things. It was wonderful to be involved with a community that seemed to be actively concerned with the same issues that I was.

I jumped right in with my newfound friends, most of whom seemed to be huge fans of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; Christopher Hitchens, the late Vanity Fair columnist; and Sam Harris, author of the book The End of Faith. Their in-your-face godlessness seemed to be just what I was looking for. It was unapologetic, caustic, and most important of all, concerned with spreading the good word. It was a welcome contrast to holding your tongue, as one must in theocracy for self-preservation.

These NewAtheists wanted to spread the gospel of secularism, unlike their predecessors whose atheism was more incidental to their identities. It wasnt an overnight change, but once I became involved in the online atheist scene, I too, posted frequently on the internet about religion and my dislike for it.

My online content generating days began In 2010 after I had recently returned to Canada after living in Pakistan for a few years. I decided to start a blog called Nice Mangos based on my observations and some interviews I did while I was there. I primarily wrote about sexuality in Pakistan back thenthe site was the first and only blog of its kind at the time. Of course, it was hard to completely disentangle religion from sexuality and societal restrictions around it in Pakistan, so I did touch upon it occasionally.

A few years later, I wrote and illustrated a childrens picture book called My Chacha is Gay which used simple illustrations to address the subject of homophobia in a specifically Pakistani context.

Most of the money I raised via crowd-funding for the book came from fellow Pakistanis, which was such a pleasant surprise and in stark contrast to the attitudes I had generally experienced in Pakistan. The homophobia in Pakistan always struck me as very odd & hypocritical considering that same-sex experimentation was not uncommon among men who lacked access to women because of gender segregation. Pakistan is a place where two men walking down the street holding hands would be perfectly acceptable and commonplace, but any mention of gay rights elicits howls of anger. My childrens book was the target of such anger, and I continue to receive death threats about it to this day.

I wrote my blog and childrens book under my current pseudonymand Im glad I did! Being a woman who discusses sexuality, religion and apostasy from Islam specifically put me in real danger and made me a target of intolerant religious extremists. I received all kinds of hate mail, rape, and death threats too.

I still get plenty of threatening messages nowadays, but the hate mail I currently receive comes mostly from Western far-right types who say Islam is barbaric, and call me a dirty immigrant. Having been the target of abuse from extremist Christians, Muslims, and atheists, its easy to see that they have a lot in common.

Sadly, the abuse Ive faced is part of a larger dilemma that Muslim and ex-Muslim women face. At home, we deal with constant oppression from Islamic authoritarians; in the West, were beset by bigotry and tokenism from people who want to exploit our struggles in the service of their own narratives.

After several years as a blogger, I decided to expand my online voice in February of 2016 by starting a podcast called Polite Conversations. The show started off with a bang by getting banned from YouTube twice for posting our first episode, an interview with Iranian-British atheist Maryam Namazie. Since then, Ive done scores of shows and met many wonderful people.

But as I got further into New Atheism, I began seeing troubling indications that many of the people in the movement seemed to be motivated by anti-Muslim bigotry rather than a desire to oppose intolerance and superstition. This wasnt a realization I came to easily or quickly since I too had personally had been falsely accused of Islamophobia because of my criticism of religion, so that obscured things for me for a while.

At the time, it was harder to see who was criticizing in good faith (no pun intended) and who was motivated by anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views. But after Donald Trump emerged as a political figure in the United States, the truth became much easier to spot, as bigots were emboldened and dog whistles turned into blaring sirens.

My concerns about movement atheism really escalated in 2015, when the reactions to the European migrant crisis I saw around me were more in line with the far-right than the compassionate, secular humanism I had been expecting. I was appalled as I saw prominent New Atheist figures sharing anti-migrant propaganda. One popular atheist publication even began publishing articles from notorious bigots like Katie Hopkins and supposedly satirical covers that depicted migrants in dehumanizing ways as insects or through racist caricatures. I was disturbed when I saw people like Sam Harris sharing and endorsing anti-migrant interviews with far-right figures like Anne Marie Waterswho was too extreme for UKIP (a far-right party in the United Kingdom).

Instead of welcoming refugees fleeing Islamic fundamentalism, many within New Atheism were joining the reactionary effort to close Europes doors. This moment was what really began to open my eyes to the hollowness and hypocrisy of this movement.

Despite my worries, however, I still had some hope that perhaps the disgusting behavior I was observing was merely the product of misunderstanding, rather than a turn by some atheists toward the far right.

In pursuit of that thesis, I decided to voice my concerns publicly through an open letter to Harris about a podcast discussion (horrendously titled On the Maintenance of Civilization) hed had with Douglas Murray, a far-right anti-immigrant English commentator who had once lamented the declining levels of whiteness in London, had a friendly conversation with a white nationalist like Stefan Molyneux, and had generally allied with many extreme figures on the right in their advocacy against refugees.

I expressed concern to Harris that, during his Murray interview, he had proclaimed that he would rather vote for Ben Carson, a man he proclaimed to be a dangerously deluded religious imbecile, over the atheist socialist Noam Chomsky because at least Carson knew that the real enemy of American society was jihadists.

At the end of my letter, I invited Harris to come onto my own podcast to discuss the topic further. Several months later, I was delighted that Harris accepted my offer to appear on Polite Conversations. Our interview took place in November of 2016, just before Donald Trump was elected as president of the United States.

Ahead of my discussion with Harris, I hoped that he would be able to address my concerns. But as our conversation progressed, it became increasingly evident that he was unwilling to budge in his positions, regardless of the amount of evidence and examples I provided. Instead of responding to the specific points I made, Harris responded with generalities and hand-waving as he doubled- and tripled-down in his support for people like Douglas Murray and YouTuber Dave Rubin, whose supposedly deeply journalistic agenda I was unable to perceive.

While I appreciated his courtesy in appearing on my show, the more I thought about our exchanges afterward, the more I realized how evasive Harris had beenand eventually through this exchange and other observations, I came to the conclusion that my concerns about New Atheism merging with the far-right were true. I now do a miniseries documenting my journey into and out of New Atheism called Woking Up. Im still very much an atheist, but not that kind of atheist.

Once Trump took office in 2017, the trends I had noticed before became glaringly obvious. Rubin, who had risen to prominence thanks to Harriss help (he not only appeared on his first episode to assist in launching Rubins show, he also regularly promoted his episodes and funded him on Patreon) began making paid videos for PragerU, a propaganda network started by Dan and Farris Wilks, Christian supremacist brothers who are big donors to Texas Republican Ted Cruz and many other extremist causes.

After building a career as a professional atheist, Rubin told a Religious Right YouTube channel that he now believed in a god, thanks to the ministrations of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist whose first claim to fame was his transphobia and deliberate misinterpretations of Canadas Gender Identity Rights Bill C-16.

Since his emergence in 2016, Peterson has worked diligently to flatter his far-right Christian audience with interminable lectures that mostly amount to justifying Bronze Age theological pronouncements. Ditto for Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor who presents himself as a sciencey secular type while frequently shilling forivermectin, the anti-parasitic drug beloved by the Christian right that Weinsteinfalsely insiststo be a miracle cure for Covid-19. He has now openly embraced the anti-vaccine movement as well.

Harris himself has also carefully cultivated a right-wing audience, endlessly ranting against wokeness, critical race theory and leftist identity politics. While the coronavirus pandemic has pushed his obsession about Islam out of the news cycle, he still sometimes goes out of his way to throw a little jihadism-fearmongering into other subjects. Just recently on an Ask Me Anything episode he warned, given how disruptive Covid has been, I would bet that the threat of bio-terrorism has increased significantly and if youre a nihilist, or youre insane, or youre a jihadist, or youre a fanatic of some other stripe, well then, bio-terrorism just got its Super Bowl commercial.

Even as far-right movements around the globe have come to power thanks to inspiration from Trump, Harris has continued to use his platform to focus on petty grievances with college students, anti-racists, Black Lives Matter, and the political left in general. Instead of highlighting the alarming growth of right-wing extremism, Harris has downplayed it as irrelevant, a mere fringe of the fringe.

Despite his reputation as an advocate for atheism, Harriss content has barely examined the violence-glorifying Christian supremacism that metastasized into the murderous chaos of the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.Within the year after the attack took place, Harris published only two podcast episodes about itaccording to his website search. Even then, the event was portrayed as some sort of response to wokeness.

A few days after the first anniversary of Jan. 6, Harris did mention Trump and the Capitol putsch, but instead of putting the attack in its proper theocratic context, he framed the ex-president being a mere cult leader. While Trump certainly does inspire adoration in some supporters, its an incomplete picture, like most of Harriss Trump criticism. Thats becauseTrump alone did not create the manic hatred we all saw on Jan. 6, he merely took advantage of it. According to his website and Google, Harris has never even used the term Christian nationalism on his site, even as numerous journalists and scholars have published hundreds of articles, research papers, and books on the subject.

Everyone has their own priorities, but its certainly interesting to see that one of the original four horsemen of New Atheism evinces little to no concern about a growing and malignant Christian supremacist movement in his own country which was nourished by one of its major political parties to conduct the first violent invasion of the American Capitol since the War of 1812.

A key part of the far rights strategy to radicalize theologically conservative Christians has been the spreading of lurid and often false tales about Muslim immigrants and migrants. Unfortunately, Harris and many others in the former New Atheist movement have been more than happy to oblige. But in promoting and defending hatred against Islam, right-wing atheists are doing more than just enabling their fellow ideologues, however. They are also undermining the position of atheism in society. Trump and his underlings have been crystal-clear that their goal is Christian supremacyhaving government explicitly promote Christianity while giving non-Christians fewer rights and forcing them to be silent in public.

Christianity is under tremendous siege, Trump said in a 2016 campaign speech to an extremist evangelical group. We dont exert the power that we should have.

Christianity will have power, he promised. If Im there, youre going to have plenty of power, you dont need anybody else. Youre going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.

Unlike so many of the promises hes made over the decades, this was one that Trump actually kept. He appointed hundreds of Christian nationalist judges intent on throwing out abortion rights rulings, he gave them unparalleled access to his staff, he appointed many of them to the highest echelons of power. He catered obsessively to their authoritarian policy demands. And after four disastrous years, Trumps strategy of unlawfully clinging to power was conceived and executed by Christian Right activists.

Despite everything Trump and his fellow Republicans have done to promote and enforce Christian supremacism, right-wing atheists are still continuing their quixotic obsessions with random left-wing activists and college students, while also cozying up to theocrats. Figures like James Lindsay who emerged from the New Atheist scene are now prominent allies of the Religious Right with close ties to Christian nationalist organizations like Sovereign Nations. Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, is praising church bells and denouncing the aggressive-sounding Allahu Akbar, and Douglas Murray is making videos about the supposed god-shaped hole in the human psyche.

You simply cant make this stuff up. It is beyond parody.

Nowadays, no one wants to be called a New Atheist anymore, because of the baggage and connotations the term carries, but the evangelical right-wing atheists still continue doing the same things. Whether they call themselves the Intellectual Dark Web or heterodox, their anti-left sentiment remains. Its very different from the vast majority of atheistswho actually do embrace pluralism, science, and human rights.

I left Islam because my skepticism was prompted by progressive values. I did not expect to see the same bigotries and conservative biases in the atheist scene that claimed to oppose these things. I learned the hard way, however, that bigotry and discrimination were not what my former associates opposed, it was Islam, it was minorities, immigrants and brown people.

Joining hands with Christian nationalists to own the libs makes a certain kind of sense by this twisted logic. But its definitely not atheist activism.

Original post:
I never thought 'New Atheism' would become a tool of the Christian Right - Flux.community