Sectionfive
bandwagon house
Isn't automatically equating atheism with Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins et al a bit like automatically equating Islam with Osama bin Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini?
Of course, so perhaps necessary to separate atheism from Atheism for the discussion.
Here's the thing. It seems to me that when we hear criticism of islam, nine out of ten times it's Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan. That one in ten might maybe, occasionally be Indonesia (which is actually worlds largest muslim population) or Malaysia. Islam has been racialized to mean a fairly consistently defined area and peoples. Atheism in my experience is one of the main sources of this thinking, or at the least offers little resistance to it. So much of what I have encountered has no concept of race, whiteness and bizarrely less of power, politics and history. It's a complete blindspot. As if their ideas don't exist in an atmosphere of hostility to the middle east and and white dudes having a go at the very notion of islam carries the same consequences as targeting the local christian bishop. Unfathomably shallow