On Tuesday, January 13, 2015 at 8:54:40 PM UTC+1, Brent wrote: > > A fair question. >
I'm not so sure about that. The question presupposes ironically that violence is a justified response to insult. It's a simple trap: taking it literally legitimizes more ridicule because the subject didn't see the blatant irony, and not taking it literally/ignoring it will be interpreted as being complacent/apologetic towards absurd religious fairy tales. No bite here although I will admit it is a rather sad and thorny theological issue. It's thorny because this type of imagery/question carries nihilistic assumption that there exists nothing that is transcendent/sacred. Picture cartoons depicting "dumb Americans/westerners naive on freedom of speech suing each other like nuts for defamation" and imagine your response if you're in that target audience. Of course this imagery/question carries that cool irreverent subtext, but laid bare, it implies meaningless existence as certainty. Is shoving such nihilist-tinged humor down other people's throats a valid way to promote tolerance? I'm not sure. It's easy to fall for the "freedom of speech vs. old, medieval Islamic values" gestrure. But when you know and relate to people from that culture, I find that it's closer to most of them wanting to preserve their ways of life from nihilistic consumerism of the West. Also, everybody I know can distinguish between extremists using religion to further their interests and the pragmatic aspect of living their faith, no matter their faith. The Dawkins quotes and "argumentation" against the whole religion (via selective quoting of the militant rhetoric penned in times when Islam was persecuted; I take it that the faith as a whole takes murder to not be justifiable and an insult to humanity) give us an image of: enlightened reasoning in the West vs. dumb superstitions of the East. And here we have to take Atheism to contradict its own status as belief, to be able to save its rather forcing implication of superiority. The imagery and question is thus targeted at the immature and naive as it confuses a lack of hard evidence for the existence of transcendent/sacred concepts with the radical belief that there are none. Because of this thorny state of affairs, and assuming the authors know what they're doing, this is therefore plausible ideological bullying. An insecure attempt to swap one radical ideology for another. The nasty bit, is that this is presented to us through a biased media as "harmless fun of liberty". And I'm not sure we can blame lack of education either, as this requires some patronizing ledge again. The fault is to be found more in violating people, histories of occupation, stealing resources, and continuing the power game itself, wishing to score high points and "earn status" in a game, that people with sound scientific/theological background, should see as rigged imho. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
