Generalising about "The West" is not helpful. Generalising about atheists is not helpful.
You may say "Well maybe to people who want to wipe us out"!
But you can't wipe out ideas. This may be a good thing or bad, depending on the idea. But we need to have a mechanism for criticising ideas that are demonstrably false, and cause great harm.
You may consider me to be overly politically correct in the various stances I have taken in this blog - however, I would point out that there is nothing politically correct about criticising religion. In fact, it is very politically incorrect to do so, and this in itself is a massive problem.
Take for example the religion section of The Guardian Online. Here in the Christian and Muslim pages you'll usually find positive stories about the religion and its array of characters and their activities. And yet in the non-believers or atheists pages, we're constantly told how atheists are sad, mean or rich outcasts desperately trying to take away everyone's freedom or knock the comforting holy books from desperate poor believers' hands; or how Richard Dawkins is the most misogynistic racist in existence. Yeah right. I've criticised him, sure, but he's not THAT bad.
Around the world, even today, saying nothing about days of yore, atheists are subjected to abuse, censure, torture and calls for execution for the simple "crime" of suggesting that the locally supported Sky Daddy might not be quite as real as everyone seems to think.
"Whatever else you do, you MUST believe in a God!" we're constantly told. In the US, raving loonies who write into newspapers demanding that all atheists are immediately deported are described as having "strong views". Seriously, if someone says that about Muslims, they would (quite rightly) be taken down pretty quickly for the bigots they are.
(By the way, don't get me started on how incredibly skull-numbingly dumb that letter is).
That's as may be. I've come to expect it.
The people I am really criticising in this blog are the left-leaning academics, journalists and personalities who regularly conflate criticism of ideas with criticism of people. According to them, even talking about religions' role in conflicts, humanitarian disasters, and human rights issues like FGM around the world is taboo. Verboten. To them the poorly-defined and gestalt entity known as "The West" is the root of almost all problems.
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Aside 1 - Faith
Prof. Peter Boghossian, a US philosopher and critical thinking teacher, calls these people "Contemporary Academic Leftists" in his book A Manual For Creating Atheists, which I highly recommend.
Forget the title - he wanted to call it Street Epistemology, but that would never fly with the publishers - the main purpose is using the "Socratic Method" to question the assertions of the religious believer. This is done by finding counterexamples to their claims, questioning their systems of knowledge, and helping them to realise that they are in no position to be as certain as they claim to be, about the truth-value of their claims.
Doubt is key.
Of course, the decision to believe or not can only be made by a person themselves. The aim is to promote questioning, not to deconvert. That is left to the believer. Faith is, as many atheists see it, a pretty bad thing, universally speaking - there seems to be very little of merit to it. One definition of "faith" is "belief that is not based on proof"
and this is the one that most closely relates to religion. Indeed, Boghossian considers faith an implacable foe, deeming it "Pretending to know what you don't know" and using this definition as a synonym. Taken in these terms, what may have previously been seen as a compliment, for example "He is a man of deep faith" is exposed for what it really means - "He is a man who deeply pretends to know what he does not know".
The problem really does go back to epistemology - how you know what you claim to know. As a major proxy for bad epistemology, religion will remain in my sights until more believers start rightfully doubting that they may be on entirely the right course.
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Here's the thing. Many people in "The West" don't agree with what "The West" is doing with its foreign (or internal) policies, and are trying to resist them. The tide is turning away from those policies. How many people seriously still regard the imperial age as anything other than a disastrously bad and regrettable episode for which we'll probably never be able to make up for? I don't think it's as many as you might suppose. I'm of the opinion that we should hand Ireland back to the Irish, and even the matter of the Falklands and Argentina isn't out of the question.
Such views are gradually filtering into culture. Thinking of "the sins of our fathers" is not disrespect or anarchy, but understanding that they did what they thought was best for their own interests while under the thumb of questionable epistemology. It was predictable, and understandable in a way, but not acceptable. This is being crystallised in some modern music.
In their hit single "Sons of Apathy", from their album, the appropriately titled "All Our Kings Are Dead", popular High Wycombe rock band Young Guns sing a verse which goes
"We are the heirs to empty dawns and promises unkept
I'll sit and watch The Empire burn with mild disinterest
But we are not forsaken, we have a gift worth more than gold
We've been shown how NOT to live by "gracious" kings of old".
The whole track espouses self-determination, and is a refutation of nationalist values on the international stage, lamenting how they have led to internal neglect. So up yours UKIP.
Internationally, recent legal claims made by Caribbean countries, calling for reparations for the salve trade years, would have been given short shrift a few years ago, but now may (and should) be seriously considered, and in my opinion should be met as closely as possible.
The only people continuing to be "imperialist" are either power mongering sabre-rattlers (hello Putin) or those just reverting to type when being goaded by unhelpful foreign countries touting the "imperialist" line. They are hardly representative of the nation of a whole. I ask those continually making the accusations of imperialism against "The West", what actions could "The West" take which would NOT be regarded as "imperialist"? The list of helpful options is probably unrealistically short.
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Aside 2 - "Islamophobia"
The book "Does God hate Women?" (Benson / Stangroom, 2009 Continuum) deals with this issue well. I'll include a few ideas from it as I really like them. They touch on the idea of the latent "inferiority complex" exhibited by some less wealthy middle eastern countries and how religion helps to unite the people against who they see as the oppressor - "The West" of course. But the general citizenry of "The West" have nothing to do with any position of power it may occupy.
Likewise, a person from any less wealthy country is capable of being an intellectual giant in any field.
You wouldn't think this from listening to leftist dogma though. The best answer to this conundrum, of course, is to beat "The West" at their own game by scientific and technological advancement. Start by giving women a voice and see how GDP could double almost overnight. Furthermore, the book refutes accusations of "Islamophobia" - "It has become a lazy habit to equate criticsm of Islam with racism or general antipathy toward the unfamilar other." The term "Islamophobia" is nebulous, and largely rhetorical. In it, Islam is seen as "...irrational and sexist" and "supportive of terrorism".
The problem is that the term "pahologises a number of beliefs that are almost certainly true". I would agree with this statement. The case is made that Islam as a theology does appear to be irrational, sexist, and countenance violence through jihad by any reasonable definition. Even Muslims in their native countries are concerned about the risks of Islamic extremism. But if it's all right for them...no, I submit that "Islamophobia" is primarily used to shut down debate and control what can and can't be said.
Of course, where I differ from more right-wing commentators in this regard is that I don't think that Christianity (or any other religion for that matter) is any better. There appears to be a connection between users of the term and religious apology, going back to the old chestnut that "a threat to one faith is a threat to them all", and indeed certain Christian commentators have made sure to collaborate with the wider theistic community in decrying "Islamophobes".
All of this goes back to "imperialism" of course. The irony is that many leftist commentators seem to regard "the West" as a monolithic bloc, whilst decrying the same attitude from "The West" which is not as widely held as they think. The link between only right-wing thinking and criticism of Islam is not a universal constant.
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The dogmatic and unreasonable views of contemporary academic leftists are a poison to the most useful forms of free speech. Free Speech that rises above the right to harassment of equality advocates, and actually address some important taboo subjects like how sensible fervent religious belief really is. Religions hold massive power over whole populations, particularly in some countries when they are basically mandated by the state, and when this results in undeniable suffering to millions of people, trust me, we need to talk about it.
This is not least because many of the good people from these countries actually want us to help them. They want some form of democracy (see the recent elections in Afghanistan). Women want rights like men, and a voice to be heard. If we're not allowed to do anything about this, "because well that would just be imperialist", then we are condemning millions of people to a life without hope of improvement of their standard of living. The richness in any country is not to be found in its oil gas fields, mines or crops but in the strength of its people. We need to see past manipulative leftist logic, see through the imperialism of the past, and help these people help themselves.
*Thanks to Dr. Strangelove...
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