Friday 23 December 2011

How Clever One Must Be


You know that cold pit of dread that starts to form in your stomach every time one of your relatives starts proselytizing at the dinner table? Well I’m getting that feeling scrolling through my Facebook and Tumbr. Cute little visuals are slapped together, usually showing a frenzied group of brown people with absolutely no context to their state overlaid with bold text proclaiming that “Militant atheism never hurt anybody.” And let’s just take a moment and pretend that’s actually true (even though militant atheists in China, N. Korea and Russia, have indeed, hurt plenty of people for the act of practicing religion).

Even if it were true, so fucking what? If you really think “them brown frenzied folk” are angry because of Allah, either your mental laziness is a lot more acute than you think, or you’ve never actually taken the time to listen to one of those brown people. The 9/11 hijackers, while they invoked the name of Allah, weren’t going after American citizens because of ‘him’. They were going after American citizens because their own countries have been colonized and exploited. They spent their lives with their actions being dictated by a foreign land that shows nothing but utter contempt for them both through their media and through their policies. A country that has created hundreds of thousands of refugees and killed just as many for reasons that can be best summed up as “capital gains”.

That’s why they hated us. Most of the anger has absolute shit to do with actual religion. If you look across the region, similar “religious” conflicts (as the West likes to dismiss them) actually boil down to very understandable concrete actions that one group took against another due to land and resources. Sure, religion is always a nice excuse, but even if didn’t exist, boarders would still be fought over with the same level of fervor. Similarly, even if nobody was drawing cartoons of Mohammad, the Western media would still find a way to insult the culture they once exploited to enrich their own nations. Because it is imperative to show the Arab world as the savages we need them to be. After all, if we’re talking civilized and calm Arabs (i.e. the vast majority of daily Arab life), we’re talking about owning up to some pretty heinous shit. We’re talking about hundreds of years of murder and exploitation, which is still going on this very instant on the taxpayers dime. The West needs Arabs to be as awful as possible, otherwise we’ll start looking like the monsters.

But let’s get away now from actual facts that cause us to humanize and, in some cases, even empathize with the Allahu Akbar crew. Let’s get back to this never ending circle-jerk of rationality and logic. Which, funnily enough, usually only extends to the after-life. It so rarely seems atheists are willing to coldly and unemotionally examine the construct of race or gender within society. Instead, one will find plenty of atheists who are more than happy, giddy even, to hold onto some incredibly primitive opinions.

One pervasive thought I’ve seen in the atheist community seems to conclude that believing Jesus shows laughable brainwashing, but believing that black women are somehow less desirable than white women is just “a preference”. Yeah, sure, right, fuck yourself. This sort of emotional unpacking, sadly, requires a certain level of self examination and being open to the idea that you might have drank the kool-aid too. I find the vast majority of atheists I’ve come across are incredibly resistant to such ideas. In case you think I’m the one full of shit, do this: go into an atheist community filled with mostly white males and bring up two subjects: 1. Male privilege and 2. Racial privilege. Oh the way logic will twist when it’s their needs that are being sated.

But okay. Fine. You’re an LGBTQ supporter. You shirk the gender binary, appreciate and listen to POC, and you also think that relying on religion is totally a sign of a weak mind. So much so that you want to put up funny catch phases and picture everywhere saying just that. Fine. The thing is, I’m not even religious myself. But guess who is? Parts of my family. And I don’t think it is a “weak mental condition” that causes them to believe in Allah or God. I do not think they need to “grow up” or “get over needing to hold someones hand”. I actually think my Grandma was ten times as tough as any modern motherfucker you could lay out in front of her. I’ve seen that woman bash goat skulls in and pour the contents in a frying pan without blinking. She had very few illusions about life and death.

Yet my grandmother still held on to a certain level of cosmic comfort. Perhaps because life was so unendingly unfair to her. It blessed her with a husband she loved, had six children with, and then around the age of 36, her husband suffered from a traumatic brain injury. This trauma left him in a constant state of wanting to kill her. Did she leave him? No. With six children? She simply ran the house as usual and hid anything her husband might use to murder her with. Knives, pots and pans, wires, those all went to the neighbors house. Meanwhile some villagers took pity on her and she got a job cleaning a station house in 1940’s rural Syria. She did this for seven years, until the husband she had once loved so much finally died of his injuries. If she wanted to fall back on some Mohammad in her darkest hours, I dare some sniveling skinny white punk to tell her that she just couldn’t handle the “reality” of life.  

And that’s really the problem. Sneering, pretentious atheism takes away the human element of kindness. I get that there are heaps of religious bullshit out there. That dogma can and does ruin lives. Hell, it can be deadly. But the root problem is not some hippie in sandals talking about love, the root is the human condition which warps religion to fit their needs. Go after that. Go after the actual cancer. Do not, instead, downgrade an entire group to ‘inferior’ because they find comfort where they can get it. That is not only cruel, it’s inhumane and pointless.

One may be able to argue about their own rationality, but I don’t actually give a hot fuck about how logical you think you are. Be atheist. We’ll have a party. I’ll bring the punch. But stop with the snickering. You look like an asshole. And there is no amount of fantastical logic that will change that fact. So if that’s what you were going for with your cheeky graphic, then mission accomplished. But if instead you’d rather consider that not everyone had the same upbringing as you, with the same luck, schooling or status and that, perhaps, it would be best for you to take a step back and consider the entire spectrum of human existence before demoting entire groups to “children”…then we can talk. Until then, do I even have to bring up the incandescent bag of dicks I have on reserve? Okay then. Good day.