Challenges facing the women’s liberation movement

"But stop, I am told. Saying so ‘just supports Western propaganda’ - something by the way that the Islamic regime of Iran often tells women and men it is hauling off to prison and execution.
How absurd. It is like Iranian women’s rights activists telling one to stop opposing US-led militarism because it supports the ‘Islamic regime of Iran’s propaganda!’
The religious-nationalist anti-imperialist left always ready to act as prefect when women’s rights under Islamic laws are concerned has an affinity towards Islam, which it views as an ‘oppressed religion’ bullied by the USA.
It is an anti-colonial movement whose perspectives coincide with that of the ruling classes in the so-called Third World.
This grouping is on the side of the ‘colonies’ no matter what goes on there.
And their understanding of the ‘colonies’ is Eurocentric, patronising and even racist.
In the world according to them, the people in these countries are one and the same with the regimes they are struggling against.
So at Stop the War Coalition demonstrations here in Britain, they carry banners saying ‘We are all Hezbollah;’ at meetings they segregate men and women and urge unveiled women to veil out of ‘solidarity’ and ‘respect’.
But even their anti-imperialism - their badge of honour - is pathetically half-baked; it does not even scratch beneath the surface to see how political Islam is an integral part of the US’ militarism and new world order.
Their historical amnesia of even the past 30-40 years ignores that the political Islamic movement was encouraged and brought to centre stage by Western governments as a green belt against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

[...]

Whilst the anti-imperialist left defends and justifies political Islam on the one hand, the virulently racist and right-wing defends US militarism and the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine on the other.

[...]

They are ‘concerned’ about the ‘rights’ of women and apostates so they can ban the Koran and ‘Muslim immigration.’ So they can stop the sub-human teeming hordes destroying the Christian nature of Europe and the West.
They are quite happy to defend Christian religious morality, restrict the benefits due single mothers, demand exemptions from the Sexual Orientation Regulations, bar funds for AIDS- related and contraception-related health services abroad if they provide abortions and consider the women’s rights movement’s fight for equality ‘the destruction of the nuclear family and of the power structures of society in general.’
According to their warped worldview, ‘the West has skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, leading to a cultural and demographic vacuum that makes [it] vulnerable to a take-over.’"

Maryam Namazie, speech at a seminar entitled ‘Sexual apartheid, political Islam and women's rights. (maryamnamazie.blogspot.com Tuesday, March 11, 2008)

She takes on two sides that are a problem. The appeasers and the demonizers.
I think it's a good point that as the Islamists got a real boost thanks to American funding, the Left is supporting an old American strategy.
Also, what she says about the Christian Right is right. They aren't against fundamentalism, they just don't want competition. They may be less dangerous for the moment, and so was Stalin during WW2.
And I mean, it's crazy to hear people talk about "plummeting birthrates" when the world is overpopulated. We should make the whole world a place with plummeting birthrates, but no doubt the Catholics have other plans.

Terror: Can We Blame Religion?

"In the wake of recent terror attacks, Western society has jumped to an easy and, it might seem, obvious conclusion. [blabla] [Sam Harris] contends that religion propagates myths that are dangerous, and that the world would be far better off without them. [blabla] What both Harris and Dawkins seem to overlook, however, is that religion has never been the unique instigator of violence. [blabla] The Soviet Union was a professedly secular society. [blabla] And there are more recent examples. Saddam Hussein led an Iraqi nation that “was thoroughly secular, [ruled] by a western-style legal code,” according to Gray."

Donald Winchester, Vision, Summer 2007 issue

Heard it all before right? Neither Harris nor Dawkins ever "overlooked" this straw man. It has been repeatedly rebutted, and just as often repeated again by believers. Here, Mr Donald Winchester, take a look at the famous "Problem with Atheism"-speech of Sam Harris.

"So too with the “greatest crimes of the 20th century” argument. How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I’ve got news for you, this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith, and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as though I had never mentioned it. So I tackled it again in the afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is Not Great.

Did they overlook it? No, Donald Winchester overlooked it.
In a surprisingly (for him) nuanced comment he writes this:

"Does this mean that atheism or secularism is to blame for such slaughter? It would be hard to argue this. It simply shows that in these cases religion is not the cause of violence and terror. The absence of religion did not equal the absence of violence; the Jacobin Terror and Stalin’s purges demonstrate as much. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism show that atheism is not the sole cause either. Indeed, many religionists are largely peaceful, as are many secularists. To ascribe the urge to violence to either is plainly unreasonable. Instead, we must search deeper."

That absence of religion does not mean absence of violence is pretty clear. We do not promise a world without violence. But what makes religions particularly dangerous when it comes to violence is that they are not falsifiable. Communism, as horrible as it was, is de facto falsified. We have all seen that it didn't work. While Christianity and Islam both promise an afterlife, Marx promised a paradise on here on Earth. And while there are lots of comparisons between religion and Marxism, the fact is that all communist regimes quickly turned sour. The experiment didn't work, and we have seen it with our own eyes. No such experiment will satisfy religious people, because their evidence will only come after death. The fact that living in the Middle East is probably worse than living in the USSR does not mean anything to them, because they expect a better life when they're dead.
So while Atheists can and will start wars in the future, they can not rest upon strange beliefs that can't be rationally discussed. Silly ideas won't last 2000 years.
Further, the argument about Stalin has magnitude as one aspect. But I think Winchester knows all too well that if the Spanish Inquisition had all the fancy new weapons of Stalin, they'd kill a lot more people. The crusades would have been much more effective too. I'm not sure, but I think that 911 probably set some world record as well. Not anywhere near the damage of the nuclear bombs dropped by the (so I hear) Christian country of USA, but you get the point. So as time passes, terrorists or religious fanatics in power are armed with better weapons and can inflict much more damage than the Spanish Inquisition could ever dream of(and I'm sure they did). I don't know what kind of nukes Iran are working on, but I bet they'll be more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
But let's hear more from Winchester:

"Stalin and Hussein aimed for unbridled power; the Jacobins, like today’s al-Qaeda, hoped to convert the world to their own worldview. Even Dawkins’s and Harris’s recent tomes fall inside this tradition, belonging to a genre of books that is among the most ideologically violent in modern publishing."

Yeah, right. How many people have Dawkins and Harris killed? Ideologically violent... al-Qaeda blabla. This is simply nonsense, and it shows how dishonest the anti-Atheist bigotry is. (Sorry, if this blog post equals an attack by al-Qaeda)

In the end, I refer everyone to this brilliant story I posted earlier:

"Then there's the problem on the other side -- among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled "fanatics." Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins' tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins' radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

That's it. That's the whole, crazy, fanatical package."

Dan Gardiner, The Ottawa Citizen, May 05, 2007

The New Atheism (and the left)

"If someone tells you that Islamic extremists are part of a “liberating” multitude because they are against imperialism, remind them that some folks in an earlier generation of leftists were quite able to be anti-imperialist and also to be against the Stalin-Hitler pact. They didn’t need hundreds of pages of theoretical delirium to figure it out. And remember that there were leftists whose theoretical hallucinations led them to imagine that the Second World War was little more than a reprise of conflicts among imperialists.[...]

Nonetheless, I am struck at how parts of the extreme left apologize for Islamic extremism in ways reminiscent of how an earlier generation found ways to apologize for Stalinism. The objects excused are different but the patterns of apologetics are sadly similar. It shows that there really is something I once called ‘the left that doesn’t learn.’"

Mitchell Cohen (professor of political science), Dissent Magazine, Fall 2007

An interesting article that has insights both on religion in USA as well as the Left.
It is no doubt a problem today that parts of the left do not follow up on their ideals when it comes to Islam. That is sad, because some good old idealism and activism for human rights is a lot better now than a relativistic fight for "the right to conform to your culture". I'm not sure it's the stalinist types that are currently defending Islam though. It seems to me it's the all too liberal left that does so. I hope the left can get more active, because a lot of the debate is hampered by the fact that Christians are more eager to fight for universal feminism and whatnot than the left itself.
It's going to be another black spot on leftist history unless they pull themselves together.

Cult Plus Time Equals Religion

For the most part, the only difference between a "real religion" and a "cult" is longevity--a distinction that also applies to governments. If enough people believe in some form of the supernatural for a long enough period of time, we stop calling it a cult and start calling it a religion. Religions are cults that last.

[...]

One of the main reasons why it is a mistake to call atheism, freethought, or secular humanism "just another religion" is that unfettered inquiry is the basis of the secular worldview. Free inquiry is the mortal enemy of all controlling religions. Of course, secular ideologies such as Stalinist Communism can become controlling religions too, since they take on the imperviousness to evidence that is the ultimate expression of religious fanaticism. But that has nothing to do with the open-minded secularism, rooted in the Enlightenment, that is the basis of freethought today. Fear and loathing of intellectual challenge is the essence of all controlling religious factions, whether the God is called Stalin, Jehovah, or Allah.

[...]

Christian societies, of course, used to kill people for blasphemy. But time--and the rise of the great separation between church and state pioneered by the United States of America--has turned most of the Christian world away from the dogmas of controlling religion. But don't call this "real" religion, as distinct from a cult. It is simply religion moderated by secular knowledge and secular government.

Susan Jacoby, On Faith, 19. September 2007

Genocide and Atheism

Two blog posts that go through some of the points related to this common and completely ridiculous idea:

"Atheism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th Century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot killed millions of people in the name of atheism. Atheism is the cause of the most repressive, murderous regimes in history."

[...]

"Atheism is not a movement. No government or country effectuates policy in the name of atheism. Atheism is not even a a proper "ism". It has no guidelines, rules, tenets, or practices. It has no rituals, dogma, holy books or scripture. It cannot replace religion, because it is merely the vacuum created when religion disappears from one's personal beliefs.

[...]

Atheism in Stalin's Russia, then, was a mere tool used by Stalin, for the greater good of the state, imposed on the structure of society. It's effect was to strip away the power of the church to oppose his power. It was not a mere lack of belief in gods. Stalin could care less about the individual beliefs of the peasant, his focus was on destroying organized religion".

[...]

I challenge anyone to go through [the communists' (etc)] writings, or the writings of their biographers, and find any references to genocide on the grounds of a belief in god.

[...]

However, [the theist accusers] would still reason that while the killings perpetrated by these leaders were not done specifically in the furtherance of atheism, it is still because of their atheism that their moral depravity reached the depths witnessed by the entire world. But this still leads to logical fallacy. The world has never experienced a government conceived entirely on the notions of Hume, Spinoza, Paine, Jefferson, Einstein and other free thinkers. [...] But such an experiment has never been done, so it's impossible for the theist to argue that the result would be a negative one."

Regarding biographies and writings, I may add that if it's something the Soviet Union was not renowned for, it was interesting books on Atheism. (Ever heard of one?) I suppose it's because communism had too many similarities to religion, so lengthy criticism of religion would be counterproductive, while simply suppressing religious enemies would business as usual.

And as for the experiment with Hume and Spinoza etc. it is quite clear that the North European secular countries are in relevant fields far better places to live than deeply religious countries. So we don't need an experiment to see what is best from a religious nation and a non-religious nation.

See also this post:

Religions more safe in 'secular' nations, U.S. nun says

[Comment] Those fanatical atheists

"Then there's the problem on the other side -- among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled "fanatics." Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins' tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins' radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

That's it. That's the whole, crazy, fanatical package."

Dan Gardiner, The Ottawa Citizen, May 05, 2007

An excellent comment!

[History] The myth of an atheist Hitler

"One of the main arguments that religious people throw up is that the great genocides of recent times were committed by atheists. They tend to focus on both Hitler and Stalin, ignoring the fact that both were brought up in religious circumstances and held religious beliefs. Hitler especially saw the Christian faith (well his ideo of the faith) as essential to an aryan Europe. Here are some quotes

[...]

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people." [Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]"

Profnewport.blogspot.com, 25 April 2007

A good list of quotes! Well worth checking out!