I say this knowing that people stuck within the violence of communities that are extremely conservative and deploy violence to maintain that conservatism through mandatory and functionally-mandatory power structures don’t necessarily have an outlet to deal with the resulting trauma from that and that this is has to be considered as context when people vent in toxic ways about religion.

  • A_A@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Maybe you would like to vent about it … so, what was the worst comment (replacing slurs with “beep”) ? … or maybe you would like to offer a good critique of religions ?

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      8 months ago

      Ok specific example, there was a meme post about how Islam is definitely a violent religion. I agreed with that aspect of the meme.

      What I find difficult is that there is a political context to portraying Islam as violent in English speaking majority Christian nations, put as a-politically as possible, leaders and demagogues in majority Christian nations frequently stoke Islamophobia to distract from the fact that they aren’t doing their jobs as leaders and people are suffering under their rule.

      We have to consider that context when attacking Islam on an English speaking public forum, we have to make sure our words aren’t going to be part of a bigger weaponization of an identity and more importantly erasure of the very real geopolitical history of colonialism in majority Islamic countries.

      Criticize Islam, hell yeah of course, but take a moment to consider how your words intersect with powerful narratives of fear used to flatten the complexities of reality down to brutal simplifications.

      • A_A@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Must have read your comment at least 10 times … Well, I don’t know enough and you know much more about all of this so I can’t add something really meaningful. Still, I wish you peace and I wish that we, humans, wouldn’t be so violent.
        Take care.

  • spujb@lemmy.cafe
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    8 months ago

    Not an unpopular opinion, but upvoted anyway because people have a right to know that they don’t have to participate in c/atheism type spaces at all. Those communities tend to attract a very specific demographic.; I don’t know if it’s just young or incredibly privileged and headstrong, but it’s been a pattern for decades. You, dear reader, are not expected to participate in it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all short-term participants who just pop in for a few months or years to get it out of their system. If it works for them, hey, I’ll let them do their thing. But it’s totally valid to find those communities to be too much, even unfortunately delving into toxicity on occasion. It doesn’t make you a bad person to pass that judgement. Personally, I block these communities when I make a new account or join a new platform for very similar reasons to what OP describes.

      • spujb@lemmy.cafe
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        8 months ago

        the block button is your friend. not yet on lemmy, but on other platforms i have blocked into the hundreds of accounts. especially for c/atheism types you’ll probably quickly find it’s just the same four or five people making the same antagonistic comments anyway lol.

  • Flax@feddit.uk
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    8 months ago

    Literally had someone on here say they want to wipe out all 4 billion followers of Abrahamic religions. It’s unhinged at that point and not any better than the likes of ISIS

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      8 months ago

      It’s also only caring about viewing an aspect of human culture through the lens of rationality when it comes to whether some ridiculous magic bullshit happened from a higher power and ignoring the extremely relevant and very rational adjacent context that fears of dark skinned Muslim people are used all over the world in majority Christian nations to distract voters from thinking about how much they are suffering at home.

      The more we hate Islam the easier it is to distract us from the fact that we don’t have healthcare…. money, or time off.

      I am all for viewing religions like Islam through a rational lens, but I think that includes being careful not to feed into narratives Islam is inherently dangerous when criticizing Islam from an atheist perspective.

      Also, it is difficult to rationally criticize Islam without including geopolitics and colonialism as a context for why violence is perceived as being associated with Islam. It is too important of a context, you can’t carefully just cut it out like it is the edges of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.