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.
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 ?
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.
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.