Jos: and still the apologists try to defend religion

March 10, 2010 at 12:24 am (blogging, hell, insanity, Jim D, religion, secularism)

Dave, in a very astute posting about the Jos massacres, says:

IF YOU are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.

“The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.

“There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.”

Dave’s analysis seems to me to be beyond dispute.

Amazing, then, that pro-religion apologists like the SWP’s John G and the Catholic nationalist “Splintered Sunrise” still attempt to defend religion from a (supposedly) “leftist” standpoint. Here’s the almost incomprehensible post-modernism of the Gameboy:

“But more generally the lense which see’s current communal and ethnic strife as involving a conflict between modernity and traditon (often also involving a welter of claims about “western culture” and its defence) are fundementally misconcieved. These are all problems within modernity and attempts to read them as conflicts between modernity and its others involves systematic distortions of actual historical and social relationships. The view that what is going on in the world today is fundementally a clash between secularism and its religious others is to me an example of systematically misleading concepts which are with little effort transformed into the very opposite of the values such a perspective claims to champion.”

Here’s the Catholic (Irish) nationalist “Splinterd Sunrise” attacking Labour’s Equality Bill; he may be reactionary, but at least (unlike Gameboy) he’s comprehensible:

“When mentioning Locke, perhaps it’s worth recalling Locke’s argument in favour of the state suppression of Catholicism. See also Milton’s Areopagitica, where the great man breaks off from his defence of free speech to argue for exterminating papists.

“Nor does separation of church and state come as a BOGOF with religious freedom. British secularists may not be on the verge of repeating the Jacobins’ genocidal Vendee campaign, but an awful lot of them are awfully keen for the Almighty State to tell religious people what to do. New Labour’s Orwellian “Equality Bill” being a case in point.”

Anyway, it’s an excellent discussion, in which the pro- religion “left” apologists are getting a good and well-deserved splattering:  join in!

We must *never* give up on the struggle for secularism: it isn’t a “optional extra” in the fight for socialism – and those who say otherwise are traitors.

PS: I must just say that I have a lot more sympathy for liberal/leftists who are genuine believers, than I do for supposed “atheists” like  Gameboy and (on a slightly higher intellectual plain) Eagleton, on the “left” who defend religion.

Pictures of the massacre here: they’re not nice.