there's our catastrophe

Another lovely YouTube message:

lifeisliterallylimited:

don’t get it twisted i know you are a terrorist, i knew it the moment i checked out your blog..

You have an anti-israel post, i know all muslims are terrorists and i will tell you why. Muslims are taught to hate jews from childhood, there are countless videos on youtube from muslims calling for the destruction of of israel (a people), they chant that the end will not come until muslims fight the jews, I pity you for being involved in that death cult.

I could trash you and ridicule you which i do with most male muslims but i’m not going to, instead i invite you to become atheist, being an atheist makes you appreciate life, all that hate that religion produces will then seem silly and ridiculous to you, there is absolutely no reason to hate another human being to the point to want to see them dead. I know you want israel gone.

Islam produces nothing but judgmental people and martyrdom seekers, they think that by murdering themselves and people around them will appease a non-existent being.

Science on the other hand, it sets your mind free of all hate, it sets your life’s direction into appreciating reality, and make no mistake this is the only one life we get.

Become rational girl, leave the death cult and take off that silly sheet over your head. When you pray you are only talking to your self, there is nothing listening to you. It is illogical what you are doing silly girl, i invite you to study science, astrology, biology, history, then everything will begin to make sense to you. You are still young do not produce more little terrorists and embrace free thought instead.

Regards.

Intellectual Quantum.

WHY DO ATHEISTS FEEL THE NEED TO SHOVE THEIR APPARENT INTELLECTUAL SUPREMACY DOWN OTHER PEOPLES THROATS. Y’KNOW WHAT, IF I WANT TO PRAY TO THIN AIR, I WILL. OBVIOUSLY I DON’T BELIEVE THAT I’M TALKING TO MYSELF. OBVIOUSLY IT’S NOT JUST A SHEET ON MY HEAD. 

SERIOUSLY. WHAT THE FK MAN.

ok obviously this person is an idiot and a bigot and incredibly pretentious — but it caught my eye as particularly stupid because the history of Islam is so intimately intertwined with the history of science.  not just in that Muslims are and have been eminent scientists, but in that their faith was part of their drive towards scientific knowledge.  algebra was invented partly to help make judgements in Islamic inheritance law. huge advances in astronomy, mathematics, and geography came about partly because people needed to know where to turn when they prayed to Mecca, when important religious dates were, and so on.  it’s kind of common knowledge that the science of the Islamic world wiped the floor with European science for most of recorded history.  just because scientists and powerful faith leaders have often been at odds in recent Western history, doesn’t mean that religion and science are inherently opposed.  that’s what militant atheists don’t get.  you study history, “Intellectual Quantum”. 

I know it’s stupid and unscientific and also anti-feminist and so on but most days I just want to be free of the corporeal.  be a brain in a jar or a ghost.  it’s not really anything to do with body image or trauma or whatever, at least not consciously or directly.  it’s more that this whole “having to negotiate multiple layers of experience” thing gets me down.  maybe it’s as simple as that I was always smart but not athletic and I don’t like to be bad at things so when I am I pretend they’re not important.   maybe it’s tied up with my secret desire to be the universal subject, which is always the disembodied subject; maybe it’s the other way around.  probably it’s got a lot to do with persistent and debilitating anxiety, but who knows.   

I wish I came from a spiritual tradition with a strain of asceticism.  one of those dualist traditions that holds you don’t “have a soul”, you are a soul; you have a body.  then maybe I would know what to do with this desire to transcend matter. 

but actually I’m pretty sure you don’t have a body.  you are a body.  I see that every day.  I know that if I’m not healthy, my mind is clouded, my temper short, I can’t separate my spirit and flesh.  I took up running this year.  it takes me out of my body.  if I’m fitter then my body does the things I need it to do with less complaint.  I haven’t felt less like crawling out of my skin since I was about ten, it’s extraordinary.  I still feel like crawling out of my skin most days.  it’s so weird to me that I have to think so much about my body in order not to think about my body.   I think there may be no experience so thoroughly of the body, so grounded in awareness of the state of the body, as feeling detached from the body.  (“the body”.  your body, my body, I mean.)

whatever I would like to believe aside, I was raised not to believe in a soul separate to the body, and I think most of this stuff is at some level wired in early.  having faith is something you have to learn young, maybe, like speech.  I never learnt.  it’s probably just as well because I think one of the only ways I could seriously disappoint my parents with a personal choice is to get religion.  I went to church a couple months ago because this woman I was dating had a craving for church music.  I think the only thing that stopped my mum hyperventilating into a plastic bag was the fact that I went holding hands with a butch and wearing some ridiculous secretary-in-a-porn-flick outfit that was my misguided idea of Church Wear, so it was clear I had no idea what I was doing. 

maybe this is the atheist guilt bit.  instead of worrying about whether I’m going to hell, I get to beat myself up for wanting something totally ridiculous like existence as a sentient gas cloud.  maybe later I can get mad at myself for willfully ignoring the second law of thermodynamics and yearning for life eternal.  maybe I can learn to forgive myself by appealing to some mechanistic theory of mind wherein I couldn’t help wishing for something I know to be unreasonable in my bones, because of society or the will to survive or maybe magnetic forces near my brain, that was in New Scientist once.  probably that wouldn’t hold water because I’m pretty sure there is no spiritual tradition other than Western atheism more grounded in the conception of pure reason separate from the whims of society and the body, a priori good and righteous without reference to its material effects, and starkly dualist. 

when I think about Hell I think of one of those relaxation exercises where you close your eyes and someone tells you in a soothing voice that you have to truly inhabit every part of your body. 

mixxy99:

ourcatastrophe:

“I condemn slavery with the utmost vehemence, but the fact that my remote ancestors may have been involved in it is nothing to do with me. You need a genetics lecture. Do you realise that probably only about 1 in 512 of my genes come from Henry Dawkins?’”

—

Richard Dawkins on his family’s  connections with the slave trade.

pretty sure the “Dawkins family estate, consisting of 161 hectares in Oxfordshire …bought in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantations and slave ownership” counts as something to do with him

via. 

What does his family’s history with slavery have to do with him? You can’t hold him accountable for something someone else in his family did. Especially when he had absolutely no way of preventing it.

Briefly:

He and his family continue to directly benefit from the proceeds of slavery — most dramatically financially.  It’s these generations of privilege that have put him in the position to get an expensive education, be financially independent of bodies that might attempt to moderate his opinions, and get that posh accent people love; it’s generations of slavery, colonialism, trauma, violence, financial exploitation, and social exclusion that are responsible for the continued worse outcomes for Black people in Britain and worldwide.  To reiterate: his family’s history benefits him at the expense of others.  Just because you’re not directly responsible for something that benefits you unjustly doesn’t mean you’re not obligated to try and make it right as best you can. (If you were given a stolen bike you’d return it to the person it was stolen from, right?)  There are many ways that Dawkins can begin to make amends for his ancestor’s actions.  He could, for example, make a financial contribution to one of the many bodies that serves and advocates for Black British people. 

Dawkins’ conduct is especially risible because a) he continues to hold all religious people responsible for any and every religiously motivated atrocity going back centuries and b) has written extensively about his family while leaving out mention of their role in the slave trade, effectively concealing it.  This suggests that he realises it is something to be ashamed of. 

It’s also worth mentioning that many, many people feel that Dawkins and the kind of atheism he espouses are Eurocentric at best and explicitly racist at times.  See for example this article by Carole McConnell, “Faith in Colour: Racism and Atheism”; this article from a UK newspaper, “Atheist Richard Dawkins blames Muslims for ‘importing creationism’ into classrooms”; these amazingly horrible quotes.  He’s not exactly giving people a reason to extend a lot of good faith here. 

(via dhisacjkndjalhiu-deactivated201)