Christians could face one year prison sentence for encouraging conversion to their faith, according to a new controversial legislation being introduced in Israel. The legislation which is being proposed by ultra-Orthodox members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition would also proscribe Christians from engaging in religious discussion with Jews.
Titled Proposed Penal Law: Amendment – Prohibition of Solicitation for Religious Conversion – 2023, the legislation is introduced by United Torah Judaism’s Moshe Gafni and Yaakov Asher. The law would apply to anyone who would attempt to persuade someone to change their religious beliefs, however the legislation specifically mentions the Christian faith, saying that “recently, the attempts of missionary groups, mainly Christians, to solicit conversion of religion have increased.”
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This website really is full of euphoric Reddit atheists lmao
Here, let’s go to the Wikipedia article on Christianity in Israel shall we:
75.8% of the Christians in Israel are Arab Christians.
This law is obviously designed as another tool of oppression on the Palestinian population. It isn’t going after Evangelical weirdos because Evangelical weirdos don’t, you know, actually live in Palestine. Palestinians live in Palestine, and like other Arabs, not all Palestinians are Muslim. The city of Nazareth is almost 1/3 Christian, which I’m sure is a complete coincidence and has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian faith and is just a completely random city that’s never mentioned once in the Bible. Palestinians are just Christian in this random Palestinian city for some strange reason.
This website really is full of euphoric Reddit atheists lmao
I think a lot of us just got sick of the uphill battle that is doing apologia for religions that we don’t even believe in. We never attracted much of a religious user base so it sort of felt like who are we even defending here? I’m not saying that’s the right course of action but I do think it’s part of the explanation.
We never attracted much of a religious user base so it sort of felt like who are we even defending here?
Palestinian Christians who have been Christian for 2000 years? Like, they’re the OG Christians. Their ancestors straight up met Jesus. If anyone has claim to being the real Christians, it’s them.
I’d say the common factor there is taking religious belief in isolation (in particular the heretical ev*ngelicals, who we know are whack af), which we might think is ridiculous, and not considering the broader concrete historical context, i.e. the apartheid state of Israel and how religion works there politically. I.e. it’s methodological idealism.
It does remind me of the often very difficult topic of how to relate, as Communists, to religion which we think is not simply wrong, but often deeply reactionary, while also being, in the context under discussion, that of an oppressed minority. This is clearly a problem that the left has not really figured out how to properly relate to or solve. Obviously this doesn’t apply so much in this case as we’re talking about Palestinian Christians, not rabid yankie evangelicals.
I’d say that that’s not an indication of a lack of a problem but more just a more mature way of approaching the issue, which is natural in specific social and cultural contexts where leftists are under more pressure to recognize the facts of religious majorities in politics, the deep, culturally and socially conservative religiosity of their working classes.
Obviously this doesn’t only apply outside the West, given the importance of religion in many USAmericans’ lives and the fact that if you simply trash their spirituality in the process of trying to radicalize them well then well done you blew it. As you note, in practice you are just insulting and alienating them and driving them towards right-wing (in particular religious) forces. White atheists in the West are also empowered by (at least implicit) white (including culturally) supremacy.
I’m not speaking just about this crude, insulting, arrogant and ineffective way that is characteristic of white, western interest atheists, but of how to relate to religion in general. I mean more broadly how communists should relate to religion, including when we are in positions of political hegemony. The discussions around secularism are thoroughly poisoned because in the West what this means has had little to do with any real concrete obstruction of the role of reactionary religious influence in politics (see USA), or because it has been used hypocritically as a cudgel as one state-mechanism among many for the oppression and dehumanization of minorities, above all Muslims (see, above all, France). But in a situation of communist political hegemony, how should you try to combat a variety of reactionary facets of the religions in your society? There will be inevitable backlash. Obviously the situation now is not hegemonic for us, so broad fronts and support are absolutely necessary and progressive, but honestly alot of this can at best be justified as critical support and even then I think only with certain groups. Also I’d add, to avoid the situation where certain westerners (especially the yankies), incl. on here doing their classic of larping as islamists or defending a non-western Communist Party of X just because they’re called communist, that alot of communist parties, not only in the West, are deeply compromised wrt issues like reformism, corruption, opportunism, and sticking to undisputably reactionary social and cultural positions (above all wrt gender, sexuality, and race). The Russian and Greek communist parties are good examples of groups that have been deeply reactionary in these respects. This social conservatism can also afflict communist parties in countries under imperialist boots, and I think it worth bearing in mind when considering how they relate to religious groups.
It reminds me of an argument on here a few months ago about a US professor who was fired for showing a medieval Persian painting showing Mohammad in a class on the history of religious art and having alerted the students innumerable times that it would be shown, and the influence of modern liberal identity politics was (imo, unfortunately) very present (even on here) in justifications on the broad ‘left’ media sphere of the firing of this professor. This is obviously a more benign, less materially important example but it’s symptomatic of the fact that, in general, the left has not been able to properly conceptualize its correct relation to the political claims, rights and obligations of religious groups.
