Comment by Maturin [any]@hexbear.net on ‘Genocide is not a Jewish value,’ say Jews and Rabbis as they storm AIPAC offices

Are you saying that Judaism is an inherently genocidal religion/culture?

I assume it’s more of a generic internet atheist “religion bad” sort of critique

Straight up Sam Harris grade bullshit except directed at Judaism. All his beliefs just the opposite target lol

Not any more than other religions, but yes, it’s in the book preached as the word of God and prophets. Israel is what happens when you put bronze age values in practice

This pure idealist Sam Harris-style Islamophobia logic turned toward Judaism. You’re wrong for the same reason he’s wrong about Islam.

what happens when you put bronze age morals in practice

Is this 2006? I thought Nu Atheism was over lol. You must be the last holdout for that cringe ass, warmed over racist bullshit

This particular person is from .ml but honestly I’ve seen this kind of rhetoric popping up a lot recently on Hexbear and it’s frustrating.

If you have hatred and contempt in your heart for all religious people, you hate and despise the global proletariat.

Yeah there’s a big difference between believing im secularism and wanting the liberation of people from religious oppression and hating religious people, as well as blaming religion (or bronze age morality) for things caused by modern colonialism and imperialism.

I’m sorry, but I was raised by them. I saw people indoctrinated into believing North African religions were Satan worship who wants to harm Good Christians, that women don’t have reproductive rights and that gay and trans people are scum. Liberation of the proletariat does not exist without liberation from religion.

I was raised by evangelicals myself, and also went through a nu atheist phase when I was 14.

You’re a bigot and you need to grow up and put that away.

Sure, I’ll ignore all problems it causes once I get privileged enough that they stop affecting me

Welcome to the reddit nu atheist pile on. I was not expecting antisemitic Sam Harris to be a thing, but here it is

You know, I said that on a whim, but on second thought I am. I would rather not argue with people I think are cool, but in my view, religion, as an institution, proliferates and helps perpetuate hatred. It’s not the only one, and it’s often a tool for others to do that. But I’m conviced it’s an outdated institution we (in general, not each specific person) would be better off casting away.

“do you know that if everyone was Christian, there would be no more war?”

What a creepy fucking thing to say. Straight up blaming everyone else for the violence inflicted upon them by Christians.

hatred and contempt

This is a problem. Anything coming from hatred is not coming from a good place.

However, I do have a problem with what monotheism did to the world as a colonising force.

We have depictions of full genocide in the Torah due to a chosen people doctrine (remember, at this time gendercide was nearly the exclusive form of genocide). We had Christians take this after Constantine to take a proselytising mission and turn it into an imperial casus belli. We saw the same with the formation and expansion that lead to the Golden Age of Islam.

While religious tolerance and practices have an increased amount of personal choice now in the “Western” world, that does not mean that the institution that they inherent aren’t any more colonial now then they were then. They are ideas that replaced other ideas, often through a theology of “god strengthens my arm and weakens the heathens, so might makes right”.

It’s not hatred for any set belief, but the “In” and “Out” groups created by “chosen people” dynamics that are inherent within monotheistic religion. They have always been used to perpetuate division among the “foreign”, wealth for an elite, and loyalty from the masses.

[Edited to clarify the last paragraph]

Okay, to be clear, in the discussion you’re jumping into, one of the interlocutors has stated that Jews are inherently genocidal.

I’m an atheist and I don’t particularly value religion but I do value people and there are many good people who do value their religion and I won’t stand for them being painted as inherently genocidal and neither should you.

There’s a time and place for nuance but I don’t know that this is it.

I’m saying the entire structure of monotheism has created a system of colonial thought and destruction across much of the world. Even the good theists I have met (and I have met many) will think less of or sorry for someone in the out group.

It’s not Judaism, it’s not Islam, it’s not Christianity: it is the colonial ideology embedded in these ideologies that I’m saying are a negative force on the planet.

I was replying directly to the comment above, not so much the context. You are right to point that out.

Religious people aren’t inherently genocidal. Their religion is. If you follow a book that says gay people must be put to death, you follow a homophobic book. Wether you actually believe that is up to you and God, but that’s what is taught.

There are good religious people, they’re the ones ignoring most of what their literature says.

I think you need to be careful with throwing around “choseness” in this way because this is the exact perversion of the Jewish concept of choseness set forth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf. I’m not trying to let Judaism off the hook for its genuine reactionary and regressive components (particularly with respect to women and non-normative sexuality), but it really muddies the waters when you overlay it with full-throated anti-Jewish projection onto Judaism.

Not really? There is an in-group (Jews) and an out-group (non-Jews, or Gentiles). The same applies for all monotheistic religions in a way that doesn’t gel with the fabric of polytheism. These concepts, over centuries and through different forms (especially Christianity for the “West”) were used to subjugate people by creating these in-groups and out-groups (to the point that the earliest use of the star of David to highlight the Jewish population I know of was done in England by Simon De Montfort (though I’m not an expert)).

That legacy still exists today and the institutions of wealth and (especially in places like the UK & Iran) governance. It’s a legacy of us vs them and colonialism that needs to be examined.

So you don’t think religion plays a part in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and the American public’s support of the genocide?

Also, not atheist.

I think religion is one of the primary factors for how powerful and stalwart the resistance is against said genocide. What would you say about the only major defenders of the Palestinians being all Islamic?

I say that mostly Islamic people are the only ones not failing Palestinian people.

You don’t have to be athiest to espouse cringe ass nu athiest thought. #1 the idealist delusion that religion and thought dictates actions and reality and not the other way around.

The genocide is not caused by religion or “bronze age morality” any more than genicide is caused by individual rascist thoughts or beliefs. Isreal is a settler-colonial project and an extension of US imperialism. That’s what is driving the genocide, not bronze age morality.

No, a ton of Israelis are secular and they support this just as much as religious Israelis, and this is clearly about land and wealth. The American government is supporting the genocide, and it has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with supporting a white supremacist settler colony that functions as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in a resource rich region.

I do, but the culprit is the Christian religion, which is what Zionism is. The fact that they recruited Jewish foot soldiers for their crusades doesn’t give the excuse to parrot Protocols of the Elders of Zion characterizations of the Jewish religion devoid of 2,000 years of historical context. It’s also the reason that the American public supports the genocide, because American culture has been dominated by Christian crusaders whose theology is based on genocidal settler colonialism ever since the so-called Pilgrims (who were themselves Zionists) landed in Massachusetts.

To paraphrase @AYJANIBRAHIMOV@lemmygrad.ml, a Jew from Lemmygrad, from his PM

There are alternative views on that subject, which make the religious justification shaky, by Jews themselves

Well , according to Torah Ha-Qudesha , {the arrival of Jews onto the promised land} will happen after the Mashiah has arrived and not as the zionists claim it . Because the zionists have already broken the misva and have transgressed other misvas too

According to Rambam (Moshe Ben Maimon) …

there is no obligation on all Jews to go and live in Eretz Yisrael, because if they were to do so it would be violating the Three Oaths (according to our sages ) . The Jewish people may not go up en masse to take over Eretz Yisrael They may not fight with the nations of the world ( the gentiles ) . They may not attempt to force an end to the exile and bring the redemption on their own. (Ketubot 111a .)

They broke it and tarnished it to the ground

Individual Jews may live in Eretz Yisrael, but not as part of any organized effort to control the land.

In other words , we should not … ( and I repeat again ) we should not take the land of others and neither steal from its people .

The Almighty h-shem has already put guardians and custodians to the land and it’s sacred places that are very important and beloved to us observant orthodox and traditional jews , and it’s the Palestinian Arabs , not the zionists .

atheists generally don’t do horrible things in the ideological name of not believing in god. it would be nice if discarding religion also made you discard capitalism, white supremacy, chauvinism, or believing in bigfoot and psychics; but there’s nothing forcing atheists to be humanists or skeptics or to become comrades.

ditching religion only takes away one lever western culture uses to propagate evil, but it does take away one lever.

They have a point when the question is, as it was, religions and not religious people. Their holy texts both present particular genocides as good things and include directions to commit genocide against apostates. Whatever we might say of the historic position of Jews as social minorities, the content of the Tenakh, etc. is well-suited to justifying an ethnostate.

I do think they are generalizing to strongly in that regard, since the Abrahamic religions are all especially bad in this regard compared to the others that have made it to the modern day, with the possible exception of Hinduism (I don’t know enough about it). Edit: I think Islam is the least bad of the three, but it’s also the one I’m the least familiar with.

I’m not really interested in arguing for some particular prescription based on this, I just don’t think we should close our eyes to obvious truths in the name of pushing some silly idea about religion being benign as a rule. I’m also not saying the Crusades are Christ’s fault or any of that bullshit (nor that the Nakba is the fault of Moses, to be on topic), I’m just saying that when a text says “The appropriate response to someone preaching heresy in a town is to slaughter the villagers, raze the buildings, and salt the earth,” that’s what it says.

Edit 2: I probably didn’t do enough to distinguish religion as a historical force from religion as a set of doctrines, but it should be obvious that I’m talking about the latter. Again, Christ did not order the Crusades.

Edit 3: Obviously, even without the convenient doctrine, Israel would be Israel, I’m merely saying the doctrine is convenient.

Saying “religions bad” does fucking nothing in the world we live in except establish oneself as an abrasively smug asshole

Under no circumstances should anyone, especially people that claim to be Marxist, be stepping up to bat for religion. That includes the bizarre belief among some people on this website that the existence of reddit atheists nullifies all criticism of religion online, or that anyone criticizing religion is a reddit atheist. You are projecting a ton of weird shit onto this person for saying that Israel is using Judaism to justify a genocide, which they absolutely are! Netanyahu had fucking biblical visual aids in front of the UN literally today and you’re sitting here saying they’re “smugposting?”

That’s exactly my point.

That’s an amusing decontextualization of what I said, but I don’t think it gets us closer to mutual understanding.

Especially because of the anti-Jewish smugposting, which involves a religious identity that has a secular side to it and is inherited, such atheist smugposting may as well say “hah, well you’re wearing those silly badges! Sucks to suck!” during WW2 Germany.

Well, the Nazis were really attacking the Jewish ethnicity, it’s not like Jews could survive by deconverting or even by having never practiced, but that’s maybe less important than the fact that it’s an equivocation beyond absurd to say that criticizing the moral/political doctrines in Jewish texts “may as well” be saying that Jews deserved Nazi persecution.

idk, people are all for “ruthless criticism of all that exists” when it comes to things they dislike, but then when they either have a sentimental attachment to something or just a strong contrarian streak because they know assholes who also criticize it, suddenly popularity is a perfect justification and saying bad things about something popular is “setting yourself apart from the global proletariat.” Encounters with pseudo-intellectualism should not turn you into an anti-intellectual.

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