I don’t actually like agreeing with Bill Maher because he is a misogynist ant-vaxer putz, but when a person’s right, they’re right. (Update: It was Sam Harris who said the below, not Maher. I misread.)
The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That is intellectually ridiculous.
The quote is from this really good column about how liberalism is so blinded by their inability to criticize other cultures.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I am politically and ideologically. I don’t like defining myself in such limiting terms, but a liberal I definitely am not. I’m obviously not a conservative, though – I support feminism, welfare, etc., so that moniker doesn’t really fit me at all and really never did.
I’m not sure what I am. Mostly, I care about evidence, truth and giving the most freedom to the largest number of people. Secular humanism is an ok term, but I am more militant than that philosophy allows.
I used to call myself a “militant liberal,” but I don’t really want to be associated with mainstream liberals at all at this point since like the conservatives, their entire philosophy is ideologically hollow and epistemologically bankrupt.
The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That is intellectually ridiculous.
That’s because a non-trivial percentage of criticisms are ad hominem arguments from bigotry or used as excuse for self congratulatory back patting. Conservatives tend to use this as “We are Christians and so much better than those brown non-Christians. Our religion is so much better than yours.” Multicultural arguments of “we should not criticize other people’s cultures” are often remnants of leftist misogyny and function as self congratulatory back patting. “Look at how enlightened and accepting we are of other people’s cultures, why are you complaining about sexism. Make me a sandwich.”
Fundies of any stripe aren’t going to listen to criticisms of their religion, and the non-fundies simply aren’t going to sift through the horseshit to find the needle of a good point that someone like Maher or Dawkins would make, especially since such criticisms tend to lump fundies and non fundies together. “I don’t need to know the details of a religion in order to criticize it” (which is an argument I’ve seen Dawkins make in The God Delusion) just reads as “oh all brown people are alike and I’m too lazy to learn.” The dividing points between fundies and non fundies is how much control is exerted over women so any kind of argument about the relative shittiness of religions is difficult to separate from the racism and misogyny of someone like Maher or Dawkins.
This is probably a pointless argument, anyway, as the Western world mostly only has the ability to make things worse in Muslim countries.
The best thing we could do is to not interfere and attempt to help in small ways, rather than bombing those countries to “freedom.”