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‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags (web.archive.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city became the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council. They viewed the power shift and diversity as a meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

i think this line of thinking is easily the least useful anti-theist critique you can make of religion. even if we dispensed of all religion, spirituality, and superstition, most people would still be fundamentally irrational actors. religion might influence the ways in which they are and how that practically manifests—but let's be clear, most people do not even come close to having a coherent moral system or set of beliefs and that wouldn't even if you made them blank-slate irreligious people. the problem you are describing is not a religious problem, and it would exist even if we had no religion.

EDIT: fyi this post was attached to something previously but something fucked up happened so it's totally context-less now lol. upvote if you will but this makes no sense in the context it's now being displayed in

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Irrational, yes, but not fundamentally so. Without supernatural beliefs, they'd have to at least think that they care about empirical reality. Their beliefs would be falsifiable, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not.

When you throw religion into the mix, though, you can't even guarantee that much. Were the beliefs of Heaven's Gate wrong? I'd like to think so. Can I prove that? Not in the slightest, because supernatural beliefs like their founders' "revelations" are fundamentally unfalsifiable. For all we know, there's still a chance they were right, and that all 8 billion of the rest of us are still under the thumb of the "Luciferians".

That fundamental inability to be reasoned with, which I would consider fundamentally irrationality, is unique to supernatural beliefs. Even if they don't take it nearly as far, it's still a concern I have with other religions. I'd like for people's moral ~~beliefs~~ judgements to at least be ostensibly possible to reason with.

EDIT: "belief" is a bit too nebulous on second thought.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Irrational, yes, but not fundamentally so. Without supernatural beliefs, they’d have to at least think that they care about empirical reality. Their beliefs would be falsifiable, whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not. [...]

That fundamental inability to be reasoned with, which I would consider fundamentally irrationality, is unique to supernatural beliefs.

i just do not think this at all nor do i think falsifiability is a meaningful consideration in this conversation (because people do not care about falsifiability, i'm sorry. to my knowledge this is well studied and the bulk of those studies show that proving someone wrong seldom influences their opinions in any meaningful way). you don't even have to get harmful here: just try reasoning with a person who thinks Pluto should still be a planet at this point about why it isn't. there is no rational underlying justification to continue to believe this, yet people will go so far as to say the Whole of Science got it wrong and there is no argument you can make to convince them. people will gladly die on fundamentally irrational hills and fundamentally be incapable of being talked out of defending those hills with or without religion. this is not a supernatural thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I agree that people cant really be convinced by proving them wrong on the spot. However, if someone is just a little bit interested in being rational, then after going home over time they will think about that question again and again, until they resolve that dissonance, not necessarily, but potentially by changing their mind. I would assume that this would be somewhat hard to study, but if you have some good resources on this im interested. Its just that when people constantly hear from their leaders that faith is a virtue and even more virtuous when practiced despite strong evidence to the contrary (i was raised christian, and i experienced this there, i would assume its somewhat similar in Islam), then they will be a lot less likely to go through this.

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