Shit, that logic looks ironclad to me. As an athiest, it must also follow that I am a racist. And here I always appreciated my lack of bigotry. Does this mean I have to be on Donald Sterliing’s side, now?
Shit.
Now, now, that’s unfair. He didn’t say all atheists are racists.
Just that all racists are No True Christians and thus must perforce be atheists. Because (on top of everything that is terrible about his statment) those are the ONLY TWO OPTIONS, I guess.
But it is still OK to hate the mooslims, right?
And Unitarians, yes.
I can’t say for sure obviously, but it sounds like he was taking a dig at racists who claim to be religious by pointing out the conflict rather than taking a dig at atheists and attempting to paint them as racist.
At the very best it and even with all benefit of doubt it was very poorly worded.
It shouldn’t still surprise me, but it does. How can people espouse a religion, and yet know next to nothing about its scriptures? The Hebrew Bible is full of racism, and the New Testament returns the favor by making Jews the scapegoat for killing Jesus.
I don’t even get how he came to the conclusion that “atheists are racists” due to the Sterling incident?
Did Sterling once claim he didn’t believe in God, did he just assume Sterling must be an atheist because Sterling changed his original Jewish-sounding name to something more WASPish or was it something else.
It was the MOOPS!
It’s ironic considering the extent to which racist ideology developed in the West as an attempt to morally justify slavery within a specifically Christian framework that had a lot of hostility to the idea.
He didn’t come to the conclusion of athiests being racist - but rather the reverse.
I read it as saying that racist beliefs are incompatible with Christianity.
As a sentiment - what’s wrong with that?
God was photographed standing next to a black person.
Wow, I wish this guy said that to a younger, healthier (and alive) George Wallace. He would have gotten his face punched in.
And the gays?
[QUOTE=bengangmo;17334975.]
I read it as saying that racist beliefs are incompatible with Christianity.
As a sentiment - what’s wrong with that?
[/QUOTE]
It is technic ally a No True Scotsman argument, even so there’s nothing wrong with saying that racism is incompatable with Christianity. What’s wrong is then claiming that racists are atheists.
If a racist self identifies as a Christian, claims to believe in God and follow the teachings of Jesus, you can claim he’s not “really” a Christian, but you can’t claim he’s an atheist.
The much younger, healthier, civil rights lawyer George Wallace would have agreed with him… Both hypocrites playing to their audience.
Could we at least get an acknowledgement out of the guy that this means more than 5% of the population are atheists?
Absolutely nothing, and it may have had its benefits: in Black Like Me, the author noted that New Orleans was less racist because Roman Catholic doctrine stressed racial equality stronger than the other churches in the South.
Where it’s troublesome is where it allows slackers to say “oh, I can’t be racist: *I’m a Christian!” *.
That’s pretty clearly how it reads/sounds to me. I guess there might be some implication that being an atheist must be a Very Bad Thing, but I don’t necessarily read that. All he’s saying is that if you call yourself a believer in God and are a racist, you don’t really believe in God. It’s very simplistic No True Scotsman logic (as noted), but that’s all it’s really saying. The reciprocal identity, that atheists are bigots, does not follow.
I don’t really see anything here to be pissed off about.
Not Christian =/= Atheist.
Just to be nit-picky, not all Christian denominations believe in the doctrine of Original Sin. And you could probably not find anything that all professed Christians believe.