That’s no shaggy dog story, it’s a well-known Emo Phillips joke. Let’s give him credit for what some have called the best stand-up bit ever.
Emo Phillips appeared with Weird Al Yankovic in my city, and I heard him do that story… I’d known nothing about the guy but became a fan of his after that.
Was he married to Judy Tenuta? When she died a few years ago it was widely reported they wed in 1988, but others claimed they never married
I’ve heard anti-theist used to differentiate atheists who oppose religion from those than simply do not believe. All anti-theists are atheists, but not all atheists are anti-theists. However, I don’t consider that to be discriminatory or bigoted the way antisemitism is. That’s discriminating against the people because of their religion or ethnicity, not the religion itself. The comments so far are focused on the anti-theist or anti-religion definitions. I would say “religious bigotry” would be a broader term, the problem is that it can be read as bigotry caused by religion and directed at others, rather than bigotry against religious people.
I believe the nerve is touched by the phrasing “stay out of our way”. Implies that “our” side is seeking to impose our will about something.
In the Christian context, anticlericalism. Is there a more general term covering all religions with paid ground staff?
Is it fair to use “bigotry” in this context? Religion can imply what a person believes or what they think. It’s a form of what a person does, as opposed to what they innately are. Some beliefs or thoughts can be harmful. People are born with race, gender, nationality, and so forth, but can choose religion or some aspects of religion (I realize there could be a sliding scale here and that many people wind up in their family’s religion). Is it necessarily bigotry to have a negative opinion of what people do, what they choose?
Going back to the OP I believe part of the reason we do have a “racism” term is that it was coined after the modern notions of “races” based on a pseudoscientific ordering of human types were well established. Thus a term that directly calls out that fallacy.
Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes we’ve “always” had religions and “always” knew there were others than ours and some of our own people who disagreed with ours, and “always” had some who were go-along-get-along types and some who were die-heretic types. So it tended to be along the lines of “I’m against these specific beliefs/believers” rather than some general concept.
Religious bigotry if you need to me more specific:
Ok. That seems like a reasonable argument.
“Anti-theist” suggested above might suit my needs.
(I’m not making this question for any other reason than trying to examine my own belief system.)
Staying out of our way is a bit stronger than not controlling other people. Religious protesters outside of abortion clinics are in the way - even if they don’t block anyone - but those creating laws making abortion illegal are controlling. There is a difference in my book. Maybe you meant “in the way” as controlling, but it didn’t come across that way to me.
Die heretic is a fairly recent invention. Those religions which accept other gods just think non-believers are backing the wrong horse, but like in Judaism there is not real penalty for those not in the club. Old Christianity and Islam believe that unbelievers will suffer horrible fates, so oppressing them is for their own benefit, and eliminating all those who would pull them the righteous path is justified. This has mostly gone away thanks to secularism, but it was pretty much standard.
I agree. Many anti-theists I’ve heard think believers have been taken in for a variety of reasons, and even agree that religious institutions can do good. It’s just that non-religious ones can do the same good without the baggage of believing in absolute moral laws which should apply to believers and non-believers.
And I’m against religious protestors outside of abortion clinics, so that’s fine by me.
Protestors outside abortion clinics are trying to control people. They are trying to intimidate people away from using the abortion clinic, or intimidate the doctors working there.
I think what all -isms have in common—not just racism but sexism, ageism, etc.—is dividing the world into fundamentally different kinds of people, in ways that go beyond what is objectively true and which usually involve seeing one or more of the types as fundamentally superior and others as inferior. Some people are seen as subhuman or Other, as opposed to “We’re all just people.”
And these kinds of attitudes can and do exist with regard to religion. There are members of one religion who think of members of another religion (or even another sect or demonination within the same religion) as other or inferior, less worthy of respect and benevolence; there are religious people who think this way about non-believers; and there are non-religious people who think this way about religious people.
There is a recent book and a recent movie showing what all prejudices are about. The book is Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and the movie (based on it) is the 2023 film Origin. The various divisions of society which are used to create ways of splitting up society so that people have someone that they can hate and blame for all of society’s problems are what the book and the movie call caste (which isn’t just what the term caste has meant before). Telling people that they can hate other people who differ from them by race, ethnic group, national origin, religion, gender, sexual preference, occupation, financial status, intelligence, education, neurodiversity, neighborhood lived in, and all the other ridiculous ways of splitting up humanity are things that were deliberately created so that everyone has someone to hate. Having many different levels of caste for each of those prejudices allows the people in the top caste of each particular sort of prejudice to tell the people in the caste just below them that the problems of the world don’t come from the actions of the people in the top caste but from the supposed actions of the caste just below their own caste.
As an example of a protest we might find more positive, strikers on picket lines try to keep people out of the job. But marching with signs is a different thing from blocking the entrance and forcibly preventing people from entering.
What I feel about anti-choice people physically blocking access is more suited to the Pit.
I’ve thrown an elbow at abortion protesters and received in kind while accompanying someone attempting to obtain medical care. Fück them.
A large majority of humanity thinks otherwise, because their religion to them is part and parcel of being a part of their family, tribe and/or nation - something that is not subject to personal choice. So criticising their religion to them is not an appeal to change, but an attack on them using an innate part of their identity.
For a lot of the people most prejudiced against those of another religion, their claimed religion has nothing to do with their religious beliefs. What they’re calling their religion is whatever their ancestors chose, not what they chose. These people don’t attend the worship services of their religion, don’t read the sacred texts of their religion, and don’t understand what the tenets of their religion are. They hate the people who supposedly belong to some religion that they claim is opposed to their supposed religion regardless of the fact that in all other ways that person is of a very similar ancestry and the two religions are almost indistinguishable in beliefs.
I don’t know if I find that more positive. It depends on what the strikers are striking for.
If they’re striking for better benefits or pay, then fine. If they’re striking because they don’t want the factory to desegregate, then fuck them.
Note, I don’t necessarily think the government should ban abortion clinic protestors. But I certainly do think very negatively of them, and not because they are religious, but because they try to shove their religion in everyone else’s face and control their actions.
If you don’t want an abortion because your religion forbids it, don’t have one. Standing outside a clinic and making a very difficult day in the lives of many women much worse is a fucked up thing to do.