On May 22nd there was a suicide bomb attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK. It was horrible, of course. The bombing, I mean; I don’t know how the concert was going up until that point. The suicide bomber had a Middle Eastern name, and ISIS claimed “credit” for the attack. A slew of articles and social media posts have followed. A frequent thread running through the reaction has been “Islamic terrorism,” with the usual suspects going on about how horrible those dang Muslims are, and how Islam is a religion of violence, it isn’t even a “real religion” (whatever that means), how can you trust somebody who won’t eat bacon, blah blah blah. You know, The Usual. (I won’t sully this website by linking to them.)
On May 22nd there was a suicide bomb attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK. It was horrible, of course. The bombing, I mean; I don’t know how the concert was going up until that point. The suicide bomber had a Middle Eastern name, and ISIS claimed “credit” for the attack. A slew of articles and social media posts have followed. A frequent thread running through the reaction has been “Islamic terrorism,” with the usual suspects going on about how horrible those dang Muslims are, and how Islam is a religion of violence, it isn’t even a “real religion” (whatever that means), how can you trust somebody who won’t eat bacon, blah blah blah. You know, The Usual. (I won’t sully this website by linking to them.)
With all of that, there’s an opinion that I hardly ever see expressed. To somebody who, like myself, is an agnostic atheist all religious terrorist attacks are pretty much the same. A terrorist attack by a Muslim at a concert, or a Christian at an abortion clinic, reminds me that there are legitimate reasons to distrust and fear ALL religious believers. I mean, if we’re going to judge all people who hold a certain faith based on the actions of their co-religionists, then its fair for an agnostic atheist to do the same about all Believers in general, isn’t it?
It’s clear that you just never know when a True Believer is going to lose their shit and start killing people. You can’t tell just by looking at them. Odds are good they’re going to be male, but even that isn’t always true. To somebody who doesn’t have to go through the mental gymnastics required to disbelieve 4,999 religions while believing 1, it’s just another instance of a person willing to kill and die because of the imaginary characters living in their heads. Talk about a cliche!
Once you get past the superficial trappings that set one religion apart from another, it’s all pretty much the same justification: “I believe certain parts of these words that were written by patriarchal control freaks who didn’t even know about basic hygiene or why there is such a thing as rain, while ignoring the other parts of this collection of words that contradict the parts I like, and I like these outdated and usually demonstrably false words explaining how the world works SO MUCH, that I will kill the people who don’t agree with me and go by other sets of equally erroneous words.” Yes, that was a run-on sentence, used deliberately to convey how unhinged Belief appears to Non-Believers.
Does what I say offend? I’m so very not sorry about that, I’m not even sorry-not-sorry. Let me tell you, I’ve been offended by this kind of nonsense my whole life. I’m offended by people who claim to know things they don’t, and can’t, actually know. Believe, yes, but knowledge requires facts, and facts can be proven, and since thousands of years have provided no proof of any kind of god, almost nothing can be “known” when it comes to religion.
I don’t care what people believe, but when people claim to “know” that certain religious beliefs are True, then they start to think that they can tell others how to live. It isn’t bad enough that some religious people want others to live according to their warped viewpoints, they will sometimes kill people who violate their nonsensical rules. There is no substantive difference between a religious suicide bomber, and an abortion clinic bomber, and a theocracy executing somebody for heresy. Sure, not ALL religious people are like this, but if some can be, then aren’t they all really, deep down? I mean, this has been going on for thousands of years, now, so if they don’t really believe it deep down then clearly True Believers aren’t doing enough to police themselves on this.
A common refrain one hears when this kind of thing occurs: If the Muslims won’t reign in their terrorists, then that means that ALL Muslims must secretly be terrorists on some level; that Islam itself is a religion of terror. Okay, sure, fine. I’m down with that. But since I’m turning ridiculous slippery-slope illogic on its head anyway, let’s take it a little farther. Let’s extend it to the real point of division: religious vs. non-religious. Because, like I’ve said, you find murderous believers in ALL religions, even Buddhism. They just disagree about the details of their religions which, again, are all equally BS to a non-believer. Therefore, if people who have religious faith of any kind can’t restrain other people who have any kind of religious faith, then doesn’t that mean that ALL religious people must be violent and intolerant on some level? When the justifications vary, but the behavior is identical, doesn’t that mean that religious faith itself is one of the main causes of violence and suffering for the last few thousands of years? We can’t blame Islam for that.
There, I fixed the anti-Islamic bigotry for you. You’re welcome.