[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Of course populists make great hay exploiting these divisions. But the knowledge-class does the work of populists for them when they denigrate the unenlightened. Notice I didn’t say disagree with, but denigrate....

Finally, the root of the monstrous residential school system was white saviour syndrome. The idea that benighted native people needed to be led into the light by enlightened Europeans. A bunch of white atheists expressing contempt for the brainwashed fools (many of them indigenous) who persist in their ignorant beliefs has echoes of the same arrogance.

You don't wan't people to smear religious people with a wide brush, but you don't seem to have any problem smearing populists or atheists with a wide brush. Hmm....

One of the ways the enlightened keep up a compassionate self-image is by imagining that the people they’re denigrating are all middle-aged white men. People who don’t deserve sympathy. Which is why I’d guess people around here haven’t been particularly receptive to the data showing high rates of vaccine hesitancy among people of colour. They want to hate people who won’t get vaccinated, and that’s a lot easier when they’re picturing some people in their minds and not others.

Is it possible to frown at vaccine hesitancy, without actually hating the people who are vaccine hesitant? It's an important distinction that I'm not sure you're making here.

The same with religion. The popular depiction of religious conservatives in our media is white men. Which makes performative contempt for religion and the religious acceptable in their social circles - admirable even. Lots of social media points to be earned showing white people emerging from a church during the pandemic with a caption “#### these idiots.” I’d wager few of these people would post a picture of people emerging from a mosque over that caption. It would be unthinkable.

Same thing here. Hate the ideas, not the people embracing the ideas.

My criticisms of the Catholic Church are pointed, harsh, and unapologizing... yet have absolutely nothing to do with the skin colors of the people who follow its doctrines.

Maybe the enlightened wouldn’t be so contemptuous of the unenlightened if they were prodded to recognize that many of those unenlightened don’t fit the profile they want to assign to them. White men are actually the least religious demographic in North America (women of colour are the most religious). Catholics aren’t just pasty old white dudes, but young Filipino women, South Korean families, and the tens of thousands of indigenous Canadians who make the pilgrimage to Lac Ste Anne every year. There’s a good chance the next Pope will be African, and that would almost certainly shape how people talk about the Church.

Maybe, but speaking for myself and most of the atheists I've ever met, my criticisms of religion and dogmatic thinking don't have anything to do with the countries of origin of the people blindly following the doctrines.

I point out these demographics in the hopes of making people more tolerant. Less eager to put the unsophisticated and unenlightened in boxes so they can hate them with a clean conscience.

And yet my worry here is that the opposite effect could come into play... religious people weaponizing skin color as a way to conflate criticism of religion with hating on miniorities. It's the same kind of tactic used by the Netenyahu government, where he tries to label any criticism of his government's actions as Antisemitism.