Hello Barto, what Hedges and all the other liberal critics of the “New atheists” fail to realise is that there is a massive difference between criticising a set of beliefs and actual bigotry against human beings for something they cannot change like skin colour.
If I criticise and ridicule your political views or condemn a totalitarian political ideology that is in no way bigoted. Political ideas are fair game.
So where does this funny idea that religious ideas are human come from?
When I say religious ideas are human, I mean that people grant religious ideologies the same status as human beings. Attacking the idea that the Koran is the perfect word of god is seen as persecution, oppression and bigotry in the same way that actually attacking someone because they are black is.
As if the religious ideas themselves had feelings, as if they had blood, as if the beliefs themselves had beating hearts and deserved all of the protection and rights we grant to human beings.
A set of ideas should not be given rights or held above criticism.
Especially when these critics who call for ‘respect’ show a willingness to criticise the religious ideas of Westerners.
Hedges himself wrote a book referring to American Christians as American fascists but to call Islam totalitarian is bigoted in his eyes. What double standards. One rule for Hedges and another for Harris, one rule for the pious in the West another for the pious in the third world..
These people only grant human rights to Islam not to Christianity.
I can poke fun at American Christianity and that will not arouse the wrath of the Left and the politically correct. That in no way qualifies me as a bigot, in fact it usually garners support from Leftists. But to do the same to the religion of ethnic minorities is racist and those same Leftists will denounce me as a racist and Neocon.
Also I take issue with this tactic of calling the critics of religion secular/enlightenment extremists or fundamentalists.
As if those who write books and articles are the same as those who blow up children in the name of Allah or shoot abortion doctors in the name of Jesus.
Hedges is another leftist who is labouring under the dogmas that the West is malevolent and that all Muslims are peaceful, noble, underdogs who must be supported in their wars against the West.
If Hedges can cheaply charge Sam Harris as an undercover neocon promoting the neocon agenda then the same charge can be sloppily leveled at Hedges, that he is an undercover Islamist who supports the wars of political Islam.
Both charges are stupid and for Hedges to use such cheap tactics loses him all credibility. Sam Harris did not support the Iraq war and he openly criticises Bush and his cronies.
If his harsh criticism of Islam is enough to make him a neocon then Hedges’s sympathy for the causes of Hamas and Hezbollah is enough to make him an Islamist.
Hedges’s accusations are pathetic.
He has lost all credibility with these cheap attacks and demonisation of people who are doing nothing but standing up for secularism and honestly vocalising their feelings about religion.
Their crime is nothing more than breaking the hypocritical rules of the politically correct.
