I trust you’ve never seen anything about the fate of Amaroka — or about stargates — in those texts.

(Yes, I’m kidding.)

From what I can see, the New Atheists have four main points in their platform: 1) “Out of the closet.” 2) Full legal and cultural equality. 3) Separation of church and state. 4) “We’re right.” Items 1-3 are unarguably correct, item (4) is “marketplace of ideas” material.

Sometimes they indulge in ad-hominem attacks against religion and believers, and IMHO this is a “shoot self in foot maneuver.” It’s understandable in the same way that the sexual exuberance of the early gay rights movement was understandable, but it doesn’t help the cause.

What atheists and others who don’t espouse mainstream religion really need to do, is make their own moral frameworks explicit and bring them into the debate. The human mind doesn’t work well with logical negatives. “I don’t believe in a deity” necessarily calls up the questions “then what do you believe?” and “then what’s your basis for moral behavior?”

Atheists and others need to be prepared to answer those questions, and to make clear that their moral foundation is as solid as any that’s based on a deity as arbiter of morals. That, more than anything, will contribute to the acceptance that leads to support.

The idea that privilege is context-dependent seems to sail right by a lot of New Atheists, and that gets into when they decide to be dicks about things. They don’t seem to get that decrying the terrible actions of governments like Saudi Arabia and saying that even Muslims deserve the same civil rights — whether we are at war with Muslim enemy du jour or not — are not contradictory statements. (Just read the comment threads on FtB to see what I mean). I’ll leave aside a relatively huge blind spot about which political actors were and are advocating sending more money to regressive dictators, religious and not.

I also know a bit about the impact of enforced secularization on the peoples of the Russian Far East. It was horrible, as much an act of cultural destruction and genocide as the forced religious conversions in the US a half-century earlier.

I also did some work with marginalized populations (I spent a lot of time on some stories about Native people in the US 20 years back).

So I make it a point to ask myself what the impacts of certain ideas on marginalized populations is, and to tread carefully when thinking about what religion is and was to those who practice it.

(As an aside, my grandma was threatened with jail because you know, those Japanese folks just cant be trusted. Thankfully she wasn’t a resident of California, Oregon or Washington — but she did her time bringing food to people in the camps. This historical parallel is also something that seems to get lost on some people who are ostensibly humanists).

Maybe this comment is OT. I am sorry if it is. But you got me thinking about this stuff.

But, the broader context of the joke is not so much about biblical scholars as about the larger picture including the texts (all of them) and those who read them; the enterprise is full of amazingly contradictory interpretations that are often astounding or at least amusing.