Reading Time: 4 minutes Until a few years ago, Sweden had a national Twitter account. A random citizen would curate the @sweden username for a week before passing it on. The government shut it down in 2018 after its content started leaning to the right. Inspired by the Swedish model, an @ireland account is still going strong. The Irish […]
islamophobia
Posted inArt
Art History professor fired for using ancient paintings of Muhammad in class
Reading Time: 5 minutes An art history professor in Minnesota was fired after showing students an ancient depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in class. The dismissal came after a Muslim student complained to administrators that the act was offensive and disrespectful; those school officials eventually agreed. The whole controversy has raised important questions about whether potentially offensive content should be censored […]
Posted inReligion
Something about Muslims
Reading Time: 3 minutes I often write about Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church. Some Christian friends of mine have suggested that I should direct my critical attention onto Muslims. They join the chorus of similar anonymous grumbles I get on my blog. I criticise Islam (and Hinduism and Judaism and others) regularly, but they only notice when their […]
Posted inReligion
Let There Be Light: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Culture Warriors
Reading Time: 21 minutes Hello and welcome to a Roll to Disbelieve movie review! Today’s botched cinema roll is Let There Be Light, a 2017 production featuring Kevin Sorbo as an atheist strawman.
Posted inReligion
“God’s Club” Shows Us the Disconnect Between Christian-Land and Reality-Land.
Reading Time: 9 minutes I’d be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring illustration of that discrepancy than the disgraceful spectacle of Christians making movies presenting themselves as they really truly believe they are–while remaining completely (and, one increasingly suspects, willfully) oblivious to how others see them.
Posted inReligion
The unwashed heathens of “God’s Not Dead”
Reading Time: 12 minutes Today I want to talk about how this movie presents non-white and/or non-Christian characters. As you might expect of a movie that is made up 100% of wish fulfillment fantasies, fundagelical/Fox News talking points, and the sort of memes your racist cousin keeps chain-emailing everybody, we’re not talking about nuanced, sensitive, sophisticated portrayals. We’re talking about the kind of situations and characters that you’d expect out of a movie aimed squarely at a crowd furious about having to “press 1 for English.”
This movie perpetuates stereotypes, and moreover it finds the worst possible stereotypes to perpetuate. This movie hates everybody who ain’t a nice white evangelical TRUE CHRISTIAN™. It’s not just atheists it rags on.
Posted inReligion
Human Dignity Flutters Free, Again.
Reading Time: 7 minutes (Content note: Religious extremism and terrorism.) It was such an ugly, ugly story–and all the uglier for being so painfully familiar. A Muslim radical, newly arrived to Australia, took the most effective tool of communication he had–a gun–into a nice little coffee shop in Sydney and took hostages. He did some awful things there for […]
Posted inThe Secular
4 Fictional Arguments that the Liberal Defenders of Islam Have Thoroughly Debunked
Reading Time: 5 minutes There are many liberals on the web (it’s not you, I swear, it’s someone else), who courageously joined the online collective to protect the religion of Islam from its many powerful foes (such as ex-Muslims). So bad that these arguments are – you know – fictional, since actually no critic of Islam outside a bunch of Neo-Nazis on Twitters have made them.
Posted inThe Secular
Bill Maher is No Bigot
Reading Time: 4 minutes Many people accuse Bill Maher of Islamophobia, but his criticisms of the religion and the Muslim majority countries are not racist, and there are no examples of real bigotry and prejudice towards the Muslim minority in the West in his career.
Posted inReligion
Persecution Complexity
Reading Time: 11 minutes Hi! I hope your weekend’s going well so far. Today I want to talk about the Christian persecution complex. Over a year ago, we talked here about the demonstrably false idea that a lot of American Christians have that they are being persecuted for their beliefs, but some stuff’s happened since then that makes me […]