Islamaphobia?

[Onnedheil]

So, as feminists, women, fighting against patriarchy, against rape culture against male violence to women. My question is this.

Are we suddenly now supposed to be supporting a religion that is an actual rape culture, Openly accepted paedophilia, actual supremacy of toxic masculinity an actual patriarchy Which is responsible for female genital mutilation , based on a the word of a paedophile warmonger who propagates a monotheist singular God who is male .

And when Anyone, speaks out about these things We're labelled as a racist and as islamaphobe and told to silence our voice for the religion of peace?

Have I ended up in the twilight zone or something?

Sorry to jump in, just been following the whole thread, and apologies if this is very dim... but surely science doesn't claim to give "real truth"? Science gives the current best explanation/theory with the understanding that this may change in the future with further investigations. Or have I completed misunderstood? Anyone who uses science to claim a definitive unarguable truth is mistaken about what science is, and using like a religion. But that doesn't mean science is a religion, does it?

but surely science doesn't claim to give "real truth"?

Science does not. Scientists do. You are correct in that it is not scientific to do this, but it is done.

While science should be like "You have a new theory that disproves everything we thought was true? How interesting!" it is "You have a new theory that proves we were wrong all along? You asshole! You must be wrong!"

CoteDAzur wrote - "Islam is not "an actual rape culture" and it is not only offensive and inflammatory but also silly to say that over 800 million Muslim men in the world are rapists."

Patriarchy supports rape culture inside or outside any religion, including Islam. That does not mean that all men, or even all men of a particular religion, are rapists. It means, for example, that the subset of men who are rapists are treated more favourably than they could be treated or should be treated.

Patriarchy supports rape culture inside or outside any religion, including Islam. That does not mean that all men, or even all men of a particular religion, are rapists. It means, for example, that the subset of men who are rapists are treated more favourably than they could be treated or should be treated.

I thought everyone knew this by now.
Shocking, how little effort some people put into educating themselves.

I can't see a similar mechanism for this happening in a religious context - in fact doesn't it generally lead to a new religious group being set up?

Usually. But with religion, as nothing can be proven except maybe what is in a religious text or is not, one would not expect this sort of mechanism. It is mostly opinions.

My point with regard to science is that the proof has to be overwhelming and/or may not threaten people's financial interests in order to become widely supported. By which time it may be already too late for lots of people.
People are people, and thus, science is not all that it could be.

There are also many people whose belief in science is religious in its nature.

Scientists who do not adhere to the scientific method are bad scientists. This does not mean that science is wrong- just that it is not being used properly.

I think Buffy is right, that there isn't a 'science' that you can abstract from what scientists actually do. As the philosopher of science Bruno Latour has argued, science isn't about ideas but about practices - 'science' is the sum total of all the different practices (the doing of science) by all the people involved in it (scientists).

And, of course, all those practices are compromised in particular ways - by funding, by influences and biases and starting points, by chance, by power structures within the institution, by guesswork and happenstance, fashion ... so that, as Buffy says, science is a powerful language for describing the material world that we live in, but not a pure source of truth.

And, of course, there is much that science is not competent to tell us about. It is incompetent when it comes to history, to metaphysics (questions about what existence is, for example), to ethics and to aesthetics. And most scientists cheerfully accept this.

Thinking that science can tell us everything that is worth knowing is Positivism.

So, Bertrand, what I'm saying is that there isn't a thing called 'atheism' that is different from what atheists believe. Your definition is a reductive one, in that it reduces atheism to its most minimal possible level. Other ideas about atheism are possible - Nietszche for instance said not that he didn't believe in God but that God is dead. That's a rather different thing. But I don't think there's much to be gained by a discussion that simply goes round and round. If you want to hold to your definition, that's fine.

Hermione, I've tried to explain above why I think you are idealising science. Regarding your claims about religion, in brief: a) people have very good grounds for believing in God, and their belief is based on evidence. Whether you accept testimony and experience as valid kinds of evidence depends upon your theory of knowledge, of course, but testimony and experience are certainly valid kinds of evidence in a court of law. b) to say that belief in God continues blindly is to ignore the central place that debate and doubt have in the history of religious thought. Did you know, for example, Rabbis are trained by having to argue their ideas out point by point? c) science is almost unique as a form of knowledge in that it regards history as the history of error, and sees only current knowlege as true. No other way of knowing the world has so little regard for the past. Of course religious ideas and practices have changed over the millennia of human existence; but a key feature of religious thinking is that some things are always true - for example the way God has revealed herself/himself. The essential truths are timeless but the interpretation of them is a matter for each age.

Atheism isn't a belief system Buffy.

At its strongest it means someone who believes there is no God. That is a single belief.

At its weakest it has not have any belief in a God. That is not a belief at all.

Neither of those things is a 'system' of beliefs. You attaching it to other belief systems in a sentence like science doesn't make atheism in itself a belief system.

"science is almost unique as a form of knowledge in that it regards history as the history of error, and sees only current knowlege as true"

I'm sorry but what nonsense! Science is always correcting itself. Religion is the one that thinks it has the monopoly on the truth and has literally killed those who don't adhere to it.

Theydon'tknow - yes, exactly - to scientists all the ideas of the past are wrong because they've been corrected.

And don't forget that scientists don't come out unscathed if we are looking at the use of ideas to kill people. Eugenics, anyone?

And surely you have to have multiples in some way. Surely if it's all 'belief' then Christians are Thor atheists and Shiva atheists and Goddess atheists.

I simply don't think it's logical to call absence of belief a belief system.

Am loving this thread. I don't have much to say apart from this.

Are there atheists who don't actually know much about science, or do you have to have a good understanding to be one?

Or, as a person who has grown up in a place with no region and no belief in gods, totem, or any other things out there and by sheer chance of that happening would that automatically make you atheist. As in by default.

If a person has belief in nature and it powers would you still be an atheist? For example if you are a believer in Gaia , which category would you fall into?

niminy I see little point discussing further with you as our starting points are too different.

"Theydon'tknow - yes, exactly - to scientists all the ideas of the past are wrong because they've been corrected."

Well, those ideas that have shown to be wrong have been corrected. Rather a different thing

"And don't forget that scientists don't come out unscathed if we are looking at the use of ideas to kill people. Eugenics, anyone?"

Scientists are humans. They can use their discoveries for good or ill. Scientific discovery does not in itself have a value system.

I think that atheism is part of a range of different cultures and religions.

So, we could talk about the rationalist community as having a belief system, and one of the beliefs would be atheism.

We could say the same for certain kinds of Buddhism - that atheism is a belief within it.

We could say the same for certain kinds of romanticism - that atheism is a belief within it.

But when people leap on the simple statement that someone has no belief in God, and start leaping on that to mean they have a particular perspective on evolutionary biology, that reveals something about them, not the atheist.

It is like a need to put people into boxes, and people claiming to simply have no belief annoys people so they try and assume there must be some kind of belief attached.

I think that it is similar to the trans argument and the refusal to believe someone just has no internal gender identity.

This debate is getting too nebulous for me.

Say you have an infection and I give you a choice of treatment - a faith healer with unlimited prayers, good energy, laying on of hands etc or a course of antibiotics. Which would you choose?

Most people would go for the antibiotics. Why - because they work. We can administer them and see the patients recover - evidence of cause and effect. We understand the mechanism by which they work. It doesn't depend on what "theory of knowledge" you subscribe to and It's not a belief system, it's observable fact.

I'm not a philosophy or theology major and I'm not familiar with the content and style of much of this discussion, but the observable, repeatable nature of science and research is what make me think it is not a belief system - you can demonstrate it, you can test it, people who don't "believe" in it can carry out the same test and get the same result.

Wouldn't also be right to say that if science is a system that is used to understand the world, Through research, propositions and theories were by we should be able to come to a conclusion. In this case would not be wrong for atheist to hijack science unless other religious groups don't have any form of science in their teaching.

What would happen if religious groups changed their dogma based on proven science or way of thinking. Would they become atheist?

Buffy, not when the first is followed by "No other way of knowing the world has so little regard for the past" because the opposite is true. Scientists have great regard for those that went before them, hypothesising, proving, disproving and improving. They certainly don't look at the current truth and say that's it, we know everything now because the process is ongoing and scientists are always looking to learn more.

That's the whole point of it.