Genocide and Other Nastiness

Someone didn't learn from history: Eliyahu advocates carpet bombing Gaza. (Via Pro-Science)

As Kristjan Wager said, this is advocating genocide. I shouldn't be surprised, though: If you believe the war history in the Bible, the ancient Jews committed genocide all the time. Joshua, for one, couldn't get enough of it. I don't see it very often (I don't pay a lot of attention to the region... or politics in general), but that's one bit of Jewish Fundyism to mirror a lot of the Christian and Muslim varieties going on.

One thing I always find annoying when it comes up is the idea of collective sin, especially since double-standards always seem to come up in the form of No True Scotsman. I've met with Christian fundies who will say that the genocides of the Bible were okay because of the collective sin, and yet, they'll distance themselves from the latest televangelist caught in a scandal by claiming he's not a REAL Christian. We all know how that tends to go down.

One theme I tend to see in a lot of Fundyism is the abandonment of personal responsibility. It's always someone else's fault. "It was Adam and Eve's fault that I committed the crimes I tout in my conversion story. Because they put their hands in the cookie jar, I, and by extension, all of mankind, am inherently evil." "The devil made me do it." And so on.

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I originally started on this post at about 5 PM on Tuesday, saved it as a draft, and since then, PZ posted this. Eliyahu's quite obviously 'militant', as are plenty of other fundies out there, regardless of which religion they're batting for. Of course, there are militant fundies who advocate things a notch or two below that like discrimination, government coercion of prayer, and so forth, yet don't get called 'militant.' What does it take for an atheist to be called militant? Express an opinion. Write a book. Speak out against militant Fundy actions. Dare to treat religion like they would any other scientific claim. (And by 'scientific claim', I mean testable by the scientific method.)

And that's when they trot out the canard that we're 'exactly like the fundamentalists we oppose.' I really hate double-standards.