still really tired of “you’re only allowed to be an atheist if you’re not white and/or not of a Christian background, because if you’re both then all relevant axes are contaminated and everything you do is oppressive, sorry I don’t make the rules”
As I said I have my issues with feminism but if somebody was like “*I’m* a feminist, but white western women can’t be feminists unoppressively” I’d fight them.
Hard same
The latter doesn’t even make sense; doesn’t being of a Christian background mean you’d understand even more what bullshit the Christian god is? Because that is what happened to me.
the logic is that the harder you reject Christianity the more Christian you must be (cf. the shit about “Christian atheism” following a similar universalist, evangelical soteriological logic to Christianity, smh)
I appreciate the attempt at an explanation but sadly I am not smart enough to understand the latter half- wait I just reread it and I think you mean like, atheists who were former Christians apply some of the Christian philosophy to their atheism, like believing in a kind of afterlife?
And the first part still kinda baffles me because like, my mother has bluffed locking me out of the house until I told her my religious beliefs (I only told part of the truth) and forces me to go to church on threat of throwing me out of the house because she’s scared for my soul and thinks this will fix me. Also pretty sure she thinks I’m gay.
So like, how would that make me more of a Christian? The logic doesn’t follow.
So it should be noted that I am very cranky at the moment for non-discourse-related reasons, that this is very uncharitable, and that you should take it with all appropriate salt.
That said –
In order to make any sense of this kind of outlook at all, you need to understand that your conceptual starting place has to look something like:
The defining trait of “white Western Christianity” is that it endorses and supports the superiority of white Western Christians and their white Western Christian lifestyle. It is all about establishing this one oppressive group of people as ineluctably superior, while simultaneously serving as a memetic weapon that makes infinite demands of all other people and seeks to control them to an infinite extent.
All the religion’s actual explicit content, all the claims it makes about cosmology and ethics, all its rituals and practices, must necessarily be subordinate to its role in large-scale cultural politics.
This is, as it sounds, incredibly stupid. But once you’ve already swallowed it, you can get: the purpose of “white Western Christian-derived atheism” is to establish white Western formerly-Christian atheists as being superior to everyone else (probably in the sense of being “smarter” or “more rational” or something), while simultaneously serving as a memetic weapon that makes demands of other people and seeks to control them (probably in the sense of making them give up their distinctive community-defining cultural practices, or at least undermining those practices). Therefore it’s basically just a different flavor of white Western Christianity.