Why atheists can speak in the West

Something to think about the next time someone tries to say radical Christianity is equivalent to radical Islam. [Link]

Recently Bill Maher ripped into CSU San Bernadino professorBrian Levin for making the ridiculous equivalence between Christian extremism and Islamic extremism. The problem, which Maher pinpoints, is that Islamic extremism is not that extreme. By this, I mean that Islamic extremism (e.g., Muslim Brotherhood) has much greater broad based support than Christian extremism (e.g., Christian Reconstruction). The difference here is that you’ve heard of the Muslim Brotherhood, while far fewer have heard of Christian Reconstructionists. That’s because the former have democratic support in a populous Muslim country as the ruling party.

The standard liberal cant is to change the subject, and point to the past history of Christianity, or engage in unrepresentative comparisons. Since I know more history and religion than most of my interlocutors, I have little patience for this. Sophistry loses its power when the tactics are often so nakedly amateurish. And this is not simply abstraction. Let’s look at what’s been happening in Bangladesh, the country in which I was born, BANGLADESH’S ISLAMISTS CALL FOR DEATH OF ‘ATHEIST BLOGGERS’:

On April 6, hundreds of thousands of men and boys spread out across the sweltering capital Dhaka to call for, among other things, the hanging of atheists. The mass mobilization of Islamists was spurred by a handful of “atheist” bloggers who are supposedly so offensive to Islam that they should face the hangman’s noose.

“There is no place in this country for atheists,” was one of the friendlier refrains that a supporter of the organizers, Hefazet Islami, a Sunni Muslim outfit from the country’s second largest city, Chittagong, told me.

The Islamist marchers listed 84 bloggers who they demand be arrested or hanged, In February an atheist blogger named Rajib was stabbed to death a month after blogger Asif Mohiuddin was nearly killed for his beliefs.

First, Bangladesh is a moderate Muslim country. The ruling party is secular. It is not an Islamic state. Rather, in an old fashioned 1970s socialist manner it is officially the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. But in deference to the religiously conservative nature of the populace there is still some mixing of church & state, as we would understand it in the West. But Bangladesh, unlike Pakistan, has not opted for a monotone Islamic identity. The national anthem was written by a Hindu.