Friday, January 07, 2011

The Stupid! It Burns! (racist edition)

the stupid! it burns! Atheists Have A Diversity Problem
The assumption [according to Atheists' Diversity Woes Have No Black-and-White Answers] is that racial minorities fear “coming out” as atheists; that is, that they are really atheists but are just afraid to say so. That assumption is pretty condescending, indeed, racist in itself. Maybe the racial minorities aren’t atheists because they actually believe in God!
It's dodgy in the first place to rely on an explicitly Christian source (beliefnet.com) for information about atheists, but the cited article seems accurate and straightforward. However, the relevant quotation from the article is
One theory says minorities tend to be more reluctant than whites to "come out of the closet" as non-believers, in part because religion and culture tend to be deeply intertwined in minority communities, according to Anthony Pinn, a black humanist and professor of religious studies at Rice University.

"Within African-American communities, the question concerning black atheists is: Have they surrendered their allegiance to the principles and ideas that helped us survive?" said Pinn, who is also research director for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

The concern is that "the African-American atheists have surrendered some of what it means to be black and a survivor in the United States. They've lost touch with their tradition," Pinn said.
Clearly, Pinn refers to African-Americans who are already atheists, but who do not wish to publicly self-identify as such.

One has to wonder if the post author is able to understand simple declarative sentences in the English language.

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