Sixteen Volts

I noticed that the upcoming editions Carnival of Godless have already been assigned blogs to host them for a few months in the future. This is a bit of a bummer, since I would eventually like to try my hand in hosting one. Let me briefly explain how an edition of this carnival would go if I were holding the reins.

There is already a rich tradition and almost a mountain of material that opposes Christianity in its various forms. A simple web search will bring up hundreds of websites, articles and postings that puncture Christianity full of holes from every possible angle. It's kind of... redundant to just keep repeating the same things. For example, if we look at the last few editions of the carnival, is there really anything original that hasn't already been said elsewhere at least a dozen times?

By contrast, there seems to be very little atheist material that criticizes and opposes Islam in a similar fashion. Such material seems to be very much needed in our rapidly globalizing modern jet-age world, since Islam is becoming a serious force and a threat to liberties of us atheists everywhere. In fact, if it already hasn't, it will soon become a more serious threat against atheism than the dumb and docile modern Christianity has been for a long time. So we no longer have our usual excuse that Christians are over here and Muslims are over there, so we only need to worry about the former. And even if Islam is not here yet, it would still be useful to sharpen our arguments and rhetorical tools for the sake of a possible future confrontation.

I therefore propose that some near-future edition of the Carnival of Godless concentrates in criticizing and mocking Islam the exact same way that we atheists have so far constantly criticized Christianity. Possible subtopics of this edition might include:

1. Abstract arguments why Islam is false. (Just adapt the classic arguments against Christianity wherever needed.) Internal contradictions and historical inaccuracies of the Quran.
2. Comparison of Muslim and atheist worldviews in practice. Explain that Muslims tend to be generally so backwards because their religion is holding them back and makes them live in primitive conditions where few things ever improve. Perform comparisons between the achievements of both cultures against some objective criteria to see which one is superior. Discuss how Islam and Muslims are enemies of Western science and rationality. Count how many important and famous thinkers and scientists there are on each side. Use just the right amount of sneer.
3. The threat that Islam as an ideology and Muslims as people pose to individual freedoms and civil liberties of atheists. Exploration on how Muslim attitudes and their whole worldview tend to be medieval and unenlightened. List the everyday freedoms that we would lose if Muslims ever gained power, and point out cases where this has already happened, or in which Muslims have resorted to threats of violence. Examine the extent to which Muslims generally believe in separation of Church and State, gay and transsexual rights, equality between sexes, rights of the minority faiths, abortion rights and keeping religion out of government schools.
4. Past and present bad things and cruelties that were done by Muslims. Find and list verses of their holy book that advocate violence against nonbelievers, and point out how these verses have historically influenced Muslims. Especially note the hypocrisy of Muslims who refuse to condemn their violent brethren every day. (For example, since American pro-lifers are considered hypocrites since a few of them have killed a total of perhaps three abortion doctors, it is not that big a leap to say that Muslims are hypocrites since twenty of them killed three thousand Westerners a few years ago.) Violence against women, including female genital mutilation.
5. Anecdotes about personal encounters with Muslims. Uplifting and humorous cases where the atheist deftly displayed his intellectual superiority over the silly believer, preferably in front of an audience. Situations where the herd mentality of ignorant Muslims led in a way of poetic justice to Darwin Awards -types of results. Conversion stories about some Muslim seeing the light and breaking out of the chains of his religion.
6. Humour section revealing the wackiest beliefs of Muslims. Point out beliefs and doctrines that are absolutely ridiculous but that most people are unaware of. Use humor and satire and mockery to further ridicule Islam. Find some really goofy taboos and restrictions that Muslims obey and flauntingly disobey them. If they get angry, use this anger as further proof of how stupid and irrational they are. Find out if there is some historical figure that is really important to Muslims and mock him mercilessly to present a kicky practical proof that he and Allah are powerless.
7. Point out hypocritical Western politicians and thinkers who reject the Western ideals and either pander to Islam or just refuse the condemn it for doing things that would cause them to immediately condemn other religions if they ever did the same. Point the spotlight to Quislings who call for "tolerance" and "understanding" and who want to give a free pass to Muslims since they are a poor oppressed minority.
8. Demonstrating how Muslims try to politically impose their beliefs and values on everybody else instead of respecting the tolerant multicultural and relativist society. Practical suggestions on how to slow down the islamic encroachment in the world. Brainstorm ideas on how to turn the hearts and minds of the next generation of Muslims towards our superior values of reason and enlightenment.

In other words, there is absolutely nothing here that we haven't done a thousand times against Christianity already. And it's not like most of these would be much harder than shooting fish in the barrel, so I would expect this carnival to be really big, each subtopic garnering dozens of postings.

Criticizing Christianity is such an old hat that it never really gets anywhere any more. As I said, I would challenge anybody to come up with anything original about that topic, on either side of the fence. There seems to be so much more unexplored potential in critizing Islam. I would therefore claim that an Islam-themed edition of this carnival would significantly energize and revitalize the atheist community all around the world. And I'm pretty sure that that we might even get some additional publicity out of it. Hey, it might perhaps even get atheism some worldwide mainstream media attention outside the blogosphere.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 8:43 AM