Over at BuzzFeed, Andrew Kaczynski has done the world a favor by pointing out that Reza Aslan, a person who’s good at staying dignified in an abusively dumb interview, turned right around and did unto others on Twitter what was done to him — and more — sometimes toward trolls, sometimes not. Ironically, Kaczynski did much to help Aslan’s cause out of the gate, taking the opportunity to mock Fox News for interviewing him so poorly. To be sure, mocking a bad interview is much different than worshipfully praising the victim. But these things are virtually identical in the business world where people compete for attention and money by getting involved in the politics of religion. One particularly broad region of that world can be especially unenlightening. It’s actually quite rare to see controversy swirl around a figure like Aslan, who speaks relatively calmly about religion but spews vitriol on more straightforwardly political matters. For many smart people on the internet, a more popular form of hatertainment is reading a secular writer SLAM a person who takes religion seriously from a political perspective. Encouraged by all the high-fives and fist bumps that result, polemicists of religion have gotten theatrically obnoxious. Like football players after a sack, they pause on the playing field to do dumb dances and talk trash in the faces of their flattened opponents. Things have gotten so bad in this regard that atheists are now doing it to other atheists. George Will, for instance, is a writer who doesn’t believe in God, but thinks that religion helps keep a free society from degenerating into the kind of playful environment of tyrannical derp that rules the world in Idiocracy. So he took to the pages of National Affairs to make a secularist’s case for the importance of religion to freedom in America. Mild-mannered as he is, Will adds some pretty deep caveats — like, he doesn’t believe religion is “necessary for good citizenship.” He modestly concludes that believing in God and stuff “is helpful and important but not quite essential” to the future of an America that upstanding people won’t ditch like Detroit. For his trouble, Will received a cackling diatribe from the Economist’s Will Wilkinson. Why? Well, Will’s insight into the general political significance of spiritual attitudes veered over the course of his essay into the kind of convoluted history of political thought familiar to anyone who has read the argued-to-death work of ogre figures like Leo Strauss. For decades, neoconservative theorists have been mocked for thinking, and practically saying, things like “I’m not religious — that’s for idiots — but I’m glad the idiots who surround me are religious, because they won’t try to rape my wife and kids, or take away my comfortable position in society.” For atheist conservatives like Will, liberals and progressives pose a huge threat to America because, by beating religion out of public life, they’ll ensure that people think — to quote Will — that “life should be filled to overflowing …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
