Atheism and Racism

I think we are in the same predicament here, both theists and atheists alike. At a practical level we have to try to appeal to shared values and similar moral intuitions, that is all we can do. Some times all it takes is for a racist to actually personally get to know someone from the “outgroup”, so they can experience in their own life that all the demonization is either both unjustified(and thus unfair), or that it affects people who are essentially just like themselves and capable of suffering.

Esoteric philosophical arguments about what should be the moral standard, and whether this is truly objective, aren’t very likely to change anyone’s views on these things. To persuade the racist out of racism, you have to appeal to their (hopefully existing) empathy. How would you like it, if it was done to you? You have to find out whether the person you’re talking to have a sense of fairness and is capable of feeling any sort of empathy for others. That’s in the end what is most likely to make someone “tick”.

I also think there’s a very significant difference between someone who has unconsidered or unexplored racist biases(which we probably all do to greater or lesser degrees), and someone who is a committed ideological racist.
In my experience, ideologically committed racists are almost impossible to talk to. And I mean that quite literally. It’s rarely possible to even get a real discussion started because no matter what you say they have some completely hermetically sealed network of conspiratorial rationalizations built up that provides an “answer” to basically anything you say(the fallback is, of course, always that it’s “the jews” who are orchestrating the collapse of civilization). It’s like talking to flat Earthers, where any putative evidence or argument against their position is dismissed as “these satellite pictures were photoshopped in a NASA bunker”. With people like this, conversation is utterly fruitless. It takes some sort of radical lived experience to change their minds, and you can’t do that through mere casual conversation.

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Interesting that you would use a quote that explicitly assumes, and implicitly condones, the existence of slavery to support the claim that Christianity views all humans as deserving “equality of treatment.” I know it’s not what you intend to be discussed here, but it would be interesting to hear how you reconcile that.

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That quote doesn’t condone slavery.

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I agree with you, because the passage, one of the truly great pronouncements of the NT, isn’t even about the things in the list. It is about why none of those things matters “in Christ.” That passage was one of a few that kept my faith alive (if on life support) for years after it should have died.

So I think it is unfair to claim that the passage “implicitly condones” slavery. It is not unfair at all to note the plain and painful fact that the bible explicitly approves of–indeed essentially commands–enslavement and even worse. The NT fails to disclaim slavery in the terms we expect today, and it’s the letter to Philemon that shows implicit tacit approval. That would be a less remarkable moral failure if it weren’t for the OT.

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If that’s the case, then it can’t reasonably be interpreted as a condemnation of racism, either. There is no way a slave and a master could be considered “equal” in the sense that a Jew and a Greek would be considered equal if we are not to practice racism. So the passage seems to have been misinterpreted as advice on how we should behave here on earth, and is just serving as a reminder of how, under Christianity, our earthly status has little to do with our ultimate fate.

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Good point. It is far from clear that passage is speaking about human (physical or mental) equality in context, at least in the sense that a racist might assert some “races” are inferior to others by whatever measures of athleticism and intelligence. It seems to be speaking more about a sort of spiritual equality, in the sense that everyone who has faith will get what was “promised”.

I am wondering now, again, what was really intended to be understood by the statement that everyone was made in the image of God? Obviously it can’t have been meant that we are all absolutely equal in all measures of physical and cognitive performance(the kinds of crap that matters to racists). Innumerable people are just better athletes, better looking, and much more clever than I am. And after all, even superficially we all do look different, we are not identical clones of each other. So something else must have been meant by that statement or it would be directly obviously false. Perhaps this equality was only ever meant in a sort of spiritual sense.

But then the Christian has no basis for referring to these passages as a putative refutation of racist ideologies that derive from beliefs about human physical and cognitive inequality, as they are simply referring to a completely different measure of human value than the one the racist is referring to.

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Yes I completely agree with this. I’d go a bit further and note that the Galatians passage equalizes people “in Christ” but can’t be understood to mean that the writer (Paul) believes in equality in society or even in the church. He’s brutally explicit about that in his other writings, most notably about women.

I think it is dishonest for a Christian to claim that the bible provides forceful or clear teachings against racism, or sexism or slavery or violence. Some strains of Christianity do provide those teachings, by quoting scriptures and (legitimately) amplifying those particular quotes to formulate a system of ethics and belief. Some strains are explicitly violent and xenophobic, and they quote scriptures and so on, to form their system of “ethics” and belief. My commitment is to give the first strain of Christians the respect they deserve by not conflating them with other strains. What I can’t respect is a blanket claim that the bible or Christianity (as a whole) has credibility or utility on anti-racism. The opposite is the case.

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Anyway, slaves in the Roman world weren’t divided by race, anyone’s concept of race.

Should this thread be split? The first three posts after my recent clarification speak to the question here, but then it seems we started debating Gal 3:28 and even some of the earlier posts were aimed to Christianity rather than at conversing with an atheist racist about racism.

Thanks very much for the thoughtful replies. This is what I was looking for, a bit more personally digested and thought through, and succinctly summarized.

Yeah, I’m in agreement, @John_Harshman and @Rumraket, that it may not be possible. A lot of people you cannot engage in true dialog, where both sides listen.

John - I will point to one minor objection, and it is truly minor in your excellent summary, but I see the use of “rationalization” vs “moral” as an attempt to objectify your opinion. If you believe it, it is “moral” but if someone disagrees, it’s because of “rationalization.” Perhaps claiming a little too much authority?

@T_aquaticus I look through the links you post, but coelsblog seems like one who doesn’t engage with any thoughtful Christians. Unfortunate. The AHA press release is, well, a press release, but your comments were more to the point.

To my question, yes, ultimately we’re left with hoping our racist will have some empathy, which, as I look around the world, I think the present company may have more of than average. I’m not sure if hope in humankind in that regard is misplaced. I can’t seem to find who first said something about our “thin veneer of civilization.” Alligator brain takes over too easily - consider the meaningless destruction and looting in the riots.

It seems to me that we as social beings tend toward tribalism, and “us vs them” thinking. It’s really hard to escape. I fear that the political polarization in our country is a form of that.

Thanks again for the comments!

I’m not sure I agree. I do agree that, if someone tries to justify his racism on a claim about inherent genetic inferiority, then his claim is refuted by showing this inferiority does not exist.

However, there remains a moral positon to be defended, namely: Even if genetic differences in abilities and attributes can be shown statistically to exist between ethnic groups, it is still not moral to treat members of an ethnicity as inferior to another.

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You have quite misunderstood. What I was saying is that the expressed justifications that racists give for racism are not their actual reasons. A racist who, for example, cites the curse of Ham is not actually a racist because of the biblical defense of slavery. He has quite different reasons.

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Good clarification. Got it. As @Rumraket pointed out they probably wrap it all up in conspiracy theories. And that’s sometimes why it is impossible to dialog with them, because they will not engage with their actual reasons. They may not even know their actual reasons, which probably comes down to some primal emotion, like fear.

Thanks!

I tend to think that we all bifurcate our morality to some extent: we have a felt morality and a reasoned morality, and we expect the two to coincide but they do not always do so. I think we feel, and then we explain, but the explanation is unlikely to correctly characterize the real cause of the feeling.

So, I would say that that explanation reads very much like one of these internal rationalizations. Understand that I do not mean “rationalization” in any pejorative sense here. I just mean that I would suspect that you have a felt morality which tells you how badly wronged you would feel if you were discriminated against on the basis of race, and that you seek to supply a rationale for this – the rationale may or may not provide some sort of ancillary guidance on related questions, but it is unlikely to be the reason why you feel as you do. As I have said, I think we all do this to a degree. And why not? Moral feeling is a neural phenomenon of its own, quite qualitatively different from reasoning about facts. It’s natural that we try to impose the latter on the former, but the results of our doing so are often less meaningful than they look.

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Excellent comment. Marketers know that about us, that if they can make us want something (“because I’m worth it!” … for example) we will rationalize buying it entirely on own.

Modern philosophers talk about “intentionality” as a thing of humans, though they do not try to define it from a scientific view, partly because if there is something more than just matter and energy, science cannot detect it. Leveraging from that I would push for the same starting point for our moral feelings. It’s obvious we are “moral seeking beings” and we generally agree, but the “why” is up for debate. I would, of course, attribute it to something God put in us (which is a common Christian apologetic argument, the “moral argument”), and, yes, neurons support that somehow. So while I agree with your conclusions, it would be more generic with “neural” dropped as “Moral feeling is a … phenomenon of its own.” … Hope that’s not too nit-picky!

Regarding the Bible discussions, amazing to me how people can look at the same thing and see something totally different. But I’ll give my perspective. A summary principle: context matters.

The worth of the individual is first a Biblical concept. In the Ancient Near Eastern context, their stories, humans were slaves made to do the bidding of the gods. But in the Bible God created everything for the humans, cared for them (planted them a garden), and made them “co-rulers” (Adam even named things). Today we have enshrined the worth of the individual, cut it away from its roots, and then claim that the Bible argues against it. Yet historically it first appears with astonishing clarity in Genesis.

Knowing something of the times in which they were written (the context), it also seems to me that in the Old and New Testaments slaves and women were treated better than they were in the surrounding cultures. The beginning of The Law, Exo 20 contains the ten commandments, and then Exo 21 begins with limitations to masters on how they could treat their slaves, and then verse 16: “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.” Period! If these weren’t problems they would not need to be addressed. God is raising the bar. When Paul appeals to Philemon, it is to raise his consciousness in regard to his slave Onesimus. Eph 6:9 has limiting commands to masters which Southern slave owners ignored.

And to understand Gal 3:28, you have to put it in context. Verse 29 is “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” Heirs of what? Of the anticipated kingdom where there will be “every tribe and language and nation” standing together. And since this is now the broken world and that will be the fixed world, and “your kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven,” these inequalities are not the way it’s supposed to be even now and Christians are called on to improve it as they can. So please be careful trying to interpret Bible verses without both literal and overarching theological context.

There may be details here which can be improved or debated, but I think the overall argument is fair.

Exactly. We don’t dole out basic human rights based on a sliding IQ scale. Your IQ is 98? You get 9 of the first 10 constitutional amendments.

When @Marty asked how we would convince a racist to change their mind the very my first thought was to make the racist try to justify their position out loud. Ultimately, only the racist can change their own mind, and perhaps . . . just maybe . . . if they heard their own position spoken out loud they would see how poorly justified their racism is. Just maybe.

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To unbelievers like me, and maybe especially to apostates like me, this is appalling moral abdication. You are accurately representing the bible as pro-slavery (the OT loves it, actually), and pointing to “limits” on it. I don’t think this means that Christianity, as a whole, is morally incompetent on the topic. I don’t think this means that YOU are morally ambivalent about slavery. Not at all.

What this does mean, clearly, is that neither you nor anyone else can honestly claim that the bible teaches against slavery. Phrases like “context matters” and “astonishing clarity” cannot change that.

And what this all adds up to is this: it was never reasonable to ask unbelievers how they oppose racism while claiming that your belief system had this somehow all wrapped up in a package labeled “god’s image.” The truth is that if you are committed to anti-racism, which I hope you are, it’s because you are a decent empathetic morally thoughtful human being. My opinion is that it is a terrible shame that you are giving your god credit for that. But: just my opinion.

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This.

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I very much agree with what @sfmatheson has said, and would also point out that the OT certainly is not anti-racist and the god depicted in it does not value the rights of individuals in the slightest. Much of the early story of the OT is a racist god choosing his favorite volk and directing them to commit atrocities against neighboring peoples. This god chooses, purely for the sake of inducing terror, to murder every first-born of Egypt: a punishment of a collective for the wrongs done by only some of its members. Apparently angry about the actions of a few people, on another occasion, he directs the wholesale murder of the Midianites.

This god, to use plain terms for plain facts, is a racist; and it directs actions which are nothing less than genocide. More, this god believes in collective punishment, which is quite the opposite of just treatment of individuals, or the recognition of individual rights.

Meanwhile, what do you rest your reasoning upon? Such things as the notion that men are created in the image of god. It should be obvious that this notion has no bearing at all upon the equality of men to one another. There’s no logical or practical difficulty, for a creature that can create other creatures from dust, in the possibility that it could create some lineages of them who are superior to other lineages of them. Racial equality, and the dignity of the individual, simply do not follow in any way from this “imago dei” speculation. We do not believe these things because of, but rather in spite of, the gods.

Now, because such an image of the divine is monstrous, modern people do tend to wish to deny it. But it’s there, for all to see, and the amount of fan-dancing, special pleading and other philosophical prestidigitation required to manufacture the god of the Bible into some sort of moral figure is truly immense. The one thing you’ve got on your side is, of course, that not many people actually bother to read the source material.

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How to bring some closure here? First, I’m really grateful for you guys engaging on the primary question I asked. Treatises on moral philosophy got nothin’ on succint, personal, thoughtful discussion. So thanks!

We’re not going to resolve the Bible complaints you have raised, however my points are not nearly as “without merit” as you imply. Here are some quotes from historian Thomas Cahill’s book The Gifts of the Jews referring to OT Law, “this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East… in the prescriptions of Jewish law we cannot but note a presumption that all people, even slaves, are human and that all human lives are sacred. The constant bias is in favor not of the powerful and their possessions but of the powerless and their poverty… However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.” (p154 - 155)

Most people are unaware of Old Testament context and without context it is impossible to judge. There are plenty of things in the Bible I don’t like – the times were brutal! But to help you understand how it comes across to me and not as a flame, I find your interpretations are a form of cultural imperialism: you are taking the cultural views of today and imposing them on a radically different time/place/people/culture, proclaiming it unworthy, then insist that if God was real he needed to bring them into the 21st century in one step. I think it’s an unreasonable expectation, but that’s just my opinion.

Ultimately I think we can debate this all day and not resolve it, and this is not why I started this thread. I personally think a lot of issues are a “draw” in that you choose which lenses you want to use. You feel the same way about me. It all needs to be put into a larger context and making sense of life.

But again, I appreciate the honest engagement! Thanks.

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