HarryLime [any]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2020

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  • Not that I’m trying to criticize this post or endorse an /r/atheism worldview, but I have to say that this site is in an ironic position as a bunch of avowed leftists, with a ton of us being some flavor of ML, and being against atheism. Marxism is traditionally atheist, ML states have often been officially atheist, because religion is opposed to a materialist worldview.

    It’s always seemed to me that a lot of the the new/reddit atheist types were people who grew up in right wing Evangelical households and environment and broke out of it. They have a very understandable and correct hatred for that shit, but too many of them never really broke out of the pattern of thought they were taught. They kept the dogmatic, black-and-white worldview complete with smug superiority, just with a new dogma. Anecdotally I would sometimes argue with them against Jesus Mythicism and it was like banging my head against a wall. (Like, motherfucker I don’t believe in the miracles or god shit either, but every piece of historical evidence points to there having been a dude who led a minor religious movement in Judea and got crucified by the authorities. Why is that so hard to admit? No one is asking you to believe anything else!)

    But even so, I’m still pretty much an atheist even if I share your distaste for that word and the people who usually self-apply it, because what the hell else am I supposed to be? What, you want me to be Christian? I’m not doing that shit.











  • Team America makes more sense when you understand that it was just supposed to be a parody of Jerry Bruckheimer movies. The reason the political satire has this very muddled view of “Bush era American military interventions are bad but also good but maybe kinda bad unless not” is because that’s not the main thing it’s making fun of.

    Edit: That wasn’t a defense of the movie to be clear, and I think Team America fails because it can’t commit to making a point. It invites you to laugh at how crass and stupid the whole post-9/11 Bush era American ethos was, but it mostly seems to agree with the underlying premises that birthed that ethos, except sometimes when it doesn’t. If the South Park guys wanted it to be just a movie parody then it shouldn’t have any political satire at all, but it does, so it winds up as a satire that doesn’t say anything. A movie like Airplane is much more successful as a movie parody because there’s virtually no political content in it.