[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Solumina

I don't really want to get involved in an intensive debate here but I feel compelled to say something.

You keep saying religious privilege but you're only really showing that very select religions have any privilege. You yourself have said acknowledged that many religions face persecution for their faith. I think if you were talking about Christian privilege, or even Judeo-Christian privilege this dialogue would be rather different.

I don't like calling it Judeo Christian Priviledge, or Christian Priviledge because of two things:

1) I feel that unfairly targets Christianity (even though they are the biggest offenders and usually when I'm talking about this in a material sense, I'm talking about them) and is an imprecise approach. My problem is not that Christianity has this power and things would be better if instead of Christianity, voodoo had this power, my point is NO ONE should have this power.

In a material sense, that means, right now, breaking Christian privilege - yes. But the point is not to then hand off that privilege to another faith and say "do better", the point is to pull the king off the throne, throw his silly hat away, break the throne down to kindling and set it on FIRE. Not put a new, better, more humaine king on the throne, because the problem isn't even necessarily the faith, the problem IS the throne.

2) Scientology. No seriously: You talk about persecuted minority faiths? Scientology is a perfect example of how much legal power and social clout comes from being a religion, even a distrusted and hated religion. Scientology actually recently surpassed atheists in certain polls are "most distrusted minority". They still get an insane amount of privilege from being considered a religion. Even though they're largely a hated minority, they're able to use their religious status to silence critics, rake in billions in profits & torture holocaust survivors to near suicide with virtual impunity. Now this isn't the only reason they're able to do this, but it's a damn big reason why, which is why they fought so hard to gain tax-exempt status.

3) Iboga/Ibugain. I was on the radio a few months ago with an activist/aboriginal shaman of the Bwiti faith. He was arguing that he and his people should be allowed, in the United States, to take Iboga (currently a a Schedule I-controlled substance). While I agree with him, and don't begrudge his tactic, of appealing to religious privilege in an effort to gain legal access to this substance - It is all things considered NOT a religious right to take this substance - it is a HUMAN right to do so - and to appeal solely on religious grounds is in the long run, inadequate to say the least.

While I recognize the realpolitik of the situation, it's important to be precise about these things, because if we are not, we cause problems for ourselves down the road. When you're dealing with oppression - you can't just knock out part of one leg - you've got to flip the whole goddamn table.

Do you have a source for that? Most research into bullying and peer violence that I'm aware of indicates that females are much more frequently on the receiving end both from males and other females in every age groups. People have this concept of boys interacting aggressively with each other but the truth is that such interactions between boys are just more likely to be noticed and remembered.

I should amend my statement, as It reflects a particular community and a particular means of interacting violently. I know that women are more likely to be the targets of violence, but the type of violent confrontation I was faced with, in the manner I was faced with it, was because I'm a dude. If I'd been a woman in the particular community at that particular school I would have been confronted, probably violently, but it would've been in a different way, and it wouldn't have been as public.

Also she said that she did receive confrontation just not until after she converted so even taken into consideration the fact that you think people were more likely to be aggressive with you I fail to see how you can say it is a different situation as she was still the recipient of aggressive behavior due to her faith.

She said people got "argumentative" the confrontations I had went beyond argumentative. Also, I'd hazard a guess that people got argumentative after her conversion because her faith became more visible than her lack of faith.

I'm an atheist, but when I walk down the street nobody knows. They all just assume/don't care.

If I wore a shirt that had "God" with a circle and a red line through it, it would be a completely different situation. If I got up and talked about God not existing on the subway it would most likely only be a matter of time before I was assaulted - even in NYC.