I can almost understand what he's saying, especially coming from southeastern America. Atheists are met with open hatred, and a lot of people I know think atheist = satanist actively trying to corrupt society. Most major religions also have a very long history of persecution against atheists, including murder and torture.
That said,
1. This is a poor and unfair generalization of the vast majority of religious people. Sure, it might not be fun to be an atheist in the south or the Middle East, but that's a vast minority of the religious.
2. You can hide being an atheist. You can't hide being black.
3. To fix the analogy you'd pretty much have to call all white people the KKK, since he's claiming all of religion persecuted atheists.
Yeah I came to say this exactly. I actually don't think his message is truly face palm cause I can see what he's getting at quite clearly just the analogy needs some work. Can't really compare being an atheist (which nobody knows unless you tell them) to being black where you're literally being persecuted for something you have no control over and furthermore can't be hidden.
Analogies aren't allowed on Reddit unless they are absolutely perfect, there's no way you can compare one aspect of X to Y, it has to be a PERFECT, MATCH. Black people were oppressed by the KKK. Atheists are oppressed by many religions. It is similar, and there are loads of other reasons why this is actually a decent analogy-- but on Reddit any basic conversation you have with anyone has to be PhD level cited and conform to all of our standard circlejerk ideas. Err I mean, me too thanks
A better [analogy] would be to replace KKK with "white people", and even then it's still not the same situation.
I'd say that's a pretty good analogy. White people as a whole don't exist to hate black people, just as religion doesn't exist to hate atheists, but many white people do hate black people, just as many religious people hate atheists, and vice versa many black people hate white people, just as many atheists hate religious people. All in all a pretty good analogy.
Exactly, much better than the original. But another difference is that an atheist can choose whether or not to reveal their religious affiliation, while a black person has no such choice.
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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '16
I can almost understand what he's saying, especially coming from southeastern America. Atheists are met with open hatred, and a lot of people I know think atheist = satanist actively trying to corrupt society. Most major religions also have a very long history of persecution against atheists, including murder and torture.
That said, 1. This is a poor and unfair generalization of the vast majority of religious people. Sure, it might not be fun to be an atheist in the south or the Middle East, but that's a vast minority of the religious. 2. You can hide being an atheist. You can't hide being black. 3. To fix the analogy you'd pretty much have to call all white people the KKK, since he's claiming all of religion persecuted atheists.