Quickies
Quickies: New atheists wrong about Islam, Bill Maher’s wrongness, and religious home-schooling
- New atheists are wrong about Islam. Here’s how data proves it – “New empirical evidence shows anti-Islam crusaders misunderstand Muslim countries, a political scientist tells Salon.” From mrmisconception.
- Five times Bill Maher was completely right, then ruined it by being a jerk – “He likes to imagine himself a freedom-loving liberal, but all too often he wallows in gross racism and sexism that subtracts from the freedom of everyone who isn’t a white man.”
- The right’s home-school conspiracy: How I helped the GOP launch a religious war – From Criticaldragon1177.
- The micro and macro aggressions that white folk don’t see – “If I’d listened, I would have heard many more stories. We white people, we need to listen.”
- Cute Animal Friday! First up, Great Horned Owl nest cam. And this was in one of last week’s links, but if you missed it, here’s how much food hamsters can fit in their cheeks.
The study is as unsurprising as a study saying the clergy have different attitudes than Roman Catholics as a whole or that Pat Robertson’s attitudes are more extreme than a typical self-described evangelical. This does not surprise me nor should it surprise anyone.
But, hey, if a prominent, bigoted Christian and a prominent, bigoted atheist team up with the mutual agreement that Christians are better than Muslims they both get media attention and get to pretend to not be bigots with the “one of my best friends is an atheist/is a Christian” trope.
“When it comes to class inequalities, Muslims tend to be distinctive — but they tend to lead. They tend to lag when it comes to gender inequality, but if we look at indicators of socioeconomic inequality, it seems that the socioeconomic inequalities are lower in predominantly Muslim countries than they are in other countries outside the Muslim world.” Shenanigans. I Google Abu Dhabi labor and find all sorts of things we wouldn’t tolerate here. And of course, Mauritania is the only country that still has ‘official’ slavery. (I mean, unless you consider ISIS a country.)
The author is talking about general trends in aggregate data, and you find 2 cases that don’t fit the trend. That doesn’t mean the trend is incorrect, it means you found outliers.
And I’m saying aggregate data conceal as much as they reveal, no?
If you are interested in reading M. Steven Fish’s book & have a library card or are a student, it is widely available on Worldcat as an ebook. For example, this is the Boston area availability:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/are-muslims-distinctive-a-look-at-the-evidence/oclc/702111025&referer=brief_results
and voila! For free,you can access the primary document, no speculating “what he means” based on a brief interview.