Catholics & Non-Catholics Dialogue Thread

[Ice_nine]

7 minutes ago, Peace said:

Well I can understand how most white people would be adverse to hearing that, especially the liberal ones who think of themselves as our benefactors. But sure, I could be wrong. I certainly cannot prove my view on that. It's just my opinion. It's not important to me that anyone share it.

 

nah, now the hip thing to do, for white libs, is to confess your racism and cleanse yourself. Preferably directly to a racial minority, but using tik tok or insta will suffice in a pinch.

That's a game I'm not willing to play. I have many, many flaws and biases and prejudices and stereotypes, but I don't believe people of certain races are inherently worth less or deserve to be subjugated, and I never have.

Not that your asking me to. I'm just saying maybe you meet me in a different context you think I'm a racist because I'm white, I'm a jerk sometimes, and I think all this woke stuff is garbage. And I might say crazy things like "race relations are better now than they were in the 60's."

 

Maybe you are right. Maybe most people are racist. I would like to think no. But I look around. We sure are awful to each other. We are divided. But I've found out when I start thinking "wow most people are dumb/scared/ignorant/racist/mislead" . . . sometimes I look in the mirror and see those things staring back at me so . . .

I'll end my neurotic rambling for now.
 

[Peace]

6 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

 

nah, now the hip thing to do, for white libs, is to confess your racism and cleanse yourself. Preferably directly to a racial minority, but using tik tok or insta will suffice in a pinch.

That's a game I'm not willing to play. I have many, many flaws and biases and prejudices and stereotypes, but I don't believe people of certain races are inherently worth less or deserve to be subjugated, and I never have.

Not that your asking me to. I'm just saying maybe you meet me in a different context you think I'm a racist because I'm white, I'm a jerk sometimes, and I think all this woke stuff is garbage. And I might say crazy things like "race relations are better now than they were in the 60's."

 

Maybe you are right. Maybe most people are racist. I would like to think no. But I look around. We sure are awful to each other. We are divided. But I've found out when I start thinking "wow most people are dumb/scared/ignorant/racist/mislead" . . . sometimes I look in the mirror and see those things staring back at me so . . .

I'll end my neurotic rambling for now.
 

Well I didn't mean you in particular. I'd have to interact with you in real life before reaching a conclusion on that. Sure, I would say that a huge majority of Americans would say "I don't believe people of certain races are inherently worth less or deserve to be subjugated". But what a man truly believes is shown by his actions. That is where the conversation become problematic.

At least to me, a lot of this is kind of like "original sin". We bear the scars of the society into which we were born. Do you really think that you can start with a culture where black Americans were forcibly enslaved for hundreds of years and in which they were segregated and severely discriminated against for another century, and then wipe out all of that from your culture in two generations?

For the most part, I would say that "white supremacy" is the default cultural programming in the USA. It's so prevalent that it feels "normal". It's like a fish swimming in water. The fish doesn't even know what water is until he is removed from it. Unless a person has made a concerted and sustained effort to deprogram himself, he's still locked in the matrix I think, for lack of a better analogy. But again, that's just my opinion.

In my above post I wrote that I think most black Americans have a deep seeded inferiority complex. That comes from the same default programming. A black person has to do a lot of serious psychological work to deprogram himself from the way that the culture teaches him to look at himself. I know this because I've been on both sides of the fence myself.

[chrysostom]

1 minute ago, Peace said:

Sure, I would say that a huge majority of Americans would say "I don't believe people of certain races are inherently worth less or deserve to be subjugated". But what a man truly believes is shown by his actions.

Let's take someone called Bob. You know that Bob sincerely abhors racism and tries his best to treat every other person with respect regardless of race. What actions that you could observe would persuade you that Bob, at the same time, is also an unconscious white supremacist/racist?

[Peace]

4 minutes ago, chrysostom said:

Let's take someone called Bob. You know that Bob sincerely abhors racism and tries his best to treat every other person with respect regardless of race. What actions that you could observe would persuade you that Bob, at the same time, is also an unconscious white supremacist/racist?

Oh he would have to donate $3000 to my own personal reparations fund. Then I would know he is not racist. Would you like to make a donation?

But seriously. Who cares if he tries? Either he does treat people with the same level of dignity regardless of race, or he doesn't. If he treats black people with a lower level of dignity, then he is a white supremacist, is he not? I can try to stop watching gang-bang porno, but I'll still be in the confessional until I actually stop watching it.

But it's not like there is some magical formula. It's like when you interact with people in your everyday life. It's not like you get an "Aha" moment but through a series of interactions it's easy for you to know if a person views you in a positive or negative light, if that person views you an equal or as an inferior, if that person respects you or not. I do know white people whom I believe view me as more or less as an equal (at least in the racial sense) but it's not like I can really point to XYZ action and say "this particular action convinced me." But one key would be showing me the same level of basic courtesy and respect that you show the same members of your own race, for example.

[Peace]

39 minutes ago, chrysostom said:

Let's take someone called Bob. You know that Bob sincerely abhors racism and tries his best to treat every other person with respect regardless of race. What actions that you could observe would persuade you that Bob, at the same time, is also an unconscious white supremacist/racist?

Do you think that there are a lot of people in the USA who treat blacks and whites with the same level of respect? Is that what you are seeing from your view of the world?

From my view, there are very few BLACK people who treat blacks with the same level of respect that we treat whites. Most black people know if they are being honest that we treat white people much better than we treat ourselves. We give each other a frown all day and as soon as a white person walks in the room we put a big smile on our face. I'm dead serious, we all know this and it is spoken about behind closed doors all the time.

How can you have a society in which the minority is conditioned to have a strong preference for the majority yet the majority views the minority in equal regard? That doesn't really make sense to me. I would guess part of my opinion is based on that.

[Machine_Washable]

On 2/26/2021 at 12:07 PM, Era Might said:

Just saw this interesting essay in the London Review of Books on the idea of the "Muslim World":

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/elias-muhanna/reinventing-islam

Five hundred years after Ibn Khaldun’s death, the idea of the caliphate returned – briefly – as a symbol of group feeling among Muslims. Cemil Aydin’s book explores this moment in the late 19th century, when Muslim revivalists and political activists began rallying around the faded office of the caliphate as part of a groundswell of pan-Islamic solidarity. The significance of that moment was enormous: it not only planted the seeds of modern Islamist movements but, Aydin argues, created the very idea of the Muslim world. A standard view of Islamic political history holds that the Muslim world was most vivid as an imagined community during the age of its great medieval empires: afterwards, it gradually weakened until European colonialism shattered it for ever. Aydin thinks this has it ‘precisely backwards’: ‘In fact, Muslims did not imagine belonging to a global political unity until the peak of European hegemony in the late 19th century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.’ It was the imperial encounter and the reactions it inspired from colonised subjects that created the idea of the Muslim world.

This is a story of the racialisation of religion. During the first half of the 19th century, the main players on the world’s political stage were large, multiconfessional, multiethnic, multilingual empires. Despite their differences, the Ottomans, British, Russians and French were similarly committed to a view of empires as agents of universalist values, engaging with one another as equal partners. Although the 19th century witnessed dozens of wars between these powers, they worked together to maintain the imperial balance and even to legitimise one another through lavish state visits and strategic alliances. The logic of imperial cosmopolitanism trumped ethnic and religious solidarities.

Between the 1820s and 1880s, according to Aydin, something changed. A new ‘consciousness of racial and geopolitical unity and difference’ began to challenge the imperial consensus. Before the 1800s, he suggests, it would have been natural for a French colonial official to regard Muslim subjects within the French Empire as importantly different from the Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire: the fact that they shared a faith wouldn’t have led him to assume they belonged to a single racial group or political community. But during the second half of the 19th century, a new political order began to obscure the differences between Muslims from as far apart as Montenegro and Malaysia, India and Egypt, and the idea of a unified global Islam started to coalesce. In the first half of the century, ‘there were no hegemonic and monolithic narratives of Islam versus the West’; by the 1880s, they were everywhere.

 

The precipitants of this shift are complicated. Perhaps most important was the clamour for independence from Ottoman rule by Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian communities. The Balkans had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the mid-16th century, but with the First Serbian Uprising of 1804-13 they began to slip from Istanbul’s grasp. Greece got its independence in 1830; Romania and Bulgaria in 1878. Aydin suggests that Christian liberation movements like these, in the heart of Ottoman Europe, were an inspiration to anti-colonial struggles among Muslim communities elsewhere. The imperial framework would reassert itself – first in the Crimean War, and again during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – but the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-78 marked a point of no return. It was the first war to exhibit ‘a full mobilisation of Muslim and Christian identities globally, with the racialised distinction between Muslims and Christians overshadowing imperial logic’. By the early 1880s, Aydin argues, Europeans increasingly saw Muslims as a racial rather than religious group: the descendants of an inferior ‘Semitic’ race. Rather than contesting this racial claim, however, thinkers such as the Syrian scholar and editor Rashid Rida and the Indian jurist Syed Ameer Ali ‘thickened the racial discourse by proudly talking back to an imagined European imperial centre’, adding to a growing literature on medieval Islam’s contributions to science, philosophy and art. In combating the theories of Ernest Renan and other Europeans who held that Islam was fundamentally fanatical and opposed to rational thought, 19th-century Muslim thinkers ‘essentialised Islam and Muslim identity on their own terms’ by conjuring an image of a glorious civilisation that had simply fallen on hard times.

As a political project, pan-Islamism would fail: the solidarity that had developed between Muslims in India, Turkey and Indonesia as a result of the common experience of colonial racism retreated in the years following the First World War. In time, it would be replaced by ideologies such as Third Worldism and pan-Africanism, and of course the rise of nationalism during the period of independence. But its legacy endures, Aydin suggests, and not only in the language of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Even today’s well-meaning efforts by liberals to resist Islamophobia through the promotion of Islam as a tolerant, progressive religion run the risk of essentialising what has never been, historically speaking, a unitary phenomenon. ‘More than Wahhabi and other fundamentalist interpretations of Islam,’ Aydin writes, ‘it was the Muslim-ness constructed in the conversation between European Orientalists and Muslim modernists that created current obsessions with Islamic texts, cut off from a millennium of diverse Muslim religious and political experience.’ In other words, it’s not just the idea of Islam as menace that is problematic: it is the idea of Muslimness as such.

I appreciate you sharing this. It is interesting. And the book itself probably has a lot of interesting content. Unfortunately, like a lot of modern academic works, it tries so hard to make an obviously false claim true that it's hard to know what to do with the sound facts and arguments. I re-read the article a few times because I was sure I must be misunderstanding it. However I clicked the link and saw that the author made the same point. There is simply no way to credibly claim that the idea of the Muslim world was invented in the 19th century.

Islam very consciously understands all believers as belonging to one ummah. And the idea of a politically coherent Muslim world has always existed in the idea of dar al-Islam. This idea is so clear and foundational that when the mongols superficially converted to Islam but ignored the sharia and kept attacking Muslims ibn Taymiyyah had to issue a famous (and infamous) fatwa calling for a word meaning struggle that begins with a "J" against them. This was a shocking thing at the time.

Academics who come from Muslim backgrounds but who work in secular academia often of a need to tie everything that is problematic to modern, secular liberalism in the ummah back to colonialism. I believe that is what is happening here. Pan-Islamism is embarrassing to the author so he wants to make it a product of colonialism. It isn't. It's in the bones of Islam. Colonialism was evil. It caused lots and lots of terrible things. But it's not a key that unlocks every door.

 

[little2add]

On 2/25/2021 at 1:54 PM, Ice_nine said:

I'm only here to poke and prod and have a little bit of fun.

Aren’t we all? 

On 2/25/2021 at 10:21 PM, Ice_nine said:

Nobody is whining. If you're not interested in the thread, then go to another one.

 

 

[chrysostom]

6 hours ago, Peace said:

 

 

My question was just trying to tease out how you thought this worked, and I think you gave a lot of useful feedback. Thanks for that.

I've gotta dash but I might ruminate more about this later.

[Peace]

2 hours ago, chrysostom said:

My question was just trying to tease out how you thought this worked, and I think you gave a lot of useful feedback. Thanks for that.

I've gotta dash but I might ruminate more about this later.

That's cool. It's just my opinion. I don't expect others to share it.

[chrysostom]

6 hours ago, Peace said:

That's cool. It's just my opinion. I don't expect others to share it.

It's just interesting to talk with someone who 1) doesn't share my opinion but 2) isn't furious that I don't agree with them. There's a lot I don't know. Maybe you're right. I don't think so, but maybe my perspective can get a little wider.

[dUSt]

On 2/27/2021 at 5:39 PM, Clean Water said:

Would be cool to see articles like this on the front page of Phatmass. Instead of articles attacking Amanda Gorman and saying it would be better for Catholics if she wasn't in the church.

The homepage news feed is done automatically. I'd love to include Black Catholic Messenger on the homepage but I can't find an RSS feed for them. If you know of one, please let me know.

UPDATE: I found an RSS feed for Black Catholic Messenger (I guessed at it, haha). You should now begin to see their articles appear on the phatmass homepage.

[Ice_nine]

18 hours ago, Peace said:

Well I didn't mean you in particular. I'd have to interact with you in real life before reaching a conclusion on that. Sure, I would say that a huge majority of Americans would say "I don't believe people of certain races are inherently worth less or deserve to be subjugated". But what a man truly believes is shown by his actions. That is where the conversation become problematic.

At least to me, a lot of this is kind of like "original sin". We bear the scars of the society into which we were born. Do you really think that you can start with a culture where black Americans were forcibly enslaved for hundreds of years and in which they were segregated and severely discriminated against for another century, and then wipe out all of that from your culture in two generations?

 

 

I think after the civil rights era we were moving in the right direction. I don't know a whole lot about US history, but there was the re-constructionist era as well where Black Americans seemed to be doing well and making headway in righting our country's institutions. Of course we regressed into the Jim Crow phase of things. Correct me if I am wrong.

I think we are rapidly heading in the wrong direction nowadays, precisely by the woke mob and mega-media corporations fueling mistrust between racial groups. People think Trump did this. Don't get me wrong he used people too, but he certainly didn't start it. And there are people with much more power than him that could turn the tide but they don't want to. Appealing to tribalism and sensationalism is lucrative.

 

But I don't like the original sin sin analogy. It doesn't sit well with me. I think because the people who tend to push that narrative are atheistic/secular. It has become the new religion, and I don't think people realize it's just a cheap rebrand of the gospel. I think that's why it resonates so much with people, although they might be loath to admit it.

But if you think you can ever rid a society of racism you are fooling yourself. There will always be racism. And because we cannot change the past we will always have a racist history. The goal of eliminating racism is as futile as eliminating any other sin. There is no utopia we can make here. And there's no redemption or amount of cleansing to appease someone looking for something like that. 

Slavery is a reality of human nature. So is hate. So is tribalism . . . where are the goal posts? I would personally love to live in a post-racial society where your skin color was about as interesting as your eye color or how tall you are, but the people pulling the strings and shaping the culture don't seem to want that.

17 hours ago, Peace said:

Do you think that there are a lot of people in the USA who treat blacks and whites with the same level of respect? Is that what you are seeing from your view of the world?

 

I'd also like to quickly note that a feature of human psychology is that negative/threatening experiences are more salient than positive or neutral ones. This can and does influence your perception of how prevalent something is.

[Clean Water]

1 hour ago, dUSt said:

UPDATE: I found an RSS feed for Black Catholic Messenger (I guessed at it, haha). You should now begin to see their articles appear on the phatmass homepage.

This is great news. 

[Peace]

39 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

I think after the civil rights era we were moving in the right direction. I don't know a whole lot about US history, but there was the re-constructionist era as well where Black Americans seemed to be doing well and making headway in righting our country's institutions. Of course we regressed into the Jim Crow phase of things. Correct me if I am wrong.

Well I think that today we are moving in the right direction. In my view there has been a huge amount of improvement, even since when I was a kid.

39 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

I think we are rapidly heading in the wrong direction nowadays, precisely by the woke mob and mega-media corporations fueling mistrust between racial groups. People think Trump did this. Don't get me wrong he used people too, but he certainly didn't start it. And there are people with much more power than him that could turn the tide but they don't want to. Appealing to tribalism and sensationalism is lucrative.

I am no huge fan of the "Woke mob" and the MSM either. I definitely think that they like to fan the flames. It drives advertising revenue, as you suggest.

But I wouldn't say that things would be all hunky-dory without it. When everybody is battling for a share of the same pie, and one group has ten times more pie than another group, its gonna be pretty difficult for them to get along.

39 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

But I don't like the original sin sin analogy. It doesn't sit well with me. I think because the people who tend to push that narrative are atheistic/secular. It has become the new religion, and I don't think people realize it's just a cheap rebrand of the gospel. I think that's why it resonates so much with people, although they might be loath to admit it.

Well we don't have to use that analogy if it doesn't float your boat. A random kid may see something odd and say "That's right out of the twilight zone" without even ever having seen a single episode of the show, or knowing what the show was about. We have these sort of cultural norms, expectations, and so-forth that become embedded and passed down from generation to generation, without anyone being consciously aware of it. That's the general idea I think. One of those norms, in my view, is the expectation that white people will remain at the top of the food chain.

39 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

But if you think you can ever rid a society of racism you are fooling yourself. There will always be racism. And because we cannot change the past we will always have a racist history. The goal of eliminating racism is as futile as eliminating any other sin. There is no utopia we can make here. And there's no redemption or amount of cleansing to appease someone looking for something like that. 

Slavery is a reality of human nature. So is hate. So is tribalism . . . where are the goal posts? I would personally love to live in a post-racial society where your skin color was about as interesting as your eye color or how tall you are, but the people pulling the strings and shaping the culture don't seem to want that.

Well, whether we can rid society of racism or not is not something I think about. Maybe it is possible and maybe it isn't. I don't really care that much about that tbh.

I think it is a bit of a waste of time for a black person to try to convince white people that "society is racist" or to try to try to change a racist white person's mind so that he becomes non-racist. I have better things to do with my time. I will just avoid those people, hang out with people who like me, and handle my own business to improve my own life.  I don't have a need to interact with white people, although I do like to share time with those who are cool to me.

When I write "I think most Americans are white supremacists" its just an opinion based on my observations and deductions. Something that may be interesting to discuss, but if anyone does not agree with me on that, totally fine by me. If I am interested in changing anyone's mind, I would say I'm more interested in changing the mind of black people than white people. Generally I think most of our problems could be solved if we stopped idolizing white people and trying to force them to like us, instead of just getting on with our own business.

39 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

I'd also like to quickly note that a feature of human psychology is that negative/threatening experiences are more salient than positive or neutral ones. This can and does influence your perception of how prevalent something is.

I agree. A person's viewpoints can be skewed by a few negative experiences, such that he is not perceiving reality as it actually is. But on the other hand a negative environment can persist for so long that it no-longer seems negative. Now the "negative" seems normal. At least from my own perspective, I would say that the daily experience of a black man in the United States is one of consistent disrespect and devaluation of his worth as a human being. But it's so ingrained that we don't even notice it. The point where I personally become most cognizant of this was when I left the USA for 5 years, and then came back. I was able to recognize the "water" that I was swimming in all those years, once I was removed from it for a long period of time and then "re-introduced" into it without my prior programming.

I am just gonna go ahead and declare the hijacking of @Era Might's thread complete.

[Clean Water]

2 hours ago, Clean Water said:

This is great news. 

Already showing up. Nice.

Having an accurate view of history is a good thing. Even if it challenges your religious convictuons and makes you uncomfortable. Wokeism is a broad term. It can involve a lot of different issues. But often when I hear others complain about people being woke it's a disgust in people understanding what's being said in this 17 minutes video 'We the People' - the three most misunderstood words in US history.