In 2000 you could call muslims violent, you could say all sorts of things about the barbaric and savage and backward things they did.
In 2015, muslims arrived in europe and america in large numbers, whenever they were criticized, they then started attacking people who were either the ones who criticized them, or someone from the same group as the one who criticized them.
Then violence from muslims was the expected result of saying anything they did not like, and people stopped calling them violent or savage, they started saying the opposite, and shutting down anyone who did criticize them by accusing them of being an "islamophobe", which was a term only recently heard of by most people.
In fact, people started calling them "peaceful" and "progressive" the exact opposite of what they were, and if you talked to someone in private about it, they'd tell you they were doing it BECAUSE they knew the exact opposite was true, and they were scared that not trying to avoid getting them upset was required for maintaining the peace.
So that is how the liberals went from using Islam as the prime example of what was wrong with religion, to protecting the muslims from the criticism they themselves were heaping upon the ideology not even a decade prior.
It's not a new thing, in the old days of Europe people believed in faeries, they didn't perceive them like we do today, back then they were dangerous creatures who killed, tortured, destroyed, and cursed people with powerful magick that they had as they were basically the Dark Old Gods of the Pagans with a poor opinion of humans, who had to be supplicated in order to avoid their wrath, in fact, quite a few horror stories were written about them and they were as common as the villains in horror tales as the more traditional movie monsters (like zombies or ghosts) are in the horror of today.
So what the people back then did, was they did all sorts of things to keep the faeries from being offended, not making them upset was important because then they would be responsible for the cruel fate that would befall them and their people if they pissed these guys off, the names associated with these things included "the fair folk" and "good neighbors" and "the gentle ones" and "the beautiful strangers", all told because they knew, they were not fair, but cruel and capricious, better to stay far away from, needlessly brutal and violent, and often took forms that were considered hideous to look at (often on purpose, just to scare the shit out of people or get people to show disgust at them, which they could then punish them for).
There were a fuck-ton of traditions and rituals and superstitions that revolved around keeping the faeries from not fucking you up, these were enforced upon their neighbors, since one guy's screw-up meant that everyone could have paid the price, and it would not be a pleasant affair, they were dealing with things that they considered as being similar to the way we would consider the eldritch beings of Lovecraft, you barely understand them, but at the same time, they are so much more then you, that you definitely don't want to give them any reason to harm you.
A lot of people wrote about God in much the same way, for the same reasons, most people did not get their perspective of god from the bible, they got it from selected passages that were chosen for political reasons by religious authorities who had positions in society that were basically political, steering the masses in a direction his higher-ups considered to be useful.
So the masses would hear of stories about an angry god who is preoccupied with cruelly punishing those who committed even the slightest of sins with fates that were violent or painful or otherwise very unpleasant, and that is all BEFORE he stuffs you right into the bowels of Hell, where things get infinitely worse than your time on Earth.
A lot of the supplication and superstition around God was therefore more focused on not upsetting the guy and avoiding Hell, than on getting into his good graces and going into Heaven. A lot of the titles for God were therefore overly sycophantic, they wanted only to keep God from getting all smitey on them, and that included keeping their neighbors from saying or doing anything that God might not be too fond of.
Again, he was more of this impersonal unknowable creature back then than he is now, but one you wanted to do a lot to avoid irritating. Their God was an asshole who liked to basically rule people with an iron fist and was constantly looking for something he could pretend was an excuse to lay the hurt on sinners and those who were in the general vicinity of those sinners.
You could say being overly protective of those who mistreat us when offended is one of the parts of our cultures as white people, heck, take a look at greek/roman myth, where the Gods were doing horror novel type stuff to people for the crime of merely failing to offer a sacrifice to them, or the stories of ancient sumeria, where the goddess of love and fertility caused a rising of undead to eat the living because she was offended (to be fair, Ishtar was also the godesss of revenge).
Tldr
your loss it was a fine read
I did enjoy the img tho
I was really just looking for an excuse to use the pic.
(post is archived)