Religion is a Mental Illness

Is white privilege the modern day Original Sin? How is mass denial about the truth of gender, any different from Catholic transubstantiation? Is woke culture today's dogmatic religious mob? Join me and @drpeterboghossian as we explore these questions and more in another episode of The Poetry Of Reality.

Peter Boghossian: I wrote, you know, "A Manual for Creating Atheists," and I was trying to make the world more sane and more rational. And I was trying to help people become more thoughtful and reflect on their beliefs, have reliable epistemologies upon which they could rely. And one of the things that I noticed since maybe 2013, maybe 2012, was that as religiosity decreased, deranged woke beliefs increased. And I guess my first question to you is -- uh, I don't know who came up with this, I might have come up with this, I don't know who came up with this -- but the Substitution Hypothesis.

Richard Dawkins: Yes.

Boghossian: So, do you think, and I honestly do not know the answer to this question, do you think that as one religion fades another -- like default is the belief state for humans, they just have to believe something -- and as one, as the old religion fades, a new one has to come in?

Dawkins: Yeah. Gullibility expands to fill the vacuum.

Boghossian: Exactly. Precisely.

Dawkins: I suppose that's right. I hadn't really thought of it before, but it sounds plausible to me. I think G.K. Chesterton, who was a very religious man said, "when people stop believing in God they they believe in anything." And he was a very witty, clever man, although he was a devout Roman Catholic. There's something in it I think, and there's no doubt about it that we seem to have exchanged one form of superstitious religiosity for another, and the analogy goes pretty deep. I think John McWhorter pointed out that there's a strong relationship between original sin in the Christian religion...

Boghossian: No, that was me pointing that out. 2014, with my article with James Lindsay. "Privilege is the original sin," but yeah, go ahead.

Dawkins: Good for you. So, original sin being we're all born in sin, we all inherit the sin of Adam. And we white people inherit the sin of slavery and colonialism and because we're white we have to feel guilty for what are, not necessarily our ancestors but people of the same color as us, in past centuries did. So that's that's one analogy. And then, well, transubstantiation which in the Catholic religion you know, the wine literally turns to blood, where "literally" doesn't quite mean literally, it means what Aristotle called the "accidentals" stay wine but the true "substance" of the wine becomes blood. So when somebody stands up and says "I am a woman," although they've got a male body, that's transubstantiation. In the accidentals they still have a penis and they still have Y chromosome, but in the true substance, they have become female. So trans -- that's where the word transubstantiation comes from, the transubstance, and there's a very strong analogy to transubstantiation in transsexualism.

Boghossian: Tell me more, how so?

Dawkins: Well, the wine becomes blood where the priest simply declares it as it is. And a male person becomes female when he declares himself to be female. And in the Aristotelian terms, the substance has changed, the substance of wine has changed to blood, the substance of maleness of changed to femaleness, but the accidentals, the incidentals are what are regarded by Catholics as trivial and by trans people as trivial. So they really believe that they have become the other sex.

Boghossian: It's remarkable how obvious it is that those are delusions. I mean it's crystal clear to anybody not caught in the orbit of the ideology that that is a delusion.

Dawkins: Yes. They get around it by this word "gender," which is separate from sex. And there are some who I think even think their sex has changed.

Boghossian: Correct.

Dawkins: And others who think that, they admit that their sex hasn't changed but their agenda has.

Boghossian: So, I guess I have two questions. One is, it seems to me that there are degrees of delusion that one can have. So, if we accept that, like there are certain things that are -- if I told you those books are really aliens from another planet and they've come down, okay that's another level of delusion. And so, I often think -- this is the thing that that's been causing me to think about this. I'm utterly incredulous at the sheer madness that people believe now. In a way that I was not incredulous, you know in 2010 or 2000 or so. So, let's take a look at, somebody walked on water. This guy named Jesus, he walked on water, you know, this is intervention in the space time continuum by a supernatural being and it caused this individual to walk on water. Okay, that's clearly a delusion if somebody believes in it, if someone accepts that is true. And then you have the belief that men can get pregnant. That to me seems like a significantly more profound delusion. Or am I wrong?

Dawkins: Yes. But doesn't it come from the postmodern belief that feelings are more important than facts?

Boghossian: Yeah, standpoint epistemology. And it comes, I guess they could just say that it's the redefinition of the word. But they actually like, they literally believe men can get pregnant. And the thing that I've been thinking about is, kind of goes back to Plato, is it better to let people believe benign delusions? I mean, in an ideal world, people wouldn't believe, people would proportion their confidence in the belief to the evidence they have for the belief. But humanity is sloppy and messy and the thing that I've been thinking about recently is, if it's true that there are degrees of delusion and if it's true -- and I don't know if it's true -- that there's a substitution hypothesis, then should rational people step out of the way or -- not encourage people to believe things that are false, because I would never do that and I think that's grossly unethical -- but there are certain delusions that are better for people to believe in en masse than others.

Dawkins: Yeah, so if you've got to believe in a delusion, if there's something, some law that says there's a certain quotient of deludedness that everybody's got to have, and certainly some are more harmless than others.

Boghossian: Correct.

Dawkins: I mean, I sort of feel there's a little bit about Islam and Christianity that -- Islam is such an evil at the moment, or Islamism is such an evil at the moment, that in Africa especially, maybe Christianity is a better alternative and it may be that it's no good trying to preach atheism in Africa, and Christianity might be a better a better alternative.

[..]

Dawkins: I think Stephen Pinker in his latest book has evidence that when we make our political judgment -- we, I mean humanity -- it tends to be not based on evidence, but tends to be based upon tribal loyalty, And that's a very depressing conclusion. And, by the way, one of the things that's been depressing me about my being sort of anti-woke and anti-the militant trans lobby, is that people think I must be right wing. And I've never been right wing. I voted left all my life and, I mean, I detest Donald Trump, for example, but there are people out there on Twitter especially who think that because I detest Donald Trump, therefore I must be an apologist for trans-wokeism or vice versa.

Boghossian: Yeah, so let's talk about that. I think that that is an intentional tactic of people. I think that that is what woke people use, people who have fallen -- have had their cognitions hijacked to this ideology, and I think it's very easy to write you off entirely if they say, "oh Richard Dawkins, he's just a right-wing extremist," you know, "Pinker he's a right-wing extremist," although he's the second largest donor to the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and Harvard, or who whoever it is. I've never voted for Republican candidate my whole life. I'm constantly getting that I'm on the right, but I think it's a tactic both because they don't have to do the intellectual work to rebut the arguments, so they can just a priori say that's not true. And it's a tactic because the left-wing media won't have me on, for example, so left-wing media won't, it has a kind of allergy to any self-criticism. So, then I'll go on the on the right-wing media, and the people on the left will say, "well look Boghossian's a right-winger." Well, no I'm only going on the right because -- I'm more than happy and nobody's ever invited me. I've actually invited myself and they won't have me. So, I think it's a kind of strategy to not do the intellectual work to rebut the position. Because it's hard to rebut the position.

Suella Braverman and the dirty secret about white guilt

The chattering classes are mad at Suella Braverman again. What’s she done this time? Brace yourselves: she said racial collective guilt is a

The Spectator

The chattering classes are mad at Suella Braverman again. What’s she done this time? Brace yourselves: she said racial collective guilt is a bad idea. She said we should not demonise an entire race just because some members of that race did something bad. She said we should never engage in racial shaming. Is there no end to this woman’s nastiness?

I’m old enough to remember when comments like these would have been utterly uncontroversial. When they would have been treated as decent and progressive, in fact. Right-thinking people once railed against the ideology of collective racial punishment, against the ugly idea that the sins of the individual should be visited upon the ethnic group he or she hailed from.

No longer, it seems, judging from the audible intake of breath that greeted Ms Braverman’s insistence that racial shaming has no place in our society. It was at the National Conservatism conference in London that she uttered the incendiary words. White people, she said, should feel no guilt for the crimes committed by white people in the past.

‘White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’, she said. ‘Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born’. To my ears, this is as commonsensical as it gets. The idea that white Brits should feel culpable for a vile, cruel practice like slavery that was abolished more than 200 years ago is crazy. It had nothing to do with them.

Braverman’s words will infuriate the identitarian left, however. Because they do buy into the ideology of collective racial guilt. They do think people in the present should self-flagellate for the horrors of the past. 

That’s why writers for the Guardian go on about ‘white debt’ – the need for whites to acknowledge and even apologise for British slavery. Why there is pressure on King Charles to say sorry for slavery, despite the fact that he’s never owned a slave. Why articles are published with headlines like ‘How to apologise for slavery’, advising white nations on the right way to repent for historic wrongs.

Under identity politics, white people are expected to beat themselves up for every bad thing done by white people. They’re told to ‘check their white privilege’, to repent for their original sin of racism.

‘White Christians’ must ‘repent of our own prejudices’, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. As if every white – including the little old lady who worships in a CofE village church – bears some kind of collective responsibility for that terrible American crime.

And yet we’re expected to believe that Braverman, with her critique of collective racial guilt, is the bad person, while the modish left, with their belief that all white people should do penance for the wrongs of others, are the good people.

There’s a delicious irony here: the right-on activists who damn Braverman as a racist pox on British society behave in a far more racist way than she ever has. Braverman’s articulate stand against the fashionable rehabilitation of racial shaming is anti-racist in the real meaning of that phrase.

Here’s the twist in this tale. The reason some will be bristling at Braverman’s takedown of white guilt is because they like feeling guilty. Confessing their white privilege makes them feel good. In fact, racial self-loathing, bizarrely, has become a shortcut to the moral high ground for the well-connected. 

This is the most important thing to understand about white guilt: it’s a moral boast disguised as racial remorse. In checking their privilege, in expressing regret for the crimes of their forefathers, in apologetically saying ‘As a white person’ before their every utterance, the white middle classes are really advertising their heightened moral sensibilities. They’re making a big, noisy display of their superior levels of racial and social awareness.

It looks like they’re saying, ‘Oh God, I’m white, how awful’, but really they’re saying: ‘I am a virtuous person. I am a special person. Behold my righteousness.’

In a sense, white shame is the new white pride. It’s the means through which well-educated white people demonstrate their social superiority to others, to the less racially aware, to the gammon and the chavs. 

It provides them with the tingle of moral superiority in relation to black people, too. There’s a saviour complex to these nauseating theatrics of white guilt. Guilt-performing liberals fancy themselves as the therapists of the black community, arrogantly believing that their mawkish, self-serving displays of historic regret will help to fix those allegedly wounded people.

This is the dirty secret of white guilt. It recreates the unequal relationship between whites and blacks, only in this instance the whites are not oppressing black people but rather are delivering them from their sad, broken state by telling them how sorry they are for old white crimes. It is breathtakingly paternalistic.

Hence the discomfort with Braverman’s stinging aside against white guilt. White guilt is the soapbox from which the new elite signals its specialness and builds up its cultural power. They cannot believe an uppity woman like Suella might take it away from them.

We’re not guilty for crimes of history

Leftists hurl rocks at America, claiming it is an irredeemably racist nation, but what happens when they discover they are as much a part of

New York Post

Leftists hurl rocks at America, claiming it is an irredeemably racist nation. But what happens when they discover they live in a glass house, and are as much a part of that messy, flawed history? 

Activist, communist and former fugitive Angela Davis was shocked to learn she is a Mayflower descendent on Tuesday’s “Finding Your Roots” episode. 

Now 79, Davis was the latest to appear on the PBS show where celebrities and public figures learn about their ancestry. 

Near the episode’s end, after discussing multiple members of her family, the former Black Panther learned she’s descended from William Brewster, one of the 101 people who came to the colonies in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. 

“No, I can’t believe this,” Davis replied, laughing. “No, my ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower.” 

She continued to protest while Gates confirmed the findings, then responded, “Oof. That’s a little bit too much to deal with right now.” 

“Would you ever in your wildest dreams think that you may have been descended from the people who laid the foundation of this country?” he asked. 

“Never, never, never, never, never,” she said. 

Our villainous selves 

Activists like Angela Davis have spent their entire careers excoriating America’s ancestors for their supposed participation in or benefiting from a system of white supremacy since the first Europeans landed here — and now Davis has realized she descends, at least partly, from those very villains. 

As horrified as Davis may be at finding out this information about her lineage, she shouldn’t be. Even if she were right about her interpretation of “old America,” she has nothing to do with it and she has nothing to be ashamed of. The sins of the father shouldn’t be paid by the son; likewise, we shouldn’t judge Davis’ grandchildren for having a commie as a grandmother. 

Leftists have a hard time understanding that we shouldn’t encourage people to behave like the communist regime in North Korea, which punishes all descendants with imprisonment for up to three generations for a single action of someone who happens to be in their bloodline whom they may never have met. 

America’s glass house 

History is complex because people are complex. We should stop being overly critical and simplistic about the behavior of our ancestors, who were people of their time, by comparing it to our present-day norms and social expectations. 

As clean as we think our hands are, in a couple of generations, our descendants could easily look back and shake their heads at some of the barbarism we think is completely normal and remains legal. 

Just because we know how to utilize far more advanced gadgets than our predecessors doesn’t mean that we are any less humanly flawed than them. 

Rather than constantly litigating and debating the past, why don’t we continue to build a better country together? 

You’re not supposed to throw rocks while living in a glass house because you’re not the only one who has access to rocks, and the motivation for vengeance gives people herculean strength as well. 

But in this case, you shouldn’t throw rocks because you may accidentally damage your own window. 

Angela Davis discovers her ancestor came to the US on Mayflower

A Black Panther who's also a communist has faced calls to pay reparations after discovering her ancestors were white puritans and slave owne

Mail Online

Black Panther communist Angela Davis - who teaches that U.S. was built by racist colonizers - faces calls to pay reparations after genealogy show reveals her white puritan ancestor arrived in America on the Mayflower

• Angela Davis, 79, learned that her ancestor came to the US on the Mayflower • The former Black Panther also discovered she had two white grandparents • She appeared on PBS's Finding Your Roots in an episode that aired on Tuesday

A famed Black Panther who's also a communist has faced calls to pay reparations after discovering her ancestors were white puritans who arrived in the US on the Mayflower.

Angela Davis, 79, was flabbergasted to discover both sides of her family were white, and that her mom's ancestors were slave owners, on PBS show Finding Your Roots.

And the stunning revelations sparked calls for the famously woke Marxist University of California professor to herself pay reparations, having previously called on whites to pony-up in the past. 

Sharing a tweet about the show, conservative pundit Matt Walsh wrote: 'It gets better. She's also descended from a slave owner. On her father's side is a pilgrim. On her mother's side is a slave owner. Looks like Angela Davis owes some reparations.' 

Another Twitter user called AK Kamara wrote: 'Angela Davis, the radical Marxist and former black panther, recently discovered she is also the ancestor of colonizers and slave owners. I guess she owes herself reparations. This timeline is hilarious.'

Davis became nationally known in 1970 when guns she owned were used in the holding up of a Marin County courtroom in California which left four dead, including the judge.

After the FBI issued a warrant for her arrest she went on the run and became listed as one of the department's 10 Most Wanted. After her eventual arrest she spent 16 months in jail before being found not guilty.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944 during an era of segregation and violent racial division in the South.

While studying in West Germany in her youth she was drawn to far-left politics and upon returning to the US became involved with the Black Panthers and the Communist Party USA. 

She appeared shocked during the TV interview that aired this week in which Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told her of her ancestry.

'No. I can't believe this. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower,' she said - only to be later told that they did indeed arrive in the US aboard the famed pilgrim ship. 

The Mayflower was an English boat that brought white English families, known as the Pilgrims, to the American continent to permanently establish the New England colony in 1620.

'You are descended from the 101 people who sailed on the Mayflower,' reiterated Gates Jr., who is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

The one-hour show, in which public figures learn about their ancestry, outlined how William Brewster, who traveled aboard the boat with his wife Mary Wentworth Brewster, was Davis's 10th great-grandfather.

Mary was one of only five adult women from the Mayflower to have survived the first winter after arriving in the US and one of only four such to survive until the 'first Thanksgiving' in 1621, which she was said to have helped cook. 

The revelation caused many to point out the complexity of ancestry and on social media some suggested that by some logic Davis should pay black reparations.

The concept of reparations - an idea she has endorsed in the past - is that people with ancestors who were enslaved should be financially reimbursed by those whose ancestors enslaved them.

'This vividly illustrates the absurdity of reparations as a concept, among other things,' said one person on Twitter, in response to a clip of the revelation. 

'Before any talk about reparations everybody needs to take the ancestry DNA test. I think a lot of people would be shocked to to discover who they were descended from,' said another. 

Davis also made discoveries about her mother, Sallye Bell, who was found to be the daughter of a successful white Alabama lawyer who himself descended from a slave owner.

Bell was a school teacher and grew up in a foster home, never knowing either of her biological parents. Her mother had genetics that traced back to Africa but her father was John Austin Darden, who was also involved in politics, and was born in Rockford Coosa, Alabama, in 1879.

'He has my mother's lips,' Davis said as she was presented a photo of her grandfather. 'I can't get used to the fact this is my mother's father.'

A clipping from an old Alabama newspaper shone light on who Darden had been. 

'The former publisher of the Goodwater Enterprise, who served as both a representative and a senator at various times from 1914 to 1933, had practiced law here 40 years.' 

'Was he a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the white citizens council?' Davis asked. 'That's something I would also want to know. Because in those days in order to achieve that power one had to thoroughly embrace white supremacy.

'I'm both glad and I'm angry. I'm really, really angry,' she added. 

As Gates went back further in time things got murkier still. Stephen Darden, her fourth great grandfather, was born in colonial Virginia around 1750.

He was a patriot who played the drums during the Revolutionary War, according to a muster roll. Afterwards he moved from Virginia to Georgia, where he owned a farm and at least six slaves.

'I always imagine my ancestors as the people who were enslaved. My mind and my heart are swirling with all of these contradictory emotions,' said Davis.

'I'm glad on the one hand we've begun to solve this mystery, we have something we didn't have before, but at the same time I think it makes me even more committed to struggling for a better world.

'This world that could give rise to such a beautiful person as my mother was not the world I want to see in the future,' she added.

Davis's father Benjamin Frank Davis grew in up in Lyndon, Alabama. His mother was Mollie Spencer butm similarly, nothing was known about his father.

Alabama Census records indicated that for at least ten years Mollie lived next door to a white man named Murphy Jones. Records stated that he sold her two acres of land for two hundred dollars and that the two were likely relatively close.

Using genetic profiles of Murphy's known living relatives, researchers found multiple matches to Angela, indicating that Jones was her grandfather.

Mollie Spencer's father was named Isom Spencer and was listed as collateral on a loan document filed by a slave owner named William K. Pauling, who owned a plantation in Marengo, Alabama.  

'I assume that my ancestors lived on plantations as slaves, but of course I didn't know who they were and I didn't know who the slave owners were,' she said.

It transpired that Isom was a remarkable figure who marked the transition of her family from enslaved to free. Court records uncovered by PBS showed he even brought a complaint against the slaver over his nephews, who were being held in the plantation under 'apprenticeships'. 

'I'm happy to find there's a motif of resistance there because that is what I feel I've been trying to do since I was a teenager,' said Davis, reflecting on her grandfather's struggle.

“So I was born sick, and forced to repent as the cure.

And they call that mercy from the creator?”

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned

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"I'm dreaming of a world without a religion that tells me that I'm not good enough as soon as I'm born.

That I need to be saved from a decision I didn't make, that I need to pay for a piece of fruit that I never ate...

My dream is peace and harmony around me, nothing but tranquillity. I have a dream. My dream.'

-- Greydon Square, The Dream

• Hillsdale Imprimis: “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It.” Link.
• Heritage Foundation: “Critical Race Theory Would Not Solve Racial Inequality: It Would Deepen It. Link.

• “Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.” Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility.”
• “Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence.” Derald Sue, “The Invisible Whiteness of Being.”
• “Whiteness by its very definition and operation as a key element of white supremacy kills; it is mental and physical terrorism. To end the white terrorism that is directed at racially oppressed people here and in other nations, it is essential that self-identified whites and their whiteness collaborators among the racially oppressed confront their white problem head-on, unencumbered by racial comfort.” Johnny Williams in the Hartford Courant.

• “All white people are racist or complicit by virtue of benefiting from privileges that are not something they can voluntarily renounce.” Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good.
• “White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.” Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility.
• “According to studies, babies at two to three years old, start internalizing racist ideas, start discerning and making decisions based on racist ideas … We’re allowing our society to raise them to be racist.” Ibram Kendi on KING5 News.

• “White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions … Entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how—rather than if—our racism is manifest.” Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility.
• “America is inherently a ‘white’ country: in character, in structure, in culture. Needless to say, black Americans create lives of their own. Yet, as a people, they face boundaries and constrictions set by the white majority. America’s version of apartheid, while lacking overt legal sanction, comes closest to the system even now being reformed in the land of its invention.” Andrew Hacker, Two Nations.
• “It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White.” Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist.

• “Many critical race theorists and social scientists alike hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” Delgado & Stefanic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.
• “All whites are racist … because we benefit from systemic white privilege. Generally whites think of racism as voluntary, intentional conduct done by horrible others. Whites spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves and each other that we are not racist. A big step would be for whites to admit that we are racist and then to consider what to do about it.” Wildman and Davis, Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.

• “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Delgado & Stefanic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.
• “[Critical race theorists] are also highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights … Think how that system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity but resists programs that assure equality of results.” Delgado & Stefanic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

• “White people are raised on five strong cultural myths: meritocracy, manifest destiny, white racelessness, monoculture, and white moral and managerial superiority. These lay the foundation for our feeling good about ourselves as white people, and they work in us to override and discredit counter-evidence.” Peggy McIntosh, “White People Facing Race: Uncovering Myths that keep Racism in Place.”
• “The ideologies of meritocracy, equal opportunity, individualism, and human nature we described above play a powerful role in denying the current of privilege and insisting that society is just.” Ozlem & DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?.

• “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist.
• “Formal equality overlooks structural disadvantage and requires mere nondiscrimination or ‘equal treatment’; by contrast, affirmative action calls for equalizing treatment by redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality.” Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property.”

• “The American marketplace of ideas was founded with the idea of the racial inferiority of non-whites as one of its chief commodities, and ever since the market opened, racism has remained its most active item in trade.” Mari Matsuda, et. al., Words That Wound.
• “[Critical race theorist Mari] Matsuda suggested the creation of a legal doctrine to limit hate speech in cases where the message is one of racial inferiority, the message is directed against a historically oppressed group, and the message is persecutorial, hateful, and degrading.” The First Amendment Encyclopedia.
• “The DOA [or Department of Antiracism, as proposed by Kendi] would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” Ibram Kendi, “Inequality: Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment.”

• “We believe that so long as the white race exists, all movements against what is called ‘racism’ will fail. Therefore, our aim is to abolish the white race.” Noel Ignatiev in Critical Whiteness Studies.
• “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Noel Ignatiev in the film Indoctrinate U.
• “If you abolish slavery, you abolish slaveholders. If you want to abolish racial oppression, you do away with whiteness.” Noel Ignatiev in the film Indoctrinate U.

• “Multi-racial space often results in the people of color—who have been most harmed by structural racism—carrying an additional burden of educating others (at best) or being retraumatized through the reliving of painful experiences.” JustLead Washington, Caucuses as a Racial Justice Strategy.
• “In a RAG [racial affinity group], white people can discover together their group identity. They can cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often accompany white racial awakening. They can also discern white privilege and its impact without the aid of or dependence on POC.” Ruth King, Transforming Racism From The Inside Out.

• “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist…. And in order to truly be anti-capitalist, you have to be antiracist, because they’re interrelated.” Ibram Kendi, “Ibram X. Kendi on Why We Need to Fight Racism the Way We Fight Cancer.”
• “In challenging the property interest in whiteness, affirmative action [in support of property redistribution] could facilitate the destruction of the false premises of legitimacy and exclusivity inherent in whiteness and break the distorting link between white identity and property … Existing distributions of property will be modified by rectifying unjust loss and inequality. Property rights will then be respected, but they will not be absolute and will be considered against a societal requirement of affirmative action.” Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property.”

[ Note: Kendi was paid $15,000 for a single one-hour Zoom session by Barrington, RI, and $20,000 for the same by Fairfax County, VA. ]

• Seattle Public Schools told teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and that white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.” Link.
• San Diego Public Schools accused white teachers of being colonizers on stolen Native American land and told them “you are racist” and “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.” They recommended that the teachers undergo “antiracist therapy.” Link.
• A Cupertino, California, elementary school forced third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” They separated the eight-year-old children into oppressors and oppressed. Link.
• A middle school in Springfield, Missouri, forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” claiming that white heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressors and must atone for their “covert white supremacy.” Link.
• A Philadelphia elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulated a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison. At this school, 87 percent of students will fail to achieve basic literacy by graduation. Link.
• Buffalo Public Schools taught students that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism and forced kindergarteners to watch a video of dead black children warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” who might kill them at any time. Link.
• The Arizona Department of Education created an “equity” toolkit claiming that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that white children become full racists—”strongly biased in favor of whiteness”—by age five. Link.
• The California Department of Education passed an “ethnic studies” curriculum that calls for the “decolonization” of American society and has students chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice. The solution, according to one author, is “countergenocide.” Link.
• North Carolina’s largest school district launched a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces”—and encouraged teachers to subvert families and push the ideology of “antiracism” directly onto students without parental consent. Link.
• Santa Clara County Office of Education denounced the United States as a “parasitic system” based on the “invasion” of “white male settlers” and encouraged teachers to “cash in on kids’ inherent empathy” in order to recruit them into political activism. Link.
• Portland Public Schools trained children to become race-conscious revolutionaries by teaching that racism “infects the very structure(s) of our society,” and telling students to immerse themselves in “revolution.” Link.
• The principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents a “tool for action,” which tells them they must become “white traitors” and then advocate for full “white abolition.” Link.
• Students at the elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors”—and school administrators immediately caved to their demands. Link.

• The Treasury Department told employees that “all white people” are racist and that children become racist by 3 months old. Link.
• A Department of Education-funded conference advocated for “abolition” of American institutions and told whites they must “give up” their “wealth.” Link.
• The National Credit Union Administration told employees America was founded on “white supremacy.” Link.
• The Department of Homeland Security told its white employees that they have been “socialized into oppressor roles.” Link.
• The CDC hosted a 13-week training program declaring that “racism is a public health crisis” and denounced the US as a nation of “White supremacist ideology.” Link.
• The State Department, EPA, and VA pressured staff to denounce their “white privilege,” become “co-resistors” against “systemic racism,” and sign “equity pledges.” Link.

• The Walt Disney Corporation claimed that America was founded on “systemic racism,” encouraged employees to complete a “white privilege checklist,” and separated minorities into racially-segregated “affinity groups.” Link.
• Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent key executives on a mission to deconstruct their “white male privilege” and encouraged them to atone for their “white male privilege.” Link.

And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.

The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

The Abrahamic God is a sadistic tyrant who, if the stories are to be believed, will torture people for eternity over thought crimes, who inspires, commands, and indeed personally executes holy war and genocide, who stifles curiosity and free thought wherever he finds it, who does not care to prevent needless misery, who punishes children for the sins of their parents, who creates people sick, and commands them to be well.

I see no evidence that this being exists, but even if it did, I would serve Satan in rebellion.