Solid OP. One type of obvious bigotry you actually still hear is people who use their opposition to affirmative action as a reason to discount the accomplishments of specific black people or women. You hear people like Rush do it to Obama and some of the less serious posters here have made similar idiotic claims, but pretty much everybody sees them as bigots and have no problem with calling them bigots.

The biggest problem with bigotry is that it encourages sloppy thinking and erodes understanding of one another and oneself. The core dishonesty here is sudden pretense of caring about issues that wouldn't otherwise bother them - whether mistreatment of women in muslim countries, single mothers in African-American communities, rights of gay people in muslim countries, homophobia among African-Americans, etc. If you truly cared about these cultural issues, you'd be too busy to work on related problems in your own community to bother hating on things that you simply don't understand. Those are all big issues, not just in some foreign countries and ghettos, but most American (and Western) communities, if you care to look. There's no shortage of work you can do to help out.

Thus, it's fairly easy to see that while there's a pretense of rational thinking in those judgments, feelings of hatred and fear come first, which compel one to look for evidence that corroborates those feelings. Otherwise, from a rational standpoint, you would be most familiar with problems in your own culture, while other cultures may present ideas that your own culture could adopt to deal with your problems. Problems in other cultures would be much less important to you. In short, every time you're more focused on others' flaws and your virtues, on some fundamental level, you're not concerned about virtues and flaws themselves. If you were, you'd be focused on your own flaws and others' virtues.


This is such a poignant question, because it addresses this fundamental contradiction - before you can care about quality, you must have a strong sense of what leads to quality or lack thereof. If you don't, then lack of quality in other cultures is not the reason why you hate them.

Bigotry comes from fear. What we know to be inferior doesn't bother us. What's different from us and may very well be superior triggers fear. Fear, in turns triggers superiority rhetoric (our culture/race/whatever is better), which serves two purposes - it soothes us that we're better than that which we fear and serves to legitimize negative action.

Here's a related example of such sloppy thinking (from our otherwise excellent poster Nichlemn) - read my posts in the thread for explanations. Everyone engages in these sorts of thinking all the time, but it helps us tremendouly to recognize this sort of internal rhetoric and reverse it.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...easons-872613/

Phone Booth do you think the way women are treated in Islamic culture is acceptable compared to the way women are treated in Westernized countries? You think neither one is superior or inferior to the other in terms of womens' rights?

I guess you didn't look at any of the pictures in OP.

Oh my bad I thought we were talking about present day, not 50-150 years ago.

Then look at the ones a little further down.

All political/philosophical views (ie. inc. religion) are open to scrutiny and even hatred on a intellectual level as far as I'm concerned e.g. I hate fascism and I can justify why. Presumably you will not charge me with bigotry against fascists? Yet, when it comes to the major religions (which are philosophies) you grant them elevated status to be immune from scorn.

If someone like fly can hate libertarianism and have harsh words for its adherents, then why is it anymore bigoted to hate Catholicism? If in discourse we're going to have to give religion an elevated status over other beliefs/views (e.g. Marxism/Libertarianism) then lets get that out in the open shall we?

I never said that something being voluntary is a sufficient reason to be allowed to 'hate' it. I was making the distinction between race and religion ie. unlike religion, being a member of a certain race does not necessitate a set of beliefs or qualities voluntarily acquired that can be justifiably critiqued.

In religious households, where you admit that the children tend to adopt the religious world view of their parents, do you think the acceptance of the theory of evolution (your earlier analogy) is commonplace? If not, do you think that is another reason one might be justifiably 'bigoted' against religion?

It is trivial to show that the loathsome parts of both Catholicism and Islam are not shared by all people who call themselves Catholics or Muslims. The loathsome parts aren't taught by all clergy members, either. This is distinct from, say, nazism.

sigh, wookie I guess I was wrong about my position fast forwarding the argument. Sorry you tried it on 3rdcheckraise.

The quick answer to what you're saying is that I think you (and most people) have an oversimplified view of belief complexes associated with particular religions. Here's an argument along these lines that I've made before:

Debates of scriptural literalism generally seem like straw men to me for this reason.

Your statements attempting to justify your dislike of Islam seem like rationalizations - the near immediate inconsistency in those two posts is a good indicator of this.

Yeah they make gross generalizations about demographic entities like a specific ethnic groups and/or racial type.

Saudi Arabia. Women are not allowed to drive, leave the house without a male gaurdian, hold political office, vote, they are discouraged from working in the private sector, and only the husband is allowed to get a divorce.

Pre U.S. invasion, Afghani women were not even allowed to go to school.

Iran. Men are buried from the head up when stoned. Women from the waist up.

These are entire countries, not isolated incidents.

Is that institutionalized or accepted as norm in Western countries? Is there a reason you posted that picture?

Yay, a bigotry bitching hypocrites containment thread.

this Jon Stewart video

Don't be sorry, just come up with better argument. Wookie is pretty useless at that.

I asked a question and still didn't get the answer. Am i a bigot for hating on ideology of a large group of people without actually hating anyone from that group.

And Wookie posts a picture of a beaten up white woman. What futile and delusional attempt to equalize the treatment of women in western and islamic countries.

Skimmed thread, didn't see this, please remove if it's been posted:

How does Bill Maher rate on the bigotometer?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBAG58aHwOo

I'll try to provide an answer:

No, probably not, in the sense that you're hating an intellectual idea rather than a person.

However, when you start buying your hating in bulk and not actually trying to identify what someone actually thinks, or attributing views of a minority or even a reasonable majority of that group you hate to all people of that group without bothering to try to verify that those people really do all believe that (and believe it with the fervor you would attribute to them), then yeah, that's where you start becoming a bigot.

Lol, no. Making fun of catholic confession is no different than attacking Afghanistan not allowing women to gain education.

Bigotry is not taking specific examples you disagree with and then mocking them.

You are free to dislike parts of an Islamic religion or society, you are even free to dislike stuff like evolution and abortion as part of my secular society, but i am free to dislike stuff about catholic society or religion like the wholesale wiping free of sin after the fact which does not disincentivise the actual sin in the first place.

So, whilst in no way saying they are equal, i assume you are not going to call ineedscissors a bigot for saying it is bad to not let women be educated in Afghanistan pre invasion. Just because someone is saying something negative about your beliefs does not make it worse just because they are your beliefs.

There were adherents to Nazism that weren't necessarily hateful, but rather supported the perceived benefits of Nazism eg. the reduction in unemployment from the massive public works program. But those that supported Hitler's left-wing economic policies and thus the Nazi party, were indeed enablers of Jewish extermination even if they didn't advocate it themselves.

Is a belief that women are inherently inferior to men bigoted? Yes.
Feel free to apply this criterion to any culture, philosophy, or personal belief.

Is the belief that one race, religion or country better than others solely on the fact of existing bigoted? Yes

Apply at will.

0 out of 10, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with being against religion.

The only reason to specify "United Arab Emirates" as a group that condones wife beating is so that, if you ever meet someone from there, you can justify the bigoted assumption that he's probably a wife beater, or at least he thinks it's OK, without ever having to ask him his opinion. Using this as a shorthand instead of just hating all wife beaters is bigoted.

If a woman is beaten up by her Muslim husband, is she worse off than if she were beaten up by her American husband?

OK, but there are large numbers of Catholics and Muslims who are explicitly fighting against the worst parts of their religions. That is not being an enabler.