Hey ya'll if you don't know why this is a racist dog-whistle, let me give you a brief little history about the Religious Right 🧵

https://twitter.com/ArchTheAtheist/status/1849435471543246922

I went to a private fundamentalist Christian school from 3-8th grade. Most of our textbooks were from Bob Jones University and Abeka (Pensacola). We were not taught evolution. We were taught all the Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians. & that the KKK were the good guys:

Science & Religion prof here. One of the great myths of my field & of Euro-Christian culture in general is Western science is completely founded on Euro-Christianity. This epistemology of ignorance denies and/or coopts contributions from all cultures but let's talk about Islam

https://twitter.com/SuspectFed/status/1796190100583297108

First a shout out to a really awesome Science & Religion text book that addresses this myth head on, along with some other prominent myths (e.g, no scholar in the Middle Ages believed the world was flat - Greeks, Muslims, and Christians all knew that for centuries!)

Apparently some of you are completely unaware how racist Kant was so pull up a chair. I have a book on God & racism coming out with Cambridge in the fall, & a whole chapter is devoted to how Kant’s view of time undergirds his racism, so here’s a reader’s digest version:

https://twitter.com/AmcCritique/status/1643332188190961665

First, I'm deeply informed by the work of Charles Mills (1997), Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997), J. Kameron Carter (2008), Robert Bernasconi (2009) & Bernard Boxill (2017). Also a shout out to @Jairo_I_Funez @rochellehd and @KennethLPearce who have already tweeted about this

Since I'm teaching CRT (Delgado & Stefancic and Crenshaw) in my Philosophy of Race & Religion course today, a thread abt why claiming it is "Marxist" or an offshoot of "Critical Theory" is lazy scholarship, misleading, & in many ways, perpetuates white supremacy. 1st a brief reminder that "X is a Marxist" is a very old trope/dog whistle by white supremacists against civil rights activists. It not only suggests that any egalitarian thinking is bad/socialist but is meant to delegitimize the activist as an atheist & thus not truly American

The more & more research I do related to #ChristianNationalism (CN) & the Founding Fathers (FFs), the more I'm convinced that "was America founded as a Christian nation or not" is simply a wrongheaded way to approach the issue. It's simply not an either/or binary. It's "both." Rather, we need to be asking something like: "Where do we see a simultaneous proclamation of religious freedom/pluralism/separation of church & state by the FFs *while* maintaining white Christian Supremacy for the purposes of American Imperialism?"

I don't have the time & energy for a full-blown takedown of JMac's racism, but here's some historical context. JMac's allusions to the Curse of Ham & Tower of Babel for creation of 'race' by God were CENTRAL theories put forth by white supremacists who were biblical literalists

https://twitter.com/strangefigures2/status/1537035157739384832

The idea of a curse of Ham & of an assoc. of blackness w/ slavery DID exist in the Middle Ages in Arabia & Europe. But scholars are in consensus that 'race' as we know it was an early modern invention created through Christian theology. For the proto-racial use see Goldenberg:

Phew, that's tough to summarize, but here goes. Most of this is from Caputo & Rollins. They are similar, but God as Event is more atheistic form of theism than God as Ground. Tillich says God is not a Being/Subject, but ground of all being. God precedes any subject/object split.

https://twitter.com/patricknouwen/status/1536379998835195906

God is an infinite structure that undergirds all our finitude. As soon as we reduce God to an object, we’ve created an idol. For the mystics, you connect w/ the Absolute through contemplation. For Tillich you encounter God through ultimate concern in concrete ethical acts.

W/ the recent slanderous takes on #deconstruction, friendly reminder:
Derrida coined deconstruction
He was inspired by Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of philosophy
Heidegger was shaped by Luther’s destructio
Deconstruction is at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. Disclaimer #1: There are many iterations & variations of what ‘deconstruction’ has come to mean. It would be reductive to try to encapsulate all of them here. Indeed, the very meaning of the term suggests that texts & words have multiple meanings

A little thread on #deconstruction. The past few wks, my phil of religion students have read essays on the religious exp of ppl in marginalized communities, challenging students to think abt how religion intersects w/ slavery, segregation, ableism, trauma, colonialism & sexism. Their papers have been pretty 😳, both in how they admit they're largely ignorant of such perspectives & yet the stories resonate w/ them. They have lots to say abt how they feel religious institutions have failed them & give detailed reasons for why the find religion untenable.