Rabbi Daniel Lapin: "Atheists are parasites"

[charlie]

He said it. On national TV. We mooch off "everything religious culture has built in America", but do nothing to "add energy into the system."

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201009030038

Compare and contrast. The media and pious hucksters shit their pants all week when Hawking shooed God from physics. This guy, knowing Jews have been scapegoated as parasites for centuries, was deliberately offensive, yet didn't raise a peep from anyone. Shame on them and double shame on the lowlife Rabbi.

[realisticphish]

1. ah yes

we mooch off the hatred of ourselves! Sweet...

[Flipper999]

2. The Rabbi has me convinced!

Hearing him say, "Athiests are parasites! Yargle, blargle, glarble!!!" has convinced me of how wrong I am. No longer do I have any doubt concerning the existence of an all powerful, anthropomorphic deity who only made his presence known to a tribe of nomad warriors three thousand years ago. The great flood is now scientifically feasible, everyone is descended from a couple of sinful fruit munchers, and it's totally possible for the sun to be held in a static position in the sky without any adverse side effects to life on Earth.

Black is white, up is down, and I am finally able to add my energy to society! No more sucking at the teat of mother religion for me!

For any lurking Freepers: :sarcasm:

[LeftishBrit]

3. Lapin is a horrible man - prepared to collude with those who hate Jews, if they hate secularists too

He has robustly defended Mel Gibson. He is virulently against most Jewish organizations for being too liberal and 'anti-Christian' and says that Jews should instead welcome such as Gibson as an ally against secularism.

He rails against those who wish to keep religion out of politics, and secular and Jewish 'supporters' of abortion and homosexuality.

From an article in 'WorldNutDaily' in 2007 (which he begins by comparing the threat of secularism to that of Nazism, an enemy that will be more easily defeated if the religious recognize it in time like Churchill recommended with regard to the Nazis - though he concedes that it's not QUITE as serious a threat):

'Considerably more intellectual energy is being pumped into the propaganda campaign against Christianity than was ever delivered to the anti-smoking or anti-drunk-driving campaigns. Fervent zealots of secularism are flinging themselves into this anti-Christian war with enormous fanaticism.

If they succeed, Christianity will be driven underground, and its benign influence on the character of America will be lost. In its place we shall see a sinister secularism that menaces Bible believers of all faiths. Once the voice of the Bible has been silenced, the war on Western Civilization can begin and we shall see a long night of barbarism descend on the West.

Without a vibrant and vital Christianity, America is doomed, and without America, the West is doomed.

Which is why I, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, devoted to Jewish survival, the Torah and Israel am so terrified of American Christianity caving in.

Many of us Jews are ready to stand with you. But you must lead. You must replace your timidity with nerve and your diffidence with daring and determination. You are under attack. Now is the time to resist it.'

Speaking both as an ethnic Jew and as a secularist, he makes me ill!

[charlie]

5. So that's his game, then

An authoritarian groupie. Sidle up to the guy with the whip and hope his initiative as self-appointed enforcer is noticed.

"Devoted to Jewish survival", whatta crock. Devoted to Rabbi Lapin's survival as one of the 144,000 in fundie Christianity's weird eschatology is more like it. He needs quit scaring himself with Chick tracts.

What a little chickenshit.

[vixengrl]

4. I responded to what he said like this:

The eliminationist language here makes it hard for me to imagine the Right Reb has actual atheist friends. I wouldn't, for what it's worth, like to be compared to a bedbug or a tick or a flea or similar. I would tend to think it was the sort of dehumanizing language one might use if one wanted to, I don't know, propose that the worldview of an entire subsection of humanity was so grotesque as to merit their wiping-out--

Which I would tend to oppose, my not caring who you are, but basically accepting your humanity, even if whole parts of your worldview might appear to be extraordinarily misguided.

So I might submit that the non-theist Gautama Buddha's non-theistic moral system that built from ideas from the Hindu theistisc belief system weren't actually parasitic, but in fact built a great world faith that has a rather logical approach to "right action". Would the Right Reb. Lapin care to suggest all of the sangha are parasitic?

Also, if we were to consider the Greek philosophers, from whom our label, "atheist" is derived, as being part of a tradition of pagan theology that enabled thinkers to eventually eschew the reality of gods, and suppose that knowledge could derive from questioning and experimentation--which is the foundation, in a way, of the Enlightenment thinking of democracies, as well as most freethinkers today. Hmm--did they just parasitically draw fron the religious culture without enriching it also?

Did our founding fathers just parasitically use the democracy of Greece whilst eschewing any of its gods, and equally parasitically, not openly state the referent of a Judaic God who inspired the New Testament, as being part of the English diaspora, in that so many of them wanted to follow Him, and consequently felt less like worshipping at the secular-altar of the monarchy? One wonders. Or was the philosophical tradition of the enlightenment that held that man was capable of seeking and even finding truth, through his efforts, not a more reasonable explication of the authority-defying people who created this one nation, indivisible, except by small-minded bigots who want to start trouble?

Hm? It seems to me that the moral arc of the human experience indicates that non-theistic folk can both enrich a tradition and sharpen its level of inquiry, force it to face human realities more dearly and also seem to incline towards mental independence, as opposed to parasitic slackness.

Parasitic slackness often occurring, from what I've observed, from within traditons that have not submitted to adequate rigor. And the worst sort of parasite in human communities being the demogogue

[charlie]

6. Thanks for also posting your reply here

where it can be appreciated. It won't make a dent in the Rabbi's paranoid hide. If he can't recognize "sinister" secularism is what kept his religion and his ethnic brethren from being "driven underground" in the US, he can't recognize reasoned argument.

[trotsky]

7. I dunno, I had wanted to reply to this the past two days...

but I'm just speechless. There are fucking liberals who buy into this shit too. Some of them post in R/T. How can a rabbi, of all people, use this kind of hateful propaganda speech?

[charlie]

8. I know

And with the "watchdog" media accomodating and normalising every rightward lurch into insanity, there isn't much anyone can say that isn't just ineffectual fulminating.

Oh well. As long as we're heading right there's little chance Joe Stalin's ghost will arise and kill us all, which is no small consolation, I suppose.

[sakabatou]

9. Fuck you, Lapin

[and-justice-for-all]

10. We can not be parasites...

because we do not try to make a living off other people to support us. Religion is the ultimate parasite.