CrimethInc Post

I agreeed with CrimethInc.'s critique of Western Capitalist society but the authors were joking with the readers when they wrote the story of the death of God and Moral Law (it cannot be a history because histories are only one border-ed way of thinking). Adherents.com puts "nonreligious" people at 16% of the world's population (http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html). (Already I walk on cyberspace (God, I would be scared to simply cite a website in a physical paper!).) Also, the website does not specify how many "nonreligious" people believed in God or not. They could be aethist or they could simply not identify with an organized religion--"spritual." It is a wishy-washy statistic.

What I find ironic about this article is that despite the fact that it goes on to disparage hierachy, it buys into the idea that the West is the world. I guess that when CrimethInc referes to "people" in the sentence, "one day, people began to wake up and realize that there was no such thing as a God after all," refers to the philosophs of the European Enlightment. In the US it is easy to forget that we do not live in isolation, on our "city on the hill" where everything seems to happen first: the Rennaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Democracy, Americans learn in school, was invented in Greece! It was blonde people that first did it! Perhaps other regions had "invented" or "discovered" it long before a white man was bold enough to record it! I, a product (or a commodity :P ) of an elitist American education, do not know enough about the rest of the world to argue with the claim that democracy was invented in Greece. I do not even have the information to successfully argue against the thesis: "if something is important, it happened in the West first," because my intellect was molded in an educational system that, although it claimed to be "diverse" and "well-rounded," still set "the West" as the example.

It can be argued that it is necessary to focus on "the West" in one's studies because it is this cultural-economic entity that occupies THE position of hegemony on Planet Earth today. However, I simply wish to point out in this post the funny coincidence that although the CrimethInc authors unmask "heirarchical values" as the culprit for "racism, classism, sexism, and a thousand other prejudices," they themselves buy into those values, by telling the history of the intellectual Western world while ignoring the fact that many, many, many people believe in God.