One Eyed Blogger Roundup

Somehow, I scratched my left cornea pretty badly yesterday. Ever managed to get dehydrated simply by your eye tearing up? Now I have!

Anyway, good excuse to clear some stuff off the ol' browser tab:

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Two great columns, one by Adam Serwer and the other by Josh Barro, on the growing conservative embrace of cowardly violence masquerading as toughness.

While we're on the subject, Michelle Goldberg explores the propensity to take angry White voters seriously precisely because they seriously threaten violence if they don't get their way. It might be interesting to tie in this claim to the concerns that at least some segments of the radical campus population do engage politically in this angry, threatening fashion.

Interesting Ha'aretz interview with Jamaica Kincaid -- just your standard-issue Jewish Afro-Caribbean writer residing in Vermont -- after she won Israel's prestigious Dan David Prize.

Buzzfeed profiles atheists living in highly religious societies. It's sobering just how many are in fear of their life.

Donna Minkowitz reflects on how it came to be that "proud self-hating Jew" Gilad Atzmon asked her to blurb his book.

Lauren Post has a piece at the Forward giving the history of antisemitism in the feminist movement. Some of the texts she links to are classics -- including a few I had been intending to read for awhile but hadn't gotten my hands upon.

My old Illinois colleague Suja Thomas in Jotwell reviews some new research on implicit bias and judging. And speaking of new research on implicit bias, remind me to get this book by Jonathan Kahn on the subject when it comes out next fall.

Finally, Heidi Kitrosser has an article in the Minnesota Law Review entitled "Free Speech, Higher Education, and the PC Narrative" which seems well worth reading. If ever there was a term being asked to carry far more weight than it is capable of bearing, it is "PC".

Worshiping Different Gods

I have a confession to make. In the context of interfaith relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, I really don't like it when people say "we worship the same God."* In part, it's because I have no idea what this statement means or how it could be verified. At what point does adding Jesus into the mix (or name your other sectarian division) mean the God has changed? No matter how you slice it, the theology in this debate seems like it is being driven by the politics (whether the politics are "we're all fellow-travelers on spaceship Earth" or "I'll be damned if I share anything in common with those evil Muslims/Christians/Jews").

But the bigger problem is that making "the same God" the trump card argument for interfaith solidarity doesn't exactly inspire much confidence in our ability to respect those religions who unquestionably worship different Gods (Hindus, for example), or those that don't worship God at all (atheists, many Buddhists). I really do wonder what Hindu-Americans think when they hear progressives make this argument as the centerpiece of their calls for religious tolerance. It must be profoundly alienating at best, deeply worrisome at worst.

The better thing to say is that it doesn't matter whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu, Atheists, or anyone else share a God in common or not. We're all entitled to respect, we're all entitled to be treated equally, and we all should be free to practice (or not) our faiths as we see fit. A constructed sameness of the Abrahamic faiths -- if it even is real -- is worse than unnecessary, it's deeply harmful and exclusionary.

If one does want to make an argument of this sort, I vastly prefer the Talmud's formulation, as articulated by Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer

The Talmud tells us: “The righteous of all nations are worthy of immortality.” ....There are many mountain tops and all of them reach for the stars.

* Needless to say, I do not support any forms of retaliation or sanction against persons -- particularly academics -- who do make this argument.

Godless Heathens

Article title: Atheists head for high schools with new clubs for Godless teens.

Additional info link at the bottom: "See photos of: Judaism."

Uhh ... recognizing that there are atheist Jews (one was mentioned in the article), and fully supporting the equal rights of Atheists to organize student groups around the country in opposition to the rampant social prejudice they still face, I still think that might not be quite right.

On the Need To Know More

I took the Pew U.S. Religious Knowledge quiz and scored a perfect 15/15. What can I say? I'm good at standardized tests. I'm also Jewish, and the Tribe (along with atheists/agnostics and Mormons) apparently outperformed the field on this thing.

Matt Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie attribute this to the hypothesis that minorities simply need a working knowledge of the majority as a "survival skill":

All that said, let me speculate a bit. To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.

Likewise, religious minorities — while not under much threat of persecution — are well-served by a working knowledge of religion, for similar reasons; the United States is culturally Christian, and for religious minorities, getting along means understanding those reference points. That those religious minorities can also answer questions about other religious traditions is a sign of broader religious education that isn’t necessary when you’re in the majority. Put another way, there’s a strong chance that religious privilege explains the difference in knowledge between Christians and everyone else.

Ilya Somin isn't sure. He says that, were this the case, we'd expect the primary advantage of these groups over Christians to be regarding questions about Christianity. But while we do, in fact, hold a slight advantage in that category, the area we really clean up in is questions about "world religions" (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism), etc.. He says this is indicative that it is great "cosmopolitanism" amongst these religious groups that accounts for the difference.

But I think Somin's test is ill-conceived. Aside from the fact that I can think of at least a few reasons why knowledge of certain "world religions" would fall in the "survival skill" category for Jews, Atheists, and Mormons, the baseline expectation would be that each group should do well in their own category and poorly in all the others. For the Bouie/Yglesias hypothesis to hold, Jews don't have to outperform Christians on Christianity -- they only need to be close to them so as to demonstrate they've attained a working knowledge of the group. The point isn't that Jews know more about Christianity than Christians (though apparently we do), it's that Jews know more about Christianity than Christians know about Jews.

Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult to test, because a lot of the questions are overlapping of Judaism and Christianity -- the only question I recall that is specific to Jews asks when our Sabbath starts (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday). It would be interesting to see if Christians did as well on that questions as Jews did on specifically-Christian questions (e.g., who founded the Protestant Reformation or what Catholic views on transubstantiation are).

But in any event, I think the results still, on face, bear out the hypothesis rather well. When you're a small, vulnerable minority, you simply have to be curious about the world around you. When you're the biggest fish in the pond, you don't. Cosmopolitanism is a survival skill.

Believe in Arkansas

Andrew Sullivan says that the state constitutionally bars atheists from serving in state government, "even though this is unconstitutional at a national level." I'm pretty sure it's still unenforceable at the state level -- the text survives but is meaningless except for symbolism. The symbolism, of course, still matters, and southern states have a long history of resisting getting rid of the vestiges of their bigotry long after the "principles" were thought to have lost all respectability.

Freedom to Not Believe

Trying to derail a certain segment of the population who doesn't want to vote for a candidate of his religion, Mitt Romney decides to slander those who hold no religion instead.

"What he is trying to say is 'I am a person of faith. Forget the fact what my faith is, that I am a Mormon. You might be Christian. You might be Jewish. I'm a person of faith. I believe in God,' " Martin said.

Romney said religion is essential to freedom, without pointing to any specific faith.

"Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone," the GOP contender said.

I hate this. I hate that Romney feels comfortable telling a significant portion of the population -- including many of my friends -- is incapable of grasping or maintaining freedom. I hate that he'll probably get wonderful coverage of his speech anyway. I hate that Romney was compelled to give this speech because certain people don't think his religious creed is suitable to lead America, and I hate that he decided to pander to that group rather than repudiate them. I hate that, insofar as it plays into things at all, excluding atheists from the American creed will probably give him a bump in the polls. I hate how it forces my religiosity into a state of conflict with my irreligious peers.

It's sickening to me.

I have friends who are Jewish, and I have friends who are Christian. I have friends who are Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist and Animist and atheist, and friends who are still deciding. All of them understand the blessing of liberty. All of them know the meaning of respect, and dignity, and morality, and freedom. They are righteous individuals to a person, regardless of creed. And I speak as someone who does believe that we all carry a spark of the divine in them -- you do not insult my peers, my colleagues, my friends, and do it under the banner of religious freedom. That slanders the name of religion and poisons my faith.