The White Peril 白禍

Greg Beato (that rare Reason writer these days who's nearly as funny as he thinks he is) has a column on that now-traditional holiday topic: killjoy secularization. He approaches it from the opposite direction:

While anti-bias truffle pigs like Brent Bozell, William Donohue, and Michael Medved insist the entertainment industry is out to crucify faith and traditional values, it somehow manages to produce a new crop of straight-to-Hallmark-Channel holiday weepies each year, and not one of them has ever featured Dolly Parton as an unlikely evolutionary biologist who reunites an estranged family by infusing them with that old-fashioned Darwinist spirit. Such powers, it seems, are reserved solely for angels.

Similarly, if you go looking for a Madalyn Murray O'Hair action figure at Wal-Mart, you'll have to settle for a 13-inch Samson doll from the faith-based toymaker One2believe. Christian entrepreneurs are better at providing earthly rewards than the folks who believe earthly rewards are our only salvation. In fact, the Lord has called so many believers to spread the Good News via faith-based salt scrubs and godly poker chips during the last few decades that the annual U.S. market for Christian-themed products, often dismissed as "Jesus junk," is now $4.6 billion.

Well, one of the reasons for that is that No-God is not the center of an atheist's belief system in a way that corresponds to God for Christians (and the faithful of other religions). The only reason I call myself an atheist is that daily interaction with other people is predicated on the assumption that we all have a god to talk about, so the word is useful for answering a question that frequently comes up. But I don't orient my life around some conspicuous void where God would be for other people, any more than I consider myself, in some defining way, an afairyist, achupacabraist, aboogeymanist, or a-Nessie-ist. (To me, it's similar, if not perfectly analogous, to the belief that government shouldn't be responsible for doing everything that needs to be done in society. People who've never conceived of things any other way will ask, "Well, then, who's going to do all that?" It's as if you simply had to designate a single entity your Keeper of Society, rather than being able to believe that responsibility for different social goods could be attended to in dispersed ways that no Big Brother is orchestrating.)

Of course, there are people who make a fetish out of their atheism, but there aren't very many of them, which kind of helps to explain the paucity of (non-existent Lord help us) Madalyn Murray O'Hair action figures.

Joel at Far Outliers usually posts excerpts from books and articles that are not otherwise readily available online. He has a very good eye, so his blog is worth reading just for that.

However, a few weeks ago when I wasn't looking, he started posting pieces of his own writing from twenty-odd years ago when he was teaching English in the PRC. It makes for fascinating reading. Back then, despite Deng Xiaoping's gingerly moves toward liberalization, most Americans didn't get much information about China. The multi-part documentary The Heart of the Dragon, which aired on PBS in the States, was about as good as it got. (Things were similar with the Soviet Union--anyone else remember watching the "Comrades" series on Frontline?)

One thing that caught my attention was a passage from this post:

In China those who have tap water don't drink it. Almost all the water and tea consumed each day by one billion Chinese goes through a kettle and thermos bottle first.

There must be at least a billion thermos bottles. If each thermos bottle is emptied twice a day, then four billion liters of water pour out of the mouths of thermoses each day.

Boiled water is the universal cleanser. Diners in China's typically grimy eating places often rinse their tableware with hot water or tea before they eat or drink anything. Some roadside eateries reassure their customers by bringing out all the tableware in a large soup bowl full of scalding water. The customers can rinse everything themselves.

Disposable eating utensils, like disposable medical supplies, are just coming into use in China. A recent China Daily letter to the editor lauded the growing practice of providing disposable chopsticks in restaurants in Beijing.

How times change. By 2000, disposable chopsticks were ubiquitous in China and had started to draw fire because so many trees were being cut down to make them. Last year, the PRC started putting taxes on them:

The disposable splints of wood, usually between eight and 10 inches long, have long been a target for Chinese environmentalists.

...

In recent years, the government has actually encouraged their use, in a bid to reduce the spread of infectious illnesses by sharing eating utensils.

A lot of China's product has been exported here to Japan; I read somewhere years ago that over 90% of the disposable chopsticks consumed here came from the PRC. It's been proposed that such exports be banned as early as 2008.

Perhaps China has reached a stage at which the tradeoff involved in not making disposable chopsticks freely available in order to preserve the environment is a good one. It's worth noting, though, that (as both Joel and the BBC mention) single-use utensils help close one path through which communicable diseases spread, which was no mean consideration in crowded, developing China.

Be sure to read Joel's other posts, too.

Rondi links to this piece by Bruce Bawer on "Norway's answer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali":

Fortuyn's murder should have put an end to the character assassinations of the advocates of freedom. Nope. Instead they've only grown more sophisticated. Nowadays when someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali assails Islamic fundamentalism, the clever thing to do is call her a fundamentalist--because she's so uncompromising in her insistence on liberty, get it? In this spirit, a hijab-clad Dagbladet staffer compared Storhaug's call for Muslim women to "take the hijab off and embrace freedom" to "the rhetoric of the bearded fundamentalists" – thus equating an advocate for the victims of forced marriage and honor killing with the perpetrators of these barbarities.

...

As Dagbladet reader Hans-Christian Holm cogently put it, Norway's media are engaged in "a sick tolerance competition, in which whoever tolerates the most intolerance wins, and the one who suggests that we perhaps should not tolerate so much intolerance is automatically branded as the most intolerant of all." Storhaug's own concern, as expressed in an email the other day, is that the relentless demonizing of persons like herself by those who are determined to suppress open liberal debate about these vital issues can only strengthen the hands of both right-wing nativists and Islamists.

How difficult should it be to recognize that tolerance has to be reciprocal if a free society is to function? You can recognize people's right to beliefs you find repugnant without recognizing their ability to force other people to bend to them. Or at least you should be able to.

Eric posted yesterday about a case in southeastern Pennsylvania in which a newly married couple with problems asked successfully to have the marriage invalidated in court:

In a York County case, a Common Pleas Court judge invalidated a 10-month marriage, finding that a friend of the bride's who officiated at the wedding didn't have the power to do so under Pennsylvania law even though he had been ordained online by the Universal Life Church. The judge ruled the friend didn't qualify as a minister under state law because he had no regular congregation or place of worship.

…

By 1885, Pennsylvania had clearly developed two types of marriage licenses. The first required a "minister of the gospel, justice of the peace, or alderman" to officiate. The other let a couple solemnize the marriage themselves (a self-uniting license) and register it with the county.
Little changed until the legislature amended the law in 1953. While the law still allowed for both types of licenses, a reference to religious ceremonies was added to language describing who could obtain a self-uniting license. The law remains in effect.

Since the commonwealth government is not the United States congress, I assume it has more leeway to limit freedom of religion; why it would want to do so in this context is beyond me, though. If you succeed in getting a marriage license, it seems to me, you've passed such requirements as the government deems fit. (Pennsylvania doesn't even require a blood test, IIRC from hetero friends who have taken the plunge.) Who officiates, since legal marriage doesn't require anyone to certify that you're entering into the union mindedly or that you're not likely to split up.

Eric seems to feel the same; I like his idea for a new denomination, too:

I think the sudden firestorm is grounded in the fact that ordinations can now be obtained online. Big effing deal. What makes one form of communication between humans more suspect than another? Suppose a religious-minded blogger decided to form the Divine Church of the Holy Blog, and decided upon a common set of beliefs, based on articulable principles known and understood and agreed to by all interested joiners. Why wouldn't their congregation ("Holy Blogroll") and place of abode be just as valid as any other? What business is it of the government to decide?

I've been thinking about what makes a religion "legitimate" from a different angle over the last week or so, since a friend with whom I went to church growing up contacted me for the first time after a dozen or so years. I posted about this last week. Some consider the Worldwide Church of God a cult; others think it was a genuine Christian sect that got carried away on certain doctrinal points and was poisoned by a cabal of amoral leaders at the very top. (I'm speaking of the church up to about ten years ago; it's now made numerous doctrinal changes that have brought it into line with mainstream evangelical Protestantism. I think. There's something about converting to atheism that lessens your attention to theological points, so I may be overstating the case.) I think that this site does a real service in giving former members a place to read up on the inside dirt and share horror stories. The church was supposed to be the center of your life, and it's perfectly understandable that many people who took that to heart have had real difficulties adjusting since leaving it.

I do wish, though, that the people who posted were a bit more given to recalling that they freely chose to get involved with the WCG, in countries in which freedom of religion is protected. There's a page that has a long, long, long list of bullet points for which the ministry ought to apologize—ways the enforcement of church doctrine and culture played havoc with people's lives. Okay, point taken. But no one was forced at gunpoint to keep attending church, or to refuse to take her children to the doctor, or to fork over twenty percent of his gross income per year to church headquarters. Ministers are responsible for the destructive untruths they peddled, but they can't be blamed for the unusual eagerness of many members to believe them. Much of the WCG membership comprised, in my experience, people who felt like misfits and were bad at running their own lives. My parents frequently had discussions with friends who were positively relieved to outsource their decision-making about jobs and marriage and childrearing to their pastors and church elders, even when the advice they were given flouted all logic and sense. With the exception of people who were brought up in the church and had been prevented by devout parents from ever knowing any other way of living, I find it difficult to view church teaching as something that was done to sympathetic, pure-of-heart dupes. Being weak-minded may help explain why you're acting like a ninny, but it doesn't excuse it.

The couple in the York County case, similarly, was presumably aware of the difference between an experienced pastor of an established religion and a friend who obtained an ad hoc ordination as a clergyman. It's ridiculous for them to argue now that they should be legally able to pretend it never happened just because they discovered too late that they weren't compatible. I hope Eric's right and that the current decision is "eminently reversible."

Added on 15 November: Blogger Ironwolf, who was brought up in the same church as I was, has posted about yet another lectern-thumper who wants us to know we're all doomed. The specifics of how we're going to fry aren't all that interesting--social collapse, big-scary-nightmare empires established by the most populous Asian countries, nuclear holocaust--no one seems to bring much imagination to these things. (Just once, can't one of these doomsayers jazz things up by predicting that the Satan will launch the End Times from, like, a village in Surinam?) I point it out only to give an indication of the sort of talk that was common coin at church services and among my parents and their friends when I was growing up.

I had a busy weekend away from the computer, but I wanted to squeeze in a post before Veterans Day is over. Thanks to all those who have served. We haven't forgotten.