…and this is a 
Even wingnuts respond to culture shock
Category: Religion
Posted on: September 3, 2006 12:15 PM, by PZ Myers
Wow, I'm impressed: The J Train finds a small guttering flicker of reason on WingNutDaily. It's an article by a conservative Christian opposing public prayer at football games—he'd been in Hawai'i, where he'd been shocked to discover that pre-game prayers were given by Buddhist monks, and he found himself an uncomfortable minority in a sea of people following some strange religion (hmmm…does anybody else know what that's like?)
It's actually funny to read. He's plainly horrified that he'd have to be in the presence of someone reciting a pagan prayer! He doesn't quite get the response right, though.
We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.
As I thought through the incident over the next few days I supposed that the duty of offering the pre-game prayer rotated through the local clergy and we just happened to arrive on the night that the responsibility fell to the Buddhist priest. However, after inquiring I learned that due to the predominance of Buddhist and Shinto adherents in this town, it was the normal practice to have a member of one these faiths offer the pre-game prayer, and Christian clergy were never included. Needless to say that was our first and last football game. Although many of the students we worked with continued to invite us to the games, we were forced to decline. We knew that if we were to attend again we would be forced to abstain from the pre-game activity. And not wanting to offend our Asiatic neighbors and colleagues, we simply refrained from attending.
Well…so his solution was to simply and completely withdraw from the social activity? I wonder how he'd react if the entire culture was saturated with overt displays of such religiosity—where courtrooms would claim their justice was founded on their religion, where the government, top to bottom, was loaded with official who would regularly trumpet their religious affiliation, where store owners would declare themselves adherents of particular faiths, and promise that a percentage of their profits would go to promote their beliefs, where much of the business of the town was mediated via contacts at places of worship? Would he divorce himself from the culture entirely, throw out his radio and TV, bunker down in his house and pray?
At least he appreciates part of the experience.
I would say in love to my Christian brothers and sisters, before you yearn for the imposition of prayer and similar rituals in your public schools, you might consider attending a football game at Wahiawa High School. Because unless you're ready to endure the unwilling exposure of yourself and your children to those beliefs and practices that your own faith forswears, you have no right to insist that others sit in silence and complicity while you do the same to them. I, for one, slept better at night knowing that because Judeo-Christian prayers were not being offered at my children's schools, I didn't have to worry about them being confronted with Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Satanic or any other prayer ritual I might find offensive.
Diversity of ideas is bad, I guess. I think I've got a new notion to keep the quality of my university's students high, though: if the presence of this godless atheist on the faculty doesn't scare the fanatics away, I just have to mention that our university events, such as the opening convocation of classes last week, often include a Native American blessing. Drums, chanting, the whole works.
I handle them the same way I do the Christian hymns we often get at the Christmas concert: sit quietly, enjoy the music if not the superstition, and take it as a positive aspect of the culture I live in.
Comments
I'll take the Native American drums over Christian hymns any day. The Native Americans have a lot more respect for nature and the Earth than most Christians I've encountered. I doubt you'd see any tribes fighting over the same piece of land like the Big 3 religions do over the Mount.
Posted by: ericnh | September 3, 2006 12:33 PM
A dose of their own medicine.
Posted by: mndarwinist | September 3, 2006 12:38 PM
Weclome to our world, Mr. wingnut.
Posted by: Bronze Dog | September 3, 2006 12:42 PM
Maybe I can convince my local high school to hold a pregame Wickerman burning at the 50-yard line! That ought to send the evangelicals scrambling for the turnstiles.
Posted by: raindogzilla | September 3, 2006 1:01 PM
Sadly, I think what we have here is an unusual example of a fundamentalist with a touch of empathy. The answer from the rest of them will be, "Well, we just have to make Wahiawa High School offer Christian prayers instead because the rest of the country is Christian."
On another note, I wonder how crazy it would make some of these right-wingers to know that the schools in Beverly Hills, CA, get Islamic holidays off because of the large number of Muslim (mostly Iranian/Persian) students?
Posted by: Mnemosyne | September 3, 2006 1:07 PM
I'll say it again: what the wingnut Christian would want regarding religious establishment would look pretty much like what the ACLU wants, were the Ten Commandments replaced by a Koran, were crosses or pictures of Jesus replaced by fat Buddhas, and were all prayers spoken by government officials offered to Allah or Ahura-Mazda. The wingnuts are fighting desparately to preserve their position of government preference, while blind to the fact that that is what they have. It is the hypocrisy of power.
Posted by: Russell | September 3, 2006 1:10 PM
He reaches a laudable conclusion(school-sponsored prayer imposes itself on non-believers), although his letter still betrays some ... interesting language. He refers to his fellow Americans by their ethnicity and implies their alien-ness. I mean, "Asiatic"? Who says "Asiatic"? Also, he doesn't want to offend his "Japanese" (not Japanese-American or Nissei or something) neighbors because they respect deference above all?
These were Americans interpretng a core American ritual according to their heritage, but he in the end had to withdraw because to stand in silent respect for someone else's beliefs was anathema. And he was in the Air Force to boot ... what would he do if he went to a foreign country and had to respect foreign beliefs as a representative of the US government?
Posted by: Respectful Dissent | September 3, 2006 1:13 PM
If Christianity was integrated into public life in the USA then the situation would be little different from the way it is in the UK. And we can all see how well it's working out for Christianity in the British Isles, can't we.
The "myth" of the separation of church and state (as the wingnuts would have it) may just be the one thing that's saved religious fundamentalism in America. Ironic really.
Posted by: tacitus | September 3, 2006 1:15 PM
Plus, such live-and-let-live religions as Buddhism, Wicca, atheism etc. don't have an agenda (as the kids on the Right call it) the way evangelicals (for whom public prayers are part of a vastly larger mission to convert everyone, prior to micromanaging our lives, including dictating such details as how we're expected to feel about certain things) do.
Posted by: Molly, NYC | September 3, 2006 1:18 PM
Oh noes!!! PZ said Christmas and not holidays! Now the radical activist atheist judges will attack him!
Posted by: Chris Beck | September 3, 2006 1:19 PM
As an avowed atheist, I have often surprised my friends during the holidays when they hear me playing Xmas music, asking why, if I'm an atheist, am I listening to it? The answer is rather simple: I like the way it sounds. I pay little attention to the words, instead enjoying the music and the memories they evoke. I also enjoy visiting the older churches whenever I'm in Europe, not because of some need to find some spiritual solace but because I enjoy history and architecture.
Too often people are bewildered by this behavior. For them if I enjoy something that happens to have a religious element to it, they feel I am either betraying my principles or am spiritually confused. They don't seem to understand that I can separate the object from the dogma, but that is not my concern. The same holds true for public prayer: I can stand there and respect others' beliefs without actually feeling I am catering to those beliefs. I long ago outgrew feeling any kind of intimidation by those that either wonder why I don't bow my head during those moments or why I didn't walk out.
It's when those beliefs begin to physically, economically, and/or legally intrude on me and mine that I get my hackles up, and if it takes a few fundies attending a public event that doesn't cater to their particular belief structure to realize what their thoughtless insistence has done to countless others, all the better.
Posted by: Sir Craig | September 3, 2006 1:26 PM
Oh, that article is so cute! This grown man is facing a different cultural norm than his own for the first time! Reminds me of the first time I faced religion. But that was when I was five. I was invited to a sleepover, and everyone else was Christian. I started eating my pizza at dinner while everyone else was saying grace. Later, everyone else started singing "Jesus loves me, this I know, 'cause the Bible tells me so," and I didn't know the words.
Anyway, my mother is Buddhist, but she has the live-and-let-live attitude that Molly, NYC described. She is simply convinced that when I die, I will have to be reincarnated again and again until I reach enlightenment. No harm done.
My childhood Christian friends, however, were convinced I was going to hell when I told them, at the age of five, that I did not believe in God. I still remember the shock on their faces. Priceless, in retrospect.
Posted by: j | September 3, 2006 1:34 PM
When I get into discussions of this topic with evangelical acquaintences, which is not often enough from my perspective because I think they might be shunning me, I like to point out that I live in San Francisco.
When they say, "What?"
I say, "San Francisco is where the Temple of Set is headquartered, which is the largest congregation of openly avowed Satanists in the world [I know that's not really true, but it's close enough to true for my purposes]."
They usually look at me with mounting horror at this point.
Then I drive home the point. "I can't wait until the government starts giving me vouchers to pay for sending my child to private parochial schools, because then your tax dollars will be going to teaching my kid the freaking Dark Arts. How does that sound, Mike?"
They never talk to me after that.
Posted by: s9 | September 3, 2006 1:46 PM
I found it slightly amusing that the letter writer's name is Christenot. Is the stress on the last syllable?
Posted by: Zeno | September 3, 2006 1:49 PM
He has an embarrassing flash of empathy, but he shamefully withdraws into arrogance lest any of his friends read it and think he's grown a vagina or something. Glory be, Brother Wingnut.
Posted by: junk science | September 3, 2006 1:53 PM
Over the past several years, I've noticed a big boom in the number of college football players who have joined the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Just before kickoff, they all run to the endzone and take a kneel. Two years ago, there were maybe 10 guys here who did that. Now it's almost the entire team. But we're Jewish, so it's more of a novelty than anything, as far as we're concerned.
What I'd really like to see us lose is the playing of the Star Spangled Banner before sporting events. It's a dumb tradition.
Posted by: Dan | September 3, 2006 1:55 PM
I, for one, slept better at night knowing that because Judeo-Christian prayers were not being offered at my children's schools, I didn't have to worry about them being confronted with Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Satanic or any other prayer ritual I might find offensive.
(This story has actually been bouncing around the internets for a while...)
The other amusing thing is that we all know how this man would respond if a non-Christian found his rituals 'offensive', and didn't want their children to be 'confronted' by them.
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September 3, 2006 2:02 PM
When people of a particular religious sect are in the minority, all of a sudden, they get "religion" (no, I couldn't help myself) about the seperation of church and state. In the early years of the U.S., when Anglicans were the dominant political power, Baptists were solidly behind keeping religion from secular power.
Posted by: Stoic | September 3, 2006 2:09 PM
HeHeHe. I've proposed that we have opening football-game prayers here in our little West Texas town, but apportion them out according to the students' (or jocks'? cheerleaders'?) claimed beliefs. That way, "Sancta Maria, Madre de Dios...." would be noticeably more common than "An' we jus' wanna thank yuh, Lawrd, fer lettin' us be here this evenin'....."
Baptists don't much like the thought.
Posted by: Coragyps | September 3, 2006 2:12 PM
Make that "Santa Maria...."
Posted by: Coragyps | September 3, 2006 2:14 PM
Oh, and you forgot the part about how a significant fraction of civil, cultural and academic life is scheduled around the holy festivals of their particular religion. Which you are not allowed to call by anything other than their proper religious names, or people throw hissy fits at you and accuse you of trying to oppress them.
Posted by: Chris | September 3, 2006 2:35 PM
Insidious religion creeping into all our institutions. Ick. Even up here in our notoriously secular Canada our new neo-Con wanna-be-Dubya Prime Minister is uttering the g-word in public. Interestingly though, our (Canadian) religious right is allying itself with the growing Islamic population here. It might work in the short term but I wonder how everything will fair down the line when they start arguing about who the true prophet/messiah is.
Posted by: Krakus | September 3, 2006 2:37 PM
junk, that's the way I think all wingnut brains operate. They seize the empathy that naturally comes to human beings and drown it in gross arrogance until it becomes a dead, shriveled thing that only lets them feel wmpathy when they themselves are troubled by the same types of injustice other people experience on a daily basis. Now, as for me, give me a Buddhist prayer anyday over some "Jeezus, weejust" shit.
Posted by: JackGoff | September 3, 2006 2:48 PM
Its as if he completely lacks an idea of his OWN identity.
As if he is in perpetual terror that even exposure to a different mind set will overwhelm his own world view.
How utterly terrifying his world must be?
Posted by: owlbear1 | September 3, 2006 3:04 PM
My favorite thing to do when talking to devout Christians is to quote a phrase from Matthew 6:5
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men."
I emailed a group once and asked them why they supported prayer at football games when Jesus said to go pray in private, and they never replied.
Posted by: Jude | September 3, 2006 3:16 PM
Haha! You know, I'm from Hawaii myself. (P.s.: The apostrophe in there is a post-1950 affectation. Before 1950, there was no apostrophe in "Hawaii" in either English or written Hawaiian.)
A lot of times, at public events, prayers are said in Hawaiian. Christian prayers, mind, but I have to wonder what a guy like this would think if he were dropped in without context. I have to think he'd be just as shocked and frightened, not realising all the time that the prayers are directed to the same God, just in a different language.
I doubt very much his gut reaction had anything at all to do with religion, but religion does make a pretty nice rationalisation for those feelings of disgust, doesn't it?
Posted by: Joshua | September 3, 2006 3:26 PM
My favorite part of the article is this:
"....I didn't have to worry about them being confronted with Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Satanic or any other prayer ritual I might find offensive."
he moves so quickly from the religion that is 4th most practiced behind Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism (well...5th if you count "Chinese folk religions" as one aggregate unit) to a religion that is significantly integrated with Japanese culture to something that has a tendancy to be more popular culture than actual religion (dont flame me, I said "tendancy"), to satanism.
he'ld get soooo slammed if he said Jewish or Muslim in the article. He probably doesn't even think about the existence of Hindus (there are nearly a billion Hindus on the planet). So he has to associate Buddhism and Shintoism with witchcraft ( I know...some wiccans are for real in faith) and satan worship.
the ethnocentricism embraced by protestantism is astounding. The whole thing is a Weberian nightmare.
Posted by: gramsci411 | September 3, 2006 3:27 PM
Sir Craig:
This comment just prompted me to put on JSB's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.
Posted by: arensb | September 3, 2006 3:41 PM
ericnh: I doubt you'd see any tribes fighting over the same piece of land like the Big 3 religions do over the Mount.
Yeah, because they never had to fight over pastures, water or arable land.
Molly, NYC:
Plus, such live-and-let-live religions as Buddhism, Wicca, atheism etc.
First, atheism is not a religion but a lack of one. Second, the live-and-let-live form of atheism was somehow absent fron the Soviet sphere of influence, where priests were shot and crosses taken from homes, piled up and burned.
Posted by: Roman Werpachowski | September 3, 2006 3:51 PM
It's amazing what a little travel can do to parochialism and narrow-mindedness.
I'm told that for career military, it's difficult to get promoted past a certain point if one hasn't had a few foreign postings. I wonder if it wouldn't be good to have something similar in other areas of society.
For instance, with global trade, a company that does business with Japan might prefer to hire people who speak Japanese, all other things being equal.
The US is, basically, a continent-sized country, which means that it's easy to live one's whole life without ever being aware of a world outside the country. It's much more difficult in Europe.
Posted by: arensb | September 3, 2006 3:54 PM
the ethnocentricism embraced by protestantism is astounding.
I would say that ethnocentricism -- American ethnocentrism -- has become an essential aspect of coservative Protestantism, as inextricable as any doctrines they have taken from the Bible. This is basically the sublime confidence that not only does god want everyone to be Protestant, he'd really, really prefer it if everyone was a white, American, Anglophone conservative Protestant.
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September 3, 2006 3:55 PM
This guy sounds pretty confused -- there is no god in Buddhism, so you can't really "pray" to a Buddhist god.
All of the Buddhist prayers I've ever heard are something like reminders to be aware of the world around us and to appreciate the good things in our lives.
Posted by: Brock Tice | September 3, 2006 4:10 PM
This guy sounds pretty confused -- there is no god in Buddhism, so you can't really "pray" to a Buddhist god. All of the Buddhist prayers I've ever heard are something like reminders to be aware of the world around us and to appreciate the good things in our lives.
Not exactly true -- there are several different schools of Buddhism, and some of them emphasize VERY different things, or take very different approaches. Given that this happened in Hawaii, it's very likely that the man he saw followed Pure Land Buddhism (dominant among Japanese-Americans), where they *do* pray. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Land
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September 3, 2006 4:16 PM
Yes it was. Their actions had little to do with their supposed supernatural leanings.
Posted by: JImC | September 3, 2006 4:38 PM
Roman Werpachowski: ...the live-and-let-live form of atheism was somehow absent fron the Soviet sphere of influence, where priests were shot and crosses taken from homes, piled up and burned
Atheism is at fault for the abuses of the religion of communist nationalism to the same extent that natural selection can be blamed for eugenics.
Posted by: Ken Cope | September 3, 2006 4:40 PM
...unless you're ready to endure the unwilling exposure of yourself and your children to those beliefs and practices that your own faith forswears, you have no right to insist that others sit in silence and complicity while you do the same to them.
A charming lesson, but I'm sure totally lost on WND readers. Why? Because everyone knows Christianity is supreme and better than all the rest and therefore has special dispensation to be forced on others. Only on oddball islands, far away from Jesusland, would this strategy ever backfire.
Posted by: Grumpy | September 3, 2006 5:06 PM
Atheism is at fault for the abuses of the religion of communist nationalism to the same extent that natural selection can be blamed for eugenics.
Ah, so now it is being called "communist nationalism". In the name of which "nationalism" Russian Communists killed Russians and Polish killed Poles?
Posted by: Roman Werpachowski | September 3, 2006 5:20 PM
Stalinist nationalism? Dude, it wasn't atheism that caused the purges of Stalin. IT WAS STALIN!!!!
Posted by: JackGoff | September 3, 2006 5:33 PM
That's not an affectation; it's an artifact of the relatively late standardization of Hawai'ian orthography. As late as the 1990s, Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikōlani College of Hawai'ian Language at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo was integrating the different existing standards in order to support the Hawai'ian language reliably on the PC--much later than most native American languages. For an example of how wildly that pre-standardized orthography could vary, the history of "owyhee" and "owayhee" ("Hawai'i") as place names in the Western states (Idaho, Oregon, Nevada) is informative.
Although the glottal stop between the diphthong and the vowel was always there in spoken language, before the 1950s, there was no consistent conscientious effort to represent it in the written language. Including the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop is actually more accurate and precise than the pre-1950s orthography.
Posted by: RavenT | September 3, 2006 5:37 PM
Communist nationalism probably in the sense that you can't be patriotic to your country unless you support communism.
Posted by: Alan | September 3, 2006 5:46 PM
IMHO the apostrophe is a rather stupid choice -- why not use one of the many unused letters, like q or x? --, but dropping it is simply not an option. The glottal stop is a consonant like every other in that language -- it simply isn't Standard Average European, where labial (p), dental or alveolar (t), and velar (k) stops abound, but glottal ones are always ignored. No wriing i is exacly if English were wrien wihou, say, the leer T.
Uh...
Very good article. Shows that at least some Wingnut Daily contributors are actually human beings.
Posted by: David Marjanović | September 3, 2006 5:48 PM
I think using "q" or "x" would be deprecated because, although they are unused in Hawai'ian, they have phonetic significance in the other languages that non-Hawai'ian speakers would bring to learning Hawai'ian. Having to unlearn "k" for "q" and "ks" for "x" adds more effort to learning the language than taking the apostrophe for the glottal stop.
Besides, apostrophe = glottal stop is a long-established tradition in orthography for other languages, including many not written in the Roman alphabet, where "q" and "x" also have a different significance. So having the same standard for Hawai'ian and those other languages is much better than having to remember which standards to switch between.
Posted by: RavenT | September 3, 2006 6:03 PM
Although the glottal stop between the diphthong and the vowel was always there in spoken language, before the 1950s, there was no consistent conscientious effort to represent it in the written language. Including the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop is actually more accurate and precise than the pre-1950s orthography.
The last several years I've noticed that people from Hawaii -- especially if they're very proud of being from Hawaii -- tend to actually *pronounce* that glottal stop in 'Hawai'i' while speaking English -- even if they can't speak Hawaiian at all. It seems to have become a sort of sociolinguistic marker of Hawaiianness.
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September 3, 2006 6:06 PM
Besides, apostrophe = glottal stop is a long-established tradition in orthography for other languages, including many not written in the Roman alphabet,
Which non-Roman alphabets do you have in mind here?
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September 3, 2006 6:09 PM
Hehe, you Americans and your silly ways, singing before a game (no pun intended)...
Posted by: romunov | September 3, 2006 6:16 PM
Khmer, Tibetan, Hebrew, and Arabic are the non-Roman ones I'm most familiar with, but from what I've seen in the historical literature, it seems that all of the SE Asian non-Roman alphabets (Lao, Thai), and many African ones are often transcribed that way as well. In addition, Navajo also uses the apostrophe as glottal stop, although that can hardly be called transcription, as the Navajo Roman alphabet is standardized.
Posted by: RavenT | September 3, 2006 6:16 PM
Actually, George, I would have been more accurate if I had said "transcription", rather than "orthography" (except for Navajo, where it really is orthography). My bad.
Posted by: RavenT | September 3, 2006 6:18 PM
Atheism is at fault for the abuses of the religion of communist nationalism
And, for that matter, Leninist-Marxism was functionally a religion, complete with a priesthood, a Promised Land, received dogma and accreted doctrine.
Posted by: Phoenician in a time of Romans | September 3, 2006 6:30 PM
But do the actual Hebrew, Khmer, Tibetan, Arabic, Lao or Thai native orthographies use apostrophe for glottal stop? I thought the use of the apostrophe as a phoneme was limited to languages using the Roman orthography.
I can't think of any European language that uses the apostrophe this way, though it's quite common in Native American languages when they acquire standard orthographies, such as Navajo, Ojibwe, and Guarani. Many languages simply fail to mark glottal stop in their orthographies, such as Finnish and Tagalog.
Maltese at least uses 'q' for glottal stop.
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September 3, 2006 6:33 PM
Actually, George, I would have been more accurate if I had said "transcription", rather than "orthography" (except for Navajo, where it really is orthography). My bad.
Oh, whoops, didn't see this -- this may answer my question in my last query.
Yes, I was talking about official orthographies.
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September 3, 2006 6:34 PM
Stalinist nationalism? Dude, it wasn't atheism that caused the purges of Stalin. IT WAS STALIN!!!!
Persecution of religion in Soviet Russia began long before, and ended only long after Stalin.
Posted by: Roman Werpachowski | September 3, 2006 6:47 PM
G*d save us from THEOLOGY.....
There is only one thing that any human being can be sure of, and that is that noone on Earth knows anything for certain. There is no proof for any system of belief or non-belief. Maybe all those beliefs are true! Maybe they're all false! Maybe, at the root, they're all the same! The best theological comment I've ever heard is, "All I know about God is that I'm not him, her or it".
I really love the styles of reverence and theater and music of many belief systems. It is astonishing to me that the 'christian' in question feels threatened by exposure to a different culture. Are Shintoism, Bhudism, Catholicism, Judaism, Atheism, etc. contageous? -or fatal? Geesh. We've got kids on this planet who are hungry. Get over whatever your bullshit is and feed them, damnit!
Posted by: DvCM | September 3, 2006 6:47 PM
As wierd as this might sound, Christian's, in my experience are very much like children. Which isn't so strange considering that Christianity uses the father image when talking about their god. I think it explains a part of why Christian's often act so surprised when their beliefs are questioned or when atheists and other non-christians question prayer in schools. My three year old son is half Japanese and we are currently living in Japan. He speaks mostly Japanese and understands English fairly well. He thinks that everyone understands Japanese and English because both his mother and father do. He is usually quite surprised when I put him on the phone with my mother and she tells him that she can't understand what he is saying when he speaks Japanese. I think Christian's are often the same way about their religion. "What, you don't like prayers to the Lord at football games!?" Judaic religion rarely teaches tolerance for other beliefs because of the "stakes at hand". It would be interesting if more people were forced to live in situations that stretched the boundaries of their comfort zones on a variety of issues. Unfortunately, most people, not just Christians, never stray outside of what their used to and how they were raised.
Posted by: thedropper | September 3, 2006 7:05 PM
Not strange at all. The two biggest parts of becoming a mature and functional adult are the development of the critical faculties, and gaining the awareness of one's own mortality.
Christians are in a position to do neither. Their mental development is permanently arrested as a result.
Posted by: Dustin | September 3, 2006 7:12 PM
Exactly. It's apalling to realize how much of the earth Mr. Christenot could never comfortably visit -- there are huge parts of the world where people believe quite differently from him, and I can't imagine how he could cope, because he'd constantly be deeply offended. Fundamentalism really does breed a kind of person who can only cope in a very restricted number of contexts, people who are only happy if they're never exposed to people too different from themselves.
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September 3, 2006 7:16 PM
So, by reductio ad Some-Dudes-who-were-evil, atheism is evil. Rock on in the fallacious world, Roman.
Posted by: JackGoff | September 3, 2006 7:18 PM
Roman, as an atheist, I will not take even the minutest shred of responsibility for the anti-Christian hostility of Soviet Russia until you take full, personal, and complete responsibility for the Spanish Inquisition.
I think that's more than fair.
Posted by: Mithrandir | September 3, 2006 7:26 PM
Methinks that post was a joke.
The guy's name is a dead giveaway for sure.
christen-not.
Sounds like an onion-styled gag.
But if it were true then he's just like every other christian since, when it came down to it, he chose personal comfort in an uncomfortable situation rather than stand firm in his faith and refuse to pay homage to someone elses god. He could have just sat down and if someone said anything he could say that he meant no disrespect, he just didn't mean any respect either. His faith forbids that castrating oneself or paying homage to any other gods in such a manner was forbidden. It's not personal, it's just not allowed.
Yet rather than stay true to his faith he swallowed hard and sat through it.
How christian of him to bend the rules for convenience' sake?
Bet that doesn't happen much now do ya think?
It's one thing to be a christian. It's another thing to be a cowardly one whose faith is so thin that he would forsake it just to spare himself a few minutes of discomfort.
MYOB'
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Posted by: MYOB | September 3, 2006 8:05 PM
I was rather impressed with the author. He was actually able to extrapolate from his own discomfort to the discomfort someone else might feel when confronted by an establishment of his religion.
Most fundamentalists I know would be incapable of such a mental leap. They would have ranted on about how, in this Christian country, we have Buddhist and Shinto prayers in public schools. Of course, the ACLU won't object, except perhaps they'd prefer Satanism! And how could we betray the Christian soldiers who defeated the yellow peril by allowing the defeated enemies' prayers in our schools!
Posted by: Gerard Harbison | September 3, 2006 8:20 PM
Roman, as an atheist, I will not take even the minutest shred of responsibility for the anti-Christian hostility of Soviet Russia until you take full, personal, and complete responsibility for the Spanish Inquisition.
I am sure roman can defend himself but it seems to me that his point is not so much that "atheism is evil" as it was that we should be careful in the assertion that any widely followed philosophy or religion (buddhism, atheism, native american religions) can somehow negate a human tendency toward strife and conflict over silly shit. I make this point only because I agree with it. On the other hand it is not clear to me as it seems to Roman that anyone has really suggested otherwise.
Posted by: brent | September 3, 2006 8:21 PM
Makes me think we need a bumper sticker along the lines of those "can you ____? thank a liberal!" ones:
This story makes an interesting comparison to the wingnuts condemning the Fox journalists for mouthing the words of a conversion to Islam to save their lives.
Posted by: John | September 3, 2006 8:46 PM
I was rather impressed with the author. He was actually able to extrapolate from his own discomfort to the discomfort someone else might feel when confronted by an establishment of his religion.
Correct, which puts him a cut above the average person who'd post at Worldnet. But he seems VERY uncomfortable with this trip outside his mental comfort zone, and quickly scuttles back into xenophobia, where he seems more at home. So the guy has potential, but seems to be afraid of this. Kind of sad.
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September 3, 2006 8:46 PM
Jude: Funny how hard it is to find Christians obeying what (according to the book) is one of the few unequivocal, clear commandments from Jesus, eh?
Posted by: Keith Douglas | September 3, 2006 9:20 PM
The apostrophe grapheme does not exist in non-Roman orthographies; they use other methods to mark glottal stops. And I can't think of any Indo-European languages in which the glottal stop is phonemic, so there's not much point in marking it at all. It's only when the Roman alphabet is adapted to non-IE languages (such as Hawaiian, Navajo, Ojibwe, etc.) that it becomes necessary to mark it.
Incidentally, the only Hawaiian I've ever known didn't pronounce the glottal in "Hawaii", but did pronounce the one in her own name.
Posted by: Dan | September 3, 2006 9:25 PM
This point was illustrated in the last week in new subdivision near us where one new owner planted a statue of the Virgin Mary in his front yard, drawing a rebuke from the home owners' association followed by an over-ruling by the developer who clearly thinks sales will suffer if Virgin Marys aren't allowed. (From the weekly real estate listings it's clear the development is attracting many new immigrants of all ethnicities.) The gist of my letter is what if the neighborhood fundies want to install large signs saying "Jesus Saves" or "Repent"; and the Buddhist neighbor wants a statue of Buddha, the Jew a saying from the Torah, the Muslim a sign bearing a quote from the Koran (in Arabic no less), a Hindu his statue of his favorite god, and on and on. I suspect the new Catholic homeowner would be offended by one or more if not all of the above, which would prove the same point our Hawaiian Christian has just made to his chagrin, that pushing religion into the public square is not a good idea.
Posted by: Keanus | September 3, 2006 10:21 PM
And I can't think of any Indo-European languages in which the glottal stop is phonemic,
Apparently it's phonemic in some dialects of Bengali. But you're right, that's all I can find right now.
Remarkable, considering how common the glottal stop is as a phoneme in non-IE languages.
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September 3, 2006 10:26 PM
Any working-class dialect of English between London and Glasgow, and also in Dublin.
There, the rain goes pi'er pa'er on the window panes.
I don't think I used my tongue to pronounce the letter 't' until I was in my teens. Moreover, I was completely unaware until I was in college that my glottal pronounciation was in any way different from other people's lingual stop.
Posted by: Gerard Harbison | September 3, 2006 11:25 PM
Any working-class dialect of English between London and Glasgow, and also in Dublin.
There, the rain goes pi'er pa'er on the window panes.
Lots of IE languages have glottal stops phonetically (including many North American English dialects) -- the difficult part is whether any IE language has glottal stop as an unquestionably contrastive phoneme. And I'm not sure whether for languages like Cockney one would definitely say glottal stop is truly phonemic, or merely an allophone of /t/.
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September 4, 2006 12:10 AM
George, is the difference between "blackbird" and "black bird" a glottal stop, or something else?
Posted by: RavenT | September 4, 2006 12:16 AM
Well, I guess the question is whether a bo'le is the same as a bottle. Obviously, having been unaware of any difference, I've already voted with my glottis!
I think some Cockneys might maintain, though, that while a bo'le is a container for beer, a bottle is likely to contain single-malt scotch!
Posted by: Gerard Harbison | September 4, 2006 12:20 AM
George, is the difference between "blackbird" and "black bird" a glottal stop, or something else?
It's the intonation. 'Blackbird', being a single word, has primary stress on the first syllable and no stress on the second. "Black bird", being a phrase, has either equal stress on both syllables, or perhaps for some people, slightly greater stress on the second.
When I used to teach this stuff I would tell students to try and whistle words to tell where the accents are.
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September 4, 2006 12:26 AM
Obviously, having been unaware of any difference, I've already voted with my glottis!
Listen to your own pronunciation of 'button'. If you speak an ordinary dialect of North American English, you probably have a glottal stop right before the /n/.
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September 4, 2006 12:29 AM
Wow. That's all I've got to say. Wow.
Posted by: Nathan Perrier | September 4, 2006 1:03 AM
Most cockneys would, however, accept "aristotle" as a perfectly good substitute for either
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 4, 2006 1:27 AM
JackGoff: So, by reductio ad Some-Dudes-who-were-evil, atheism is evil. Rock on in the fallacious world, Roman.
Mithrandir: Roman, as an atheist, I will not take even the minutest shred of responsibility for the anti-Christian hostility of Soviet Russia until you take full, personal, and complete responsibility for the Spanish Inquisition.
Oh, guys, take it easy. Did I say "atheism is evil"? There, your knees can stop the jerking movement now.
brent: I am sure roman can defend himself but it seems to me that his point is not so much that "atheism is evil" as it was that we should be careful in the assertion that any widely followed philosophy or religion (buddhism, atheism, native american religions) can somehow negate a human tendency toward strife and conflict over silly shit.
Well said!
I make this point only because I agree with it. On the other hand it is not clear to me as it seems to Roman that anyone has really suggested otherwise.
It began with someone calling atheism, Buddhism and Native American beliefs "live-and-let-live" religions. Well, at least one of them weren't always such.
Posted by: Roman Werpachowski | September 4, 2006 5:58 AM
Well, I think the point is that regardless of what a group of people believe, they can be total asshats. Much of what happened in the CCCP was rather disgusting in it's treatment of non-"atheists". But as mentioned time and time before, such is the case with other beliefs, fundamentalist muslims think that we should all be converted or die. But again the same can be said of fundies from just about every religion, if not all. Inherently, if one takes a look at the very core of most religions, we can all agree on good stuff there...it's mostly the dogma piled on top of it that blurs such and creates the followers there-of to not only hate others, but to be hated themselves. It's just a matter of people shunning and hating others, because their preacher tells them to, or because they had been ostracized themselves.
Posted by: Che | September 4, 2006 6:49 AM
I also grew up in Hawaii and I fondly remember the multiculturalism. My parents and I emigrated from Italy and that was the specific reason for why they chose Hawaii from all the other possible destinations in the world. I also remember very vividly how, upon going to college and later being in the Navy "on the mainland", life seemed so dammned one-dimensional.
I can't help but parrot the oft mentioned observation that the Xians, who allegedly have "such a good thing going" in their religion, have all these proscriptions against exposure to other religions... just in case they might stumble.
If you ask me, if your religion is so piss poor that it just takes half a moment (and half a brain) to lose the faith, you really owe it to yourself to find a better one anyway.
Posted by: The Count | September 4, 2006 11:34 AM
It wasn't non-atheists they were hostile to, it was non-Leninists. (Or non-Stalinists, depending on time period.) PZ would have been in the gulag right alongside the priests, if he had expressed his views there and then the same way he does here and now. Atheist bashers tend to overlook that point because it demolishes their argument.
The larger argument that religion is merely exploiting tribalism reflexes and not cre