Am I a Person or a Jew?

dgordon left an interesting comment on my post Modern Orthodoxy's State of Denial:

There's a really basic conflict involved in the Feldman/Maimonides-School encounter. The Maimonides School, and by extension OJ in general, promotes a CORPORATE identity: a cardinal obligation of sb. who is born Jewish is to perpetuate the Jewish people by marrying sb. Jewish and raising Jewish children (esp., OJ argues, in the wake of such environing threats as anti-semitism and assimilation). Feldman, on the other hand, believes in INDIVIDUAL identity: the point of having any sort of religion at all is to explore and extend one's relationship w/ God or whoever/whatever may be out there (this as an aspect of self-fulfillment within a context of respect for others' choices). These two models comprise what sociologist Max Weber called a "clash of the value spheres"; they really can't be reconciled to each other...

In the wake of Feldman's admittedly uneven article (discussed here) I saw a lot of comments that I found mystifying. Boiled down, they essentially took Feldman's intermarriage as an affront to his school, his parents, and the Orthodox community in general, if not the entire Jewish people. They said things like his marriage was "a slap in the face" to his Jewish education and that he "turned his back on Judaism."

As I said, I was mystified. If I had a child, say, who married a rabbi or a Buddhist or even a Republican ;-) I might be concerned for them and perhaps express my doubts. But to take it as a personal insult? Of course not, unless they were literally doing it out of spite. I see parenting (and friendship and love) as something I choose to give freely, not something I'm doing because I expect something in return.

dgordon nailed it. Orthodox Jews see Feldman not as a human being who made what was probably a difficult life decision, but as a Jew who married out. In the same way, when I left Orthodox Judaism, my Orthodox friends and family didn't see it as me just making a choice they didn't agree with, but as an affront to my parents and community. Nobody wanted to know what made me do it or how I was handling the transition; if anything they wanted to know as little as possible about it.

My non-Orthodox friends and family, on the other hand, were genuinely curious about my life-change. They asked for my story, empathized with how hard it was for me, and accepted me for both who I had been and who I had become. Speaking to one Conservative (the Jewish denomination) father was particularly enlightening -- he told me that all he wanted from his children was that they were good people. People like him see major life choices as part of the human experience -- he would no more attempt to dictate his child's religion (even though they were active in their religious community) than he would force them to join a profession that they didn't care for.

I have honestly sought the truth in my life and that's a difficult thing which I think should be applauded, even if you don't agree with my conclusions. The common Orthodox view that they have a monopoly on truth and that those who leave or marry out are akin to traitors, is ludicrous and arrogant. Human beings are not the property of the community or of our parents. We owe our gratitude and respect to those who raised us, but no more.

We have no moral responsibility to make babies for your community or to adhere to your dogma. We do, however, have the responsibility to support and respect the difficult personal choices our loved ones make in their lifetimes, even when we don't agree with them, and so do you, or you're not worthy of the people you love.

Atheist FAQ

Via the other Jewish Atheist, the Atheist Jew, an atheists' FAQ by the Friendly Atheist.


Why do you not believe in God?

Why do we believe anything? After much investigation and thought, the idea that there is no God strikes me as more plausible than the idea that there is one. (The two primary reasons for this are that nature and human history are "red in tooth and claw" and that the scientific method has explained more things more satisfactorily without resorting to "God" in a few hundred years than religion has done in a few thousand or more.)


Where do your morals come from?

From a sense of empathy, which itself is probably partly innate and partly cultural.


What is the meaning of life?

What is the meaning of a Wednesday morning? The question is nonsensical.


Is atheism a religion?

Not by any reasonable definition of "religion."


If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times?

I talk to friends, loved ones, and professional therapists; I write; and I eat too much.


Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God?

Define "should." Personally, I feel a need to explain myself, which is part of why I have a blog. I also enjoy debate. I don't think an atheist has any particular responsibility to Spread the Word or anything like that.


Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists?

Yes, but I do not believe the link is causal.


How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God?

That billions of people are wrong there can be no doubt, since there are over two billion Christians and over one billion Muslims and billions of others and religions are for the most part mutually exclusive. How can so many people be wrong? Because it's human nature to believe things without adequate cause.


Why does the universe exist?

No idea.


How did life originate?

On Earth? Probably with the whole primordial soup thing, followed by descent with modification. If life exists elsewhere, I imagine it started the same way, although I imagine there are or will be plenty of forms of life that are created by intelligent lifeforms as well. It's also possible that there are forms of life we haven't yet imagined.


Is all religion harmful?

Like everything else, it has good and bad. Some forms of religion are much more harmful than others. On most issues, you'll find religious people on both sides, because religions are not well-defined. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Phelps are/were both "Christian." I will say that most religions are harmful with regard to uncovering empirical truths.


What’s so bad about religious moderates?

Sometimes, they make it possible for religious extremists to do bad things. Other times, they themselves do some (usually lesser) bad things because they are religious.


Is there anything redeeming about religion?

Religious people have provided great things to the world as well as horrible things. I don't think it's possible to know whether the world would be better or worse without the influence of religion.


What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)?

If he's a reasonable bloke, I imagine we'll have a good laugh. If Pat Robertson is right, I'm going to burn.


Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected?

Mencken said it best: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."


Are atheists smarter than theists?

According to studies, atheists in America have on average higher IQs and more education than theists. Whether that's the same thing as being "smarter" is left as an exercise for the reader.


How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity?

I haven't studied the subject much, but I suspect that there was a charismatic Jew named Jesus (Ίησους/יהושע/ישוע) around whom the mythology and religion of Christianity was later erected. I wouldn't be shocked, though, if it turned out "Jesus" is really a composite of several actual or mythological people or demigods.


Would the world be better off without any religion?

Impossible to know.


What happens when we die?

We decompose.

Is Morality Selfishness by Another Name?

Morality keeps popping up in my thinking and reading lately. There are of course the religious discussions of atheistic morality, morality and free will, and theodicy. Then I have also participated in a lot of discussions recently about charity and whether, for example, Oprah is to be commended for her philanthropy or criticized for not doing more. Finally, I've been seeing a lot of the perennial complaints, common for some reason among internet users, that women always go for the jerks and nice guys finish last.

Economist Tyler Cowen links to a couple of posts including Cads vs. Dads II which is based on a comment from a reader:

Why is a Cad a Cad? I think it is because: He can be. His genes are so good, so much in demand, that women are willing to mate with him knowing that he might not stick around. Same reason why a Dad is a Dad. He knows if based solely on looks (proxy for gene competition), he will lose to the Cad every time. So, he must compensate for his lower quality genes by investing more resources in the female and offspring.

Now obviously there are some "Dads" who are attractive enough (or rich or powerful enough) that they could get away with being Cads if they wanted to. But consider an unattractive person. Being a "Dad" might be the only attractive thing about him, so being a "nice" guy instead of a jerk is simply his best bet at maximizing his chances at landing a woman. Or friends, or even maybe a job. Tabarrok goes on to identify a scientific study of birds which indicates that this hypothesis is indeed true... at least for birds.

So combining the Cad vs. Dad hypothesis with my readings and discussions about morality, I got to wondering: are people moral simply because they can't get away with being immoral? If so, morality is a strategy as selfish as any Machiavellian tyrant's.

So what of those who hold forms of morality against their own self-interest? Are they merely tools of a successful meme-complex? Is a powerful person who devotes his life to helping the less fortunate just a sucker? What of powerless people who believe the powerful are powerful because they are worthy?

(See also Nietzsche's idea of slave vs. master morality.)

Were Jewish and Christian* (and Communist**, etc.) morality simply a defense against the powerful, as Nietzsche believed? And am I, ironically, a slave to an arbitrary and predominantly religious morality? Should I adopt the morality of the powerful instead and use my talents merely to maximize my own power and prestige at the expense of others?

(Note: I'm being mostly facetious. I actually believe my sense of morality is based on empathy.)


* Today, of course, Christianity is most often used in the service of the powerful, at least in America. Because Christianity has been the religion of the powerful for so long, its God has changed from the Jesus of the Beatitudes to, e.g., Supply Side Jesus.) Jews, on the other hand, have been quite powerless until very recently.

** Is that why so many Jews were Communists?

Linguistic Snobbery

Pet peeve: language prescriptivists.

Language prescriptivism is an interesting form of elitism which allows people to feel themselves not only better, but smarter than others. Whether it's liberals making fun of Bush's pronunciation of nuclear, whites' mocking of black speech patterns, or simply bloggers attacking their opponents' grammar or spelling rather than their arguments, they are misguided about what language is and how it works.

If language is confusing, it's a problem. If language has "bad" style (for example if it's boring or cloying) is a subjective issue, but fair to note. Language is almost never, though, wrong.

"Damn, he dumb."
"Can everyone take out their books, please?"
"I don't feel good."
"Will all y'all shut the hell up?"

All of those sentences are perfectly understandable but often derided. What they generally reveal, though, is not stupidity, but the speaker's region and/or social group. There are undeniable advantages to certain styles in certain situations, for example speaking "standard" English at job interviews, "redneck" if you're Larry the Cable Guy, or "ebonics" if you're an inner-city black kid who doesn't want to be called an "oreo" by your peers.

Then there are the even snootier complaints made about the following kinds of sentences and phrases:

"To boldly go where no man has gone before."
"The train will be moving momentarily."
"Who did you go with?"
"Which begs the question of..."

Only the second and fourth can arguably be described as unclear, but they are so common, it's almost always snobbery rather than confusion that spurs complaints. The first and third are "wrong" only in the sense that some people have arbitrarily declared them as "wrong," in exactly the same way that one might argue that placing the fork on the right side of the plate is "wrong."

Sally Thompson at Language Log quotes an interesting comment about the nature of prescriptivists from linguist Lauren Squires, which I will reproduce in part:

Sociolinguistics is concerned with the question not only of how people speak, but of how they think about how they and others speak. You thus have people studying language attitudes, seeking to identify and understand what people think about linguistic variation: Why do Michiganders think they speak the most "correct" form of English in the United States? Why do people judge speakers with certain non-English-accented English as less socially desirable, less intelligent, or less agreeable than speakers without a discernible accent? How many Detroiters fail to recognize "Canadian" phonological features within their own speech community? (For excellent references on this topic, see Harold Schiffman's page of bibliographies on Language Attitudes.)

Then there's the language ideologies work, which goes beyond what people think about language to ask what social processes underlie the attitudes, often by appealing to political systems, historical influences, socioeconomic structure, and semiotic processes that turn language into a carrier of social meaning in various ways. Language ideologies are often defined as sets of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that influence how people use language (by imposing some sort of schema about what is "right," "appropriate," or whatever), and they also serve as speakers' means of rationalizing or otherwise explaining the language that they or someone else uses.

In the case of the United States, one can make a pretty good argument that our dominant language ideologies include ideas about there being one standard style that is considered "correct," that language can be something subject to judgments of "correctness" to begin with, and that nation-states are best off when their citizens speak one unified language. Studies on standardization, and particularly with regard to English, point out that in literate societies, ideas of "standard" become even more salient and powerful because of the tendency of print to "freeze" language or at least impose stratification on its use, elevating some formal or allegedly generic style above more colloquial or regional ones.

You can also argue that the written form serves as a trigger for linguistic awareness, on which there seems to be less research but which is of no less importance (if you ask me!). In order to make a usage gripe, you have to be aware of the linguistic feature you're griping about. You may be more aware because you were taught something about it, or you may notice it because it varies a lot among your acquaintances, or there may be something that makes it especially salient because of the kind of linguistic thing it is (phoneme, morpheme, word, spelling, etc.). You may also be more aware of it because it's been culturally packaged: invoking a term from Dennis Preston's work, a linguistic feature or language variety can become a folk linguistic artifact that circulates through the culture, picking up different social connotations along the way. Standard English is most certainly one of these, and so are "Ebonics," "Spanglish," "Southern drawl," and "Netspeak."

In public discourse (and educational settings), these are framed as distinct varieties to be either aspired to or avoided, having either high or low mainstream social prestige. We can pinpoint some contents of the artifacts, too, in media reports: about change in language as language decay, about linguistic "revolution" as socially harmful, about how no one sends thank-you notes any more, about how multilingualism is a threat to the health of English and Americans, about how emoticons are rampant in school essays, about how you'd better understand your teenagers' online lingo fast, before it's too late and they're pregnant or in rehab or, worse, cavorting with a sexual predator.

So, the gripers. You have people who believe that there's a correct way of speaking and writing, and who impose that belief on others. For them, what they are doing is fighting for the truth, tradition, and the Natural Order of Language. While lots of them may have some interest in language and its inner workings, for most, language is simply a material/symbolic system that gets roped into social Othering. Language is accessible, convenient, and flexible for use in doing so: it's always there, it's always changing, and it's always going to be socially differentiated. With linguistic variation, it seems that the grass is always greener on the other side, if you're talking about a usage associated with an appealing group of people (swoon those Aussies with their exotic diphthongs!), or it's greener on your side, if you're talking about a usage associated with a somehow undesirable group (shakes fist those Mexicans/teens/rednecks and their bad English!).

When you give gripers an outlet for their opinions, they're going to feel validated, and they're going to enjoy the feeling that their comments are helping to preserve the Natural Order. Maybe they see it as their duty, or maybe it's just a playful pastime. Either way, it's not (entirely) their fault, and it reflects issues beyond what people are taught about language. It's the reality of the social divisions we are constantly reproducing — every day, all the time, each of us. While I agree that it would be nice to get some teachable moments out of the gripes, I'm not certain that it would ultimately change anything until some deeper cultural issues were addressed.

Language Hat is another great blog that often touches on some of these issues. I also enjoy Mixing Memory.