There are, it seems to me, two big trends going on in religious faith right now. The first is an obvious upswing in fundamentalism, Islamic and Christian, a fundamentalism that challenges the separation of church and state, and that opposes internal debate about theology in favor of the rigid imposition of orthodoxy. But the other trend is that many faithful believers are working out their own views within their own religious traditions. Those who mock this development call it “cafeteria religion;” I’d prefer to think of it as religion informed by reason and individual experience. In America especially, new religions are popping up all over the place that partake of this cafeteria paradigm. A lively piece in the recent Reason magazine provides an overview of some of the wackier as well as more mainstream versions of this:
There is a wide gulf, of course, between someone who merely fine-tunes her Catholicism and someone who replaces the Virgin Mary with the goddess of chaos; between a Jew who mixes milk with meat and a Jew who practices witchcraft. If I am describing a trend, it is one that covers a wide spectrum of behavior, from the ordinary to the outré. As a journalist, I have naturally focused on the latter – but it’s the former, obviously, that is reshaping society.
Well worth a read.
FEMINISM AND LACROSSE: Some fascinating discussion going on at the Ms Magazine bulletin board. It’s a classic feminist controversy: are we for gender equality or for protecting girls from big bad boys? Oddly enough, some of these anti-male feminists might have some allies on the far right. They wouldn’t want a boy playing on a girls’ lacrosse team either.
CIRCUMCISION DATA: It behooves me to link to a new study arguing that there is no difference in sensitivity between circumcized and uncircumcized men. The Reuters piece doesn’t tell us exactly how such things were measured and the squeamish probably don’t want to know. My own anti-circumcision view, however, is not based on the idea that mutilated men have less pleasure. It’s based on the simple notion that individuals’ bodies should not be permanently altered without their consent, unless the medical evidence for such a procedure is overwhelming. It isn’t. So I’ll stick to my guns.
ANOTHER BUSH NOMINEE: This time to the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, former Jesse Helms campaign press secretary, Claude A. Allen. According to the Washington Post,
A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said Democrats are scrutinizing Allen’s statements about abortion and gays. During the 1984 campaign, Allen was criticized for his response to Hunt’s description of Helms’s backers as right-wingers. Allen said Hunt had links “with the queers.”
Inclusion just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?
The Dish 