A religious discussion broke out on the Huey Lewis and the News chat board, of all places. It all got started because a teenage girl is slowly learning about the band and experiencing some of their music for the first time. She's bright and articulate but clearly seems to be leading a sheltered existence, being homeschooled by her apparently ultra-conservative Christian parents. (She was the person who posted the cheers for Bush after the election. While it wouldn't be fair to hold these views against a 14 year old, I'm pretty sure, based on other posts, she was essentially parroting her dad.) I am, frankly, somewhat surprised her parents even let her hang out on the fan board in the first place with all us heathens...
Anyway, she reported that she got the second album, Picture This, and liked all the songs on it except "Workin' for a Livin'." Someone asked why. Because of the bad words, she said.
What bad words? Oh THESE "bad words":
"Some days won't end ever,
And some days pass on by.
I'll be working here forever
At least until I die.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't;
I'm s'posed to get a raise next week
You know damn well I won't."
This unexpected response then unleashed a discussion about the biblical mandates against using bad words, eventually morphing into a further discussion of what it would take to achieve salvation, etc. It was actually fairly interesting, once it was moved out of the Picture This thread to one in the off-topic area, partly because for such sensitive material it was being handled so civilly.
Still I kept my distance. I'm not qualified to discuss Christian biblical doctrine, and I sort of had this fear that at some point the conversation might turn into a train wreck. Extremism inevitably seems to lead to it, because it exists so fully in its narrow definition of the universe, incapable of accounting for other people's varying beliefs.
No full-on train wreck has occurred, but small bits of harm were nonetheless sneaking through. The girl had never heard of the Koran, and was mixing up Muslims and Hindus (and in a very dismissive way.) [Edit: further research suggests she may actually have been speaking about Jains.] But the bigger problem was the person who swooped in to set the record straight, but may have made things worse through his tone of authority and lack of corresponding accuracy, particularly in discussing Jews. Although I'd wanted to steer clear of the whole thing, I didn't think I could or should, not when these misstatements were allowed to linger publicly, unchallenged. Given how little knowledge some people are working with, it isn't good for wrong facts to become the basis of their erudition. These misapprehensions have so often been the basis for discrimination – or worse. Fearing this kind of reaction I felt compelled to set the record straight.
Yet I feel resentful for having had to do it. I had not wanted to enter the conversation. I had wanted to leave them to spin their wheels alone. By entering the discussion I felt like I validated it, and I didn't want to do that. But being silent felt like it was validating the ignorance, and that's really what I fear. Extremism can take root much easier when there is no alternate information competing with it. I don't only mean extremism as a matter of faith – I mean any narrow world view that fails to incorporate the panoply of differences of all its people. Whether it was misstating that all Jews were of anglo-saxon origin (huh?) or why they don't accept Jesus as the messiah, these were the real bad words, words that left unchallenged end up validating the negative biases underpinning them and can entrench further hatred. Somebody needed to speak up against them. Apparently that somebody had to be me.
Edit 1/3/05: This post could use some editing because I'm not sure if it's quite clear the point I'm trying to make in the last paragraph. The comment I made below will help clarify somewhat, so please read it to get a better sense of what I was trying to say. It wasn't so much that I felt personally burdened by needing to post the correction, but that it was concerning that there was no one else willing - or, more likely, able - to do so. I initially interpreted my emotional reaction to the situation as one of resentment, but in reflecting further I think it was really fear, more than anything else, that motivated me to post. Fear of so much ignorance in the world, and the harm it so often wreaks. (And as it happens, so often on people like me.)
Comments (2)
And that's the first time I feel sort of glad that I come from a culture that is mostly areligious... although I guess that makes me sound like I've completely missed the point of you diatribe, Cathy.
Historywise, it's only fairly recently that ordinary people have actually become exposed to cultures other than their own, and in that sense extremism hasn't really existed until recently. (Gee, that was a really dense statement - this might take a while for me to dig out of.) Ordinary people weren't able to travel very far on their own until the bicycle was invented (or so I hear), and so the likelihood that people were exposed to any outside beliefs, if they were normal, extremist, logical, or irrational, was more or less remote, and even if it did happen, usually only one at a time. Extreme beliefs have existed forever, and possibly the potential to compare extreme beliefs to the 'norm' may have existed for a while (although not quite so easily), but it seems right now, in the modern global society we seem to exist in now, it is, for the first time, somewhat of a necessity to recognize that other cultures exist. Since it's hard to know that you have a narrow view of the world unless you're exposed to a different view, extremism, as you've sort of defined it (and now we probably should look for a better term for the concept)... anyway, extremism is a fairly new thing. Technology has always played a part in expanding the scope of influence of beliefs, and the internet, in this sense, is probably the ultimate technology for this sort of thing, given that most previous forms of technology involved physical movement of people to get beliefs moved too.
So I guess my point is, given that extremism is a fairly new thing, and no one has quite figured out how to deal it, and that there are very few Jews that I know of that are Huey Lewis fans, well, yes, apparently that somebody had to be you. Not quite the same as people at work coming to me to proofread English, since I'm the only native speaker around. But I still think, why me? and then I realize, who else? It's not my job, but there isn't really anyone else around. Just happen to be at some place at some time (trying not to use the cliche 'right', since the rightness is not clear), being able to do something.
Posted by Koichi | December 31, 2004 9:18 AM
Posted on December 31, 2004 09:18
I may edit my post, so these comments may become somewhat moot. My point isn't "Why me" in terms of why do *I* always have to bear the burden. It's more a sense of despair/frustration that the burden needed to be born by someone, and that there was no one else even remotely qualified to bear it (it would seem.)
If this whole interchange had happened 200 years ago (not likely though, since it involved the Internet and Al Gore wasn't born then) I might not have expected an awareness of other cultures. In this day and age, though, there's no excuse. Especially for someone cosmopolitan enough to be using mass information technology.
But what really got me was not the girl's insularity (though I find that frightening unto itself) but the ignorance and insularity engrained in the "knowledge" of the person claiming to be more informed. He sort of epitomized the problem of "a little knowledge being a dangerous thing." If the girl on her own wanted to hawk her religion as the only game in town, well, that would be sad but I would have been able to ignore her. It was the other person dragging me and my kin into it, and wrongly, that made it necessary to wade in. My resentment stems from wishing that if he didn't really know what he was talking about, he should have stayed out of it.
Posted by Cathy | December 31, 2004 12:24 PM
Posted on December 31, 2004 12:24