In the Times this week, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox rabbis are enforcing gender apartheid by sending their own women and girls to flood the Wailing Wall plaza, so that women who actually want to pray there can’t get in:
โTheyโre trying to change the religion and politics in Israel โ they should do that in the Knesset and not at the Kotel,โ Ms. Beskin said, using the Hebrew terms for Israelโs Parliament and the Western Wall. โThe rules should be, honestly, just respect the tradition here.โ
Traditions only deserve to be respected if they’re good ones. Sexist bigotry doesn’t become more acceptable just because it’s old.
On SciLogs, Michael Blume wonders whether secular societies will be out-reproduced by religious ones:
Are human populations lacking any beliefs in superempirical agents doomed to demographic extinction?… [R]eligious people tend (on average) to have far “more” children than their non-religious peers…
That’s OK. We’ll let the religious people do the hard work of giving birth to the children and raising them; then we’ll steal them away by deconverting them with persuasive arguments that point out how much more sense our viewpoint makes.
On Catholic Forums, a commenter asks how to defend the church against accusations of bigotry:
I live in the Archdiocese of Detroit where Archbishop Vigneron recently made statements upholding the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding gay marriage and Holy Communion. Today in the Detroit Free Press I read two letters supporting the Archbishop the rest of the letters were filled with negativity, anger, etc. against the Archbishop including a letter from a nun! How does a faithful Catholic respond in defense of the Catholic faith?
Easy answer: You can’t. Their bigotry is indefensible.
From the U.K. Rationalist Association, Jonny Scaramanga writes about Christian courtship culture taking an even more bizarre turn:
Christian singer Kathy Troccoli came out with a book, Falling in Love with Jesus: Abandoning Yourself to the Greatest Romance of Your Life. Such was the success of this that Troccoli had to come up with ever more vomit-inducing subtitles for the sequels, Living in Love with Jesus: Clothed in the Colors of His Love, and Forever In Love with Jesus: Becoming One with the Love of Your Life.
This was simply the tip of a Mills & Boon iceberg that includes such titles as The Wild Romancer: Uncovering the Romance Jesus Longs to Lavish on You and When a Woman Meets Jesus: Finding the Love Every Woman Longs For.
If there isn’t any erotic Jesus fiction in those books, I bet millions of purchasers are going to be very disappointed.