“The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.”
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)
Well, FOX commentator Brit Hume really stepped in it.
I didn’t see it, but evidently on a televised discussion he opined Tiger Woods should abandon Buddhism and get right with Jesus to turn his life around. From the Left commentariat’s response, you’d think he’d advocated the return of the Spanish Inquisition.
Bill O’Reilly weighed in with his usual restraint.
(I am NOT being facetious. A lot of people don’t seem to see that O’Reilly is in control at all times. His writing style is generally quite restrained. On air he calls people names like “pinhead,” interrupts constantly, and comes off very in-your face, but he’s not losing it. He makes other people lose it – and sits back and smiles.)
“On my TV program, I asked Hume whether he was proselytizing, as he is a devout Christian. He said no and put forth that he was just offering Woods some advice he might consider. Thus, the question becomes: What is Hume’s sin? Why are people like Washington Post critic Tom Shales and “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart going after him?
The answer, I believe, lies in the explosive nature of right and wrong, good and evil; and in the unease some Americans feel when a religious conviction they don’t hold is displayed before them”
I left this comment on the site:
“I’m a cheerful agnostic on religious matters so I can fairly claim not to have a dog in this fight. (I used to be a militant agnostic*, but mellowed as I got older.)
So speaking as an outsider looking in – the claims of believing Christians to being slighted more than other faiths by the “intelligentsia” are definitely true.
When I was in grad school in anthropology I saw this all the time. You could all it xenophilia; xenophobia stood on its head.
People who wouldn’t dream of uttering a critical, or even skeptical word, about exotic foreign religions or customs would mercilessly mock those held by their own countrymen.”
(A kind of fun example of this is fraternities. Social science majors are generally the kind of people who wouldn’t be caught dead in one – and that includes me. “Frat rats” is what we called them when I was in college, and jokes other people tell as blonde jokes were sorority girl jokes. But any one of them, again including me, would have killed for an invitation to be adopted into one of the remaining Plains Indian warrior fraternities or African tribal societies.)
The last time I was in grad school, I had a course with a professor who loved to mock the beliefs of Christians in class. Since this was a class in qualitative research, it was difficult to see the relevance of his going on about, “people who believe a 30-year-old carpenter was killed and came back to life.”
A young lady, all of four foot ten if she was an inch, quietly mentioned on a couple of occasions that she was coming from a Christian perspective.
(I mention her size, because this guy was around 300 pounds. This could have been very intimidating to a tiny woman, if he hadn’t been such a wuss.)
Did this molify him? Did it cause him to consider that mocking other people’s deeply held religious views in certain settings is extremely rude? Did he consider that gratuitously insulting someone you are involved in a power relationship with is an abuse of authority? Do I even have to answer these questions?
And one more thing. Sitting to his immediate left in every class was a lovely young woman from Turkey, who happened to be the president of the Muslim Students Association on campus.
Strange, I attended every single class that semester and don’t recall him saying anything about, “people who believe a book was dictated by God to a semi-literate camel driver.”
Perhaps I stepped out to go to the loo and missed it.
Maybe he’s a xenophile like a lot of social science types, uncomfortable in his own culture and attracted to exotic cultures – or rather his idea of what an exotic culture is like.
And perhaps he’s a coward who only offends people he knows will take it.
Brit Hume evidently offended some Buddhists, but they’re not likely to declare a fatwa on him. (I don’t think for a minute that delightful Turkish lady would have declared one on Professor Fatso either – but I can’t vouch for some of the other Muslims on campus if word had gotten around of an insult to Islam.)
And for the record, I think both Hume and O’Reilly may have missed something about Buddhism.
There is evidence that Gautama the Buddah might have been what I call a “cheerful agnostic” himself. Buddhism as originally taught, is not a religion per se but a philosophy, or a Way, that can be practiced in conjunction with another religion, even Christianity, or no religion.
* A militant agnostic says, “I don’t know what the truth about God and religion is, and you don’t either.”
A cheerful agnostic says, “Hey what the heck, you might be right.”
And no, he doesn’t really believe that. He’s just flat not interested in the argument. Just as he has no interest in converting to your faith, he has no interest in attacking yours.
As I’ve asked before, if religion is a crutch, then what do you call someone who goes around kicking crutches out from under people? A fearless seeker of the truth, or a bloody sadist?
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