I’m not a big fan of religious tolerance as some of you might have guessed. I believe in freedom of speech and belief so I don’t want the government shutting down churches anymore than I want the FBI to raid UFO conferences. I also believe general tolerance. If cousin Fred believes deeply and sincerely in UFOs it’s reasonable to try and convince him otherwise and to tease him in a (genuinely) good natured way about it but it’s just mean to publicly mock his beliefs in front of him. This (at least in principle) is a useful and pretty fair social standard since we implicitly view obligation to steer the conversation away from UFOs as a favor to Fred. If uncle Joe works for CSICOP we might expect him to be polite and avoid deliberately inflammatory remarks but he would hardly be obligated not to discuss his job or explain his beliefs if asked and if Fred gets offended it’s Fred who we would blame.

Religious tolerance, however, tends to work quite differently. Rather than viewing the religious individual as the unreasonable person and regarding the choice to avoid topics they find sensitive as a favor it’s just the opposite. Society doesn’t demand we pretend believing in UFOs is a plausible response to the evidence, only that we don’t shove it in their faces but religious tolerance demands we act as if religious belief was reasonable. For instance if one of the candidates for president admitted their long held belief that benevolent aliens were visiting our planet in flying saucers the media and folks at home wouldn’t think twice about suggesting this showed poor judgment and rendered them unfit for the presidency. However, apparently religious tolerance renders it unacceptable to criticize a candidate for believing that special underwear will help them become mini-gods in the afterlife or that there is some big dude in the sky who is nicer than anyone whose ever lived but would let us be eternally tortured for something we didn’t do but since he is such a just guy he can’t just not punish us so instead he tortures his son instead so that those of us who believe this story without evidence can be saved¹. Similarly as I complained about in a prior post even when it comes to academic rules we have to pretend that it’s totally reasonable to prioritize religious obligation over your studies but aren’t expected to pretend the same about going out to where you think the aliens are landing².

However, what got me started on this topic today was the choice by the Washington Post and many other newspapers not to run the two most recent opus comics because they might be offensive to Muslims. Now I don’t think there is any reason to get as worked up about this as for the danish cartoon controversy since there are no calls for government censorship nor the risk of rewarding violent protest. In fact despite all the claims of bias I don’t think the Post did anything much differently than they would for any comic with the potential for religious offense: they went around and asked the people in that religion how they felt about the comic. Indeed this mirrors the general way we decide if comments or jokes about one of our culturally anointed classes is off limits. It’s just that the average Christian in the newspaper business is probably going to be a lot more accepting of comics poking fun at Christianity. So it’s not that the Post has embarked on some sort of super PC campaign that says you can’t joke about Islam. It’s that the fundamental societal norms about religious tolerance is throughly broken.

I mean there is no doubt in my mind that if there had been a similarly mild cartoon mocking atheists no one would have hesitated to print it and the explanation is obvious: atheists don’t tend to raise a fuss when their views are criticized. Now as I said in the beginning there is nothing wrong with trying to be nice but since it isn’t the religious individuals we blame for being sensitive to criticism but rather those who offended them this practice creates serious and unacceptable bias³. There are plenty of books carried by major chains (even the Walgreen’s in Berkeley) which openly vilify atheists as evil and perpetuate lies about them when a similar book against Hindus would probably get at least pulled from the display. Where politicians generally don’t dare to openly criticize another candidate because they are Jewish or Hindu they will charge them with being an atheist.

In short this Opus story convinces me of the cocktail party theory of religious tolerance. Society views it as morally acceptable to mock a belief system or openly call it evil so long as doing so won’t ruin their cocktail party. Since members of most religious faiths will become overtly offended (or even get into a fight) with people who diss their religion people are quickly trained to view such comments as unacceptable. Since most atheists will ignore the relatively common remarks that implicitly assume religion is good or that atheism is bad or at most politely disagree atheism doesn’t get the same immunity from criticism that most religions enjoy.

My preference would be to have all ideas treated equally. We would all be responsible for being reasonably polite and avoiding insult but not expected to act as if we believed other people’s beliefs were reasonable, just not shove it in their face. Accommodations should be made for people whose holy day conflicts with an exam but also for people whose girlfriend will be in town for a conference that day. We would have religious tolerance as a consequence of general tolerance and accommodation. However, this is extremely unlikely to happen until atheists start being less polite but unfortunately I’m not sure if we will ever care enough. I mean it seems pretty fucking silly to me too to care about the whole “E plurbis unum” thing on our currency but I suspect it’s this sort of fussiness and easy offense which has gained religious beliefs their protected status.