May I please be excused from the Holy War?

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I actually have some limited sympathy toward proselytizers. I mean, if you really think you're correct, then you'll want to tell your friends all about it. E.g., I have a pal who really feels that yoga has made her life better, and so she has put great effort into informing others about yoga.

I think I may have had a hand in it: I was babbling about myself, pontificating aloud about how I add value to the world, and she is silent through it all, and then when I pause for a second she says `I guess I add value by showing people yoga', and since then she seems to have gotten much more in to doing so. Because, to a great extent, adding value for others is a basic human desire---one which is often overridden by more self-serving desires, but which exists nonetheless.

So I can basically understand those who want the U.S. Government to be an arm of their preferred religion. The religion makes them happy, and they want to spread that far and wide. From their perspective, it adds value.

Of course, the basic flaw of it all is: you could be wrong. It could be that what worked great for you won't work for others, or you could be wrong at a still deeper level. The reasonable solution for most is informational proselytizing: tell people about yoga, or rennet in cheese, or hand them a copy of the Bible, and let them process the information themselves. But for emotional and spiritual experiences which have nothing to do with processing facts, this doesn't feel like enough. People just aren't going to understand what yoga's about until they're able to do a decent downward-facing dog, so talking without making the subject do it doesn't feel like enough.

Of course, it only gets worse for the proselytizing religions, which have both the `you don't understand until you've been in church every Sunday for a few years' quality, and explicit commandments to either convert people who aren't in your religion or kill them. As above, I can sort of understand where these guys are coming from, but at the same time (and I am evidently in agreement with about a hundred million people here) I want them to get the fuck away from my government. Although they believe that they are imposing a positive externality upon me, it's actually really sucking for me over here.

Which brings us back to the big flaw above, that they could be wrong. The huge problem which simultaneously appeared on the RADAR screen of every citizen of an urban center the evening of 2 November, is that there are people out there who will not rest until the rest of us are converted to their religion, and they are not at all dark-skinned, and in fact could use some sun.

If this were a coherent essay, this would be the solution section, but I've got nothing to offer you. What do you do when a hundred million people all think that you should be a Christian, and are willing to take steps to push that along? What do you do when those people are fully cognizant that there are people on the other side of the globe who all think that you should be a Muslim, and are willing to take opposing steps to push that along too? How do you keep out of the crossfire? Please leave solutions in the comment box below.

An aside Boy, I (heart) being a Jew more than ever. It is the only one of the Big Three that is wholly non-proselytizing. This comes from the fact that it's a magical blend of ethnicity and religion, and ya can't convert people to your ethnicity. Many think that this turns into elitism, or even conspiratorialism, and it is probably the source of some quantity of anti-Jew sentiment. [The Christian proselytizers, for their part, have a love and hate relationship with us Jew-folk.]

But in terms of ethics, non-Jews should be f.ing delighted that Jew folk take the ethical commandments of the Bible to be aimed only at them. In fact, Hebrew is strongly gendered, and many take the masculine forms to mean that the commandments aren't even aimed at women. Taken with this narrow interpretation, the Bible doesn't say a thing about how people who aren't Jewish males should live their lives. Is it a sin for non-Jews to kill or covet their neighbor's goat or commit onanism? Who knows---there's nothing in the Bible either way. Can orthodox women be lesbians? Why not? If non-Jews want to eat pork and light fires on Saturday, that's fine. We'll just sit here in the dark.

I certainly don't speak for all Jew folk, but for the most part Jews just don't push their laws on people. [The only subset of truly proselytizing Jews I know of are the New York Lubovichers, which are kind of embarassing to the rest of us Jews. Of course, non-Jews can't convert, but they can become `Sons of Noah' who assist the Jews in their quest to right the world. You've gotta have really low self-esteem to buy in to that group.] Imagine if they did: there'd be an anti-pork lobby, laws that people can't drive on Saturdays, and fasting imposed on certain days of the year. Of course, you'd be legally obligated to get drunk on Purim, and police would fine you if you didn't.

But this doesn't happen. Even in Israel, it's legal to sell pork, although practical considerations prevent almost all stores from carrying it. Typically, what demands Jew folk do make are about facilitation, like making sure that restaurants they go to serve something that isn't pork fried, and that they can get a day off from work on days of fasting. But this is still not proselytizing, just trying to get along.

There's a delicate line between proselytizing, which people hate, and being exclusive, which people also hate. Maybe there's no line at all, and a group which makes zero effort to recruit can be taken as implicitly exclusive. Add in a few obscure rituals, and exclusivity can even become the above-mentioned suspected elitism and conspiratorialism. So a group's options are to not recruit and thus be eyed with suspicion, or to proselytize and thus be annoying to everybody else, and I'm not sure if any middle ground exists between the two that won't be taken as a threat by outsiders. Maybe there's just no way to opt out of a holy war.

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