Religion
One interesting thing the United States doesn't have today is open public debate about the merits of rival religious beliefs. There are some journals, there are some Internet mailing lists and old Usenet groups, and there are lots and lots of missionaries. The missionaries will come to your house if you ask them (or even if you don't); they'll stop you on a street corner in certain major cities, especially, in one case I can think of, if you have a beard. There are also plenty of institutions designed to promote belief among people who are already members of a particular community or tradition, and increasingly many to try to retrieve or recover "lapsed" members. (I described in my old Advogato diary attending a seminar put on one such project called Aish Ha-Torah.)
Some groups also have rallies or revivals, but these, too, seem mostly to target current or past members of these groups. Also, there's nobody at a revival meeting presenting a contrary view!
What we don't seem to have are many public debates, or newspaper op-eds, or apologetics books sold outside denominational bookstores, or anything like that. (I guess the dueling missionary web sites sometimes come close, if they deign to respond to one another, but I don't imagine a lot of people are reading these "discussions".)
I wonder if people are afraid that overt conflict over religious belief will lead to some of the horrors and atrocities it's provoked in the past -- if people will start to kill one another because they disagree about the divine. The Statistical Abstract of the United States says there were 1,385 reported hate crimes in the U.S. motivated by religion in 1997 (the last year available in the edition I have). Almost all of them (1,087) were "anti-Jewish"; 28 were "anti-Islamic" and 3 were "anti-atheism/agnosticism/etc.". I'm afraid the anti-Islamic figure must have increased substantially since 2001.
I wonder if there is a secret, unspoken, and pervasive terror that these figures would skyrocket if there were more open disagreement about religion -- if people fear that debaters would be murdered in bars or lecture halls, or that religious controversialists would be assassinated. We have made religion such a private matter, and not primarily by separating church and state. We aren't as afraid to talk about other things this way, are we?
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