Reader Maxwell asks what it is that I find particularly hateful about the post ridiculing a beautiful passage from the New Testament that I linked to in my previous post.

Making fun of the religious beliefs of others is wrong. How would you feel about a person who stops next to a Muslim performing the namaz and starts laughing and pointing their finger at the praying person? Or somebody who loudly ridicules the Jews for wearing kipas? Or somebody who writes a blog post saying, “Those Hindus are beyond stupid. They actually believe that cows are sacred. What idiots”?

It’s perfectly fine not to share the religious beliefs of others or not to have any religious beliefs. But to approach a complex system of beliefs of a huge group of people from the point of view of a guffawing idiot who is proud of being ignorant of said religious worldview is a sign of nothing but sheer idiocy.

Religions, atheism and agnosticism are ways in which people approach the most important, fundamental questions of their existence. Where did I come from? What happens to me after I die? What is the purpose of my existence? How do I determine the moral code that guides me? Everybody has the right to answer these questions in the way they choose for themselves. This is a deeply intimate issue. It is more intimate than sex because, ultimately, you cannot share either your conscience or your death with anybody. And making fun of the way that some people have found to address these fundamental issues of existence is a lot worse than ridiculing others from not practicing their sexuality in the same way you do.

Now, let’s forget for a moment that the blogger in question ridiculed a passage from a book that many people consider to be holy. Let’s just say that s/he took a quote from any work of literature that has existed for centuries and has been treasured by many and ridiculed it in the “Sheesh, this is totally stupid because I don’t get what it is about” manner. As a literature professor, I have had my classes brought down to this level on a variety of occasions by students who are too dense even to attempt to see the beauty of Quevedo’s poetry and Calderon’s plays. As one student wrote on the course evaluation, “I don’t get why we had to read the poetry from 1,000 years ago. This was so long ago, who even cares any more?”

As my prof used to say, if it seems to you like everybody else in the room is an idiot, there is probably just one idiot in that room and that idiot is you. And it might just be possible that the countless people who enjoyed this text and were inspired by it were not completely deluded.

I read the following argument that we are experiencing the second Great Depression but it didn’t convince me:

But that doesn’t mean we’re not in another Great Depression, either. As you know, I think we are, based on the misery visited on the vast majority of the population since the recession began in 2007. What I’m thinking about are the following: the high level and long duration of unemployment (and the length of time over which both have persisted), the extraordinary number of home foreclosures, the difficulty in obtaining adequate medical care, the unprecedented rise in student debt, the growing ranks of poor people (and near-poor people), and so on. So, in my view, while there’s been a recovery for a tiny minority of the population (based on the return to record profits for U.S. corporations, the resurgence of the stock market, and the high salaries and growing wealth of those at the top), the best characterization for the situation in which the working classes find themselves is the Second Great Depression.

I’m always bothered by the tendency that many people have to stretch analogies way too far. This always leads to the complete erosion of significant concepts. As a result, we end up in a situation where “Nazi” is synonymous with “bad person” and “Holocaust” is a description of a dieting choice.

What do you think? Do you see the current economic crisis as the Second Great Depression?

P.S. I just read the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression and found the following insulting statement in it:

The fall of communism in the Soviet Union led to a severe economic crisis and catastrophic fall in the standards of living in the 1990s in the former Eastern Bloc, most notably, in post-Soviet states, that was almost twice as intense as the Great Depression had been in the countries of Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1930s.

The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a fall in the standards of living is just too bizarre. Every person who has even remotely been around during the 1990ies has to know that living standards soared after the Soviet empire broke down. And the comparison between the post-Soviet transition to capitalism and the Great Depression? The author of this article has no shame. This will now be one more example that I will use to teach my students about why using Wikipedia makes no sense.