Secular Right

Sixteen Yale students and recent alumni are siccing the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on Yale College, claiming that the college denies girls the “same equal opportunity to the Yale education as their male counterparts,” in the words of civil rights complainant Hannah Zeavin.  The ground for their complaint?  A handful of juvenile frat hazing incidents deliberately designed to violate sacred feminist taboos.   I analyse the narcissism and astounding lack of perspective embodied by this ongoing action here:

Yale has one of the greatest library systems in the world; it showers on students top-notch instruction in almost every intellectual discipline; it lavishes students with healthy food, luxurious athletic facilities, and rich venues for artistic expression. All of these educational resources are available on a scrupulously equal basis to both sexes. But according to the Yale 16 and their supporters, female students simply cannot take full advantage of the peerless collection of early twentieth-century German periodicals at Sterling Library, say, or the DNA sequencing labs on Science Hill, because a few frat boys acted tastelessly. Thus the need to go crying to the feds to protect you from the big, bad Yale patriarchy. Time to bring on the smelling salts and the society doctors peddling cures for vapors and neurasthenia.

So the rapture didn’t happen. Not a big deal. Here’s one thing that I think warrants attention: Harold Camping is a nerd. He has a degree in civil engineering from Berkeley. As the British would say, “he can do the sums.” I have never really believed in the supernatural. As a small child I knew I was supposed to believe in the supernatural, but I honestly had a hard time taking any of it seriously. I have normal human instincts, like getting “spooked” in the cemetery…but my own personal experience with friends visiting cemeteries at night for fun and laughs as a younger man is that actually opening yourself to the possibility of the supernatural naturally changes how you view “creepy” background events (my friends who believed in ghosts were really easy to scare, it was quite fun!) Most of my friends might assent to the proposition that there probably weren’t ghosts in cemetery X, and that that ghosts may not even exist, but most of them did not dismiss out of hand the very possibility of the existence of ghosts. I did.

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It’s odd to observe conventional believers—such as Rush Limbaugh on his radio show today—mock the Rapture proponents.  The evidentiary basis for more mainstream propositions about the afterlife and the nature of God is identical to those predicting a Doomsday within our lifetimes: a set of allegedly Holy writings coupled with textual exegesis.  Christians or Muslims who confidently describe Heaven and Hell, the parceling out (by a set of ex post facto rules nowhere published in sufficient detail for a person to know what gets you into heaven and what doesn’t: for example, what if someone was a lousy tipper, or didn’t report income, or ignored pooper scooper laws?  Thumbs up or thumbs down?) of the living and dead, and the various attributes and activities of God have no more empirical grounding for those claims than Harold Camping has for his.  The only mistake of Millenarians is to offer a hypothesis that is actually falsifiable.

This story is not written with serious intent, though its tone is serious. Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending:

The Haddad children of Middletown, Md., have a lot on their minds: school projects, SATs, weekend parties. And parents who believe the earth will begin to self-destruct on Saturday.

The three teenagers have been struggling to make sense of their shifting world, which started changing nearly two years ago when their mother, Abby Haddad Carson, left her job as a nurse to “sound the trumpet” on mission trips with her husband, Robert, handing out tracts. They stopped working on their house and saving for college.

Last weekend, the family traveled to New York, the parents dragging their reluctant children through a Manhattan street fair in a final effort to spread the word.

“My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven,” Grace Haddad, 16, said. “At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes.”

Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying final goodbyes before Saturday, Judgment Day, when they expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture. Nonbelievers, they hold, will be left behind to perish along with the world over the next five months.

With their doomsday T-shirts, placards and leaflets, followers — often clutching Bibles — are typically viewed as harmless proselytizers from outside mainstream religion. But their convictions have frequently created the most tension within their own families, particularly with relatives whose main concern about the weekend is whether it will rain.

Kino Douglas, 31, a self-described agnostic, said it was hard to be with his sister Stacey, 33, who “doesn’t want to talk about anything else.”

“I’ll say, ‘Oh, what are we going to do this summer?’ She’s going to say, ‘The world is going to end on May 21, so I don’t know why you’re planning for summer,’ and then everyone goes, ‘Oh, boy,’ ” he said.

The reporter “tells it straight,” as if these idiocrats aren’t just making fools of themselves. As it is, people will read the article, look up their address or phone number, and call these morons to laugh at them Monday morning. This should be in a tabloid.