Zero Sum

In Texas, Joseph Reyes' and Rebecca Shapiro' child custody battles puts religion and children at the forefront.  I would never touch the legal aspects of it.  Where a family court rules has no bearing on me and probably needs to be tailored to the needs of each circumstance.  But I'm no lawyer.

On Slate, Dahlia Lithwick zeroes in on the issue a the crux of the debate, and once again it's pluralism.

The tricky question in the Reyes case—the one the courts do not want to touch—is whether religion is a zero-sum proposition or a cultural buffet table. Is it harmful to raise a child in two different faiths? Does exposing a child to two religions differ from exposing her to two languages or teaching her to play two instruments?

Well stated and to the point!  For those unfamiliar to the term, "zero sum" is an circumstance where for one to win, another party must lose, and that the degree of benefit and loss will be equal.  -1+1=0.  The term doesn't translate well to this circumstance, but of course that is where the conflict is.  One party in this legal conflict is trying to apply winning and losing to issues of learning, experience and faith. 

Of course, I am raising my children in two religions and hope to expose them to more.  I like comparing the experience to language or music.   To build on Lithwick's proposition, to expose a child to one religion is to teach them a melody.  To teach them two is to create harmony, and many is to have a symphony.

David Plotz' Good Book

BTW, this is not the topic I wanted to start The Common Era with, but it was too good to pass up. I've been thinking over great introductory posts about the contemporary religion and progressiveness, but here we go ...

I haven't read David Plotz' new book "Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible" (yet) but I did find his series "Blogging the Bible" in Slate to be entertaining and remarkable. For me it was truly uplifting, but it is disheartening to hear Plotz write that although the experience of reading the bible was intellectually and culturally fulfilling, it didn't connect him to God.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love. >more

I don't know Plotz, apart from being a loyal reader of Slate and of listener to the Slate Political Gabfest, but I believe his experience with religion is so anchored in scripture that he has difficulty reconciling human beings' interpretation of God with the unknowable reality of God.

As a species we so need to have faith in worldly things, whether they are histories, artwork, rituals or holy wars, that we only consider the validity of relgion and mythology and we are inhibited from considering the validity of a singular creator whose reality is both represented and distorted by human experience.

I'm looking forward to reading Plotz's book, and hope you will to.