Why the Jews?

A long time ago I read a whodunnit, which started with the future victim, a successful American businessman and self-proclaimed antisemite, explaining to his friends why the world, he himself included, hates the Jews. People loathe them, he said, for the same reason most countries love to hate America. For being better. America doesn't only overshadow other nations in military power, economic clout, or cultural influence. It is the only country that after defeating its enemies, Germany and Japan, instead of exacting revenge, helped them rebuild their countries. A stronger neighbor can be tolerated. Weak countries with strong principles can be respected. But being a dominating power combined with moral superiority is unforgivable.

Turning back to the Jews, he continued, if there is a superior race, it's them. Whatever the world throws at them, they survive, and they thrive. After millennia of persecution, in whatever country they live, they are in the creme of society, among the most successful, most educated, most resourceful people. "But how can you say this, if you hate them?" - asked someone in the audience. "I'm at least honest about my reasons." - came the response.

I frankly don't remember a single thing from the book apart from this scene. It stuck with me for two reasons. One, it made complete sense. Two, only in fiction you find such compelling characters who are so clear-eyed about their moral shortcomings.

Thesis

But there are and always have been overachieving minorities. The prime example today is the Asian Americans who form the highest-income ethnic group in the US, earning well above the majority whites. The business elite in Vietnam was for a very long time dominated by ethnic Chinese. I've listened to a podcast recently that listed similar minority groups in Iran, Africa, and the Caucasus, whose names I heard for the first time, then forgotten quickly. 

Why is it then that only the Jews have become the global bogeyman? I think the answer is the Catholic Church.

History - beginnings

In the early days of Christianity, the followers of Jesus were just one of the many small Jewish apocalyptic sects in historic Palestine. As small sects tend to be, they were persecuted by the religious majority of Judaism. After Christianity's improbable rise to be the state religion of the Roman Empire, the boot was on the other foot, and the "turn the other cheek"-part was put on the back burner. Unlike the pagan religions, the Christianity demanded exclusivility. The Church persecuted all other religions, but the Jews were singled out as its vilest enemies. First, it was payback time, and secondly, the believers of other faiths at least had the excuse of being ignorant. But in the Christian mind, the Jews knew the Messiah and rejected him. They were  God-killers. The facts that the Old Testament is part of the Christian Holy books, and Christianity tacitly accepts that the Jews are God's Chosen People, and Jesus himself was a Jew, were conveniently put aside. There is no cognitive dissonance that cannot be suppressed.

I don't know enough about Islam to trace the roots of Muslim Antisemitism with confidence. But my guess would be that Islam and Christianity share a basis of animosity against Judaism because they both see it as their parent religion that rejected the final messenger from God - Mohamed - or God himself. To them, Judaism is much closer to heresy than being a completely different faith, like Hinduism, and heretics are always hated more than non-believers. On the other hand, the concept of God-killing was missing from Islam, and for many Muslims, both Jews and Christians were people of the Book.

History - medieval times

As mentioned above, the Christians were not so relaxed about these things, therefore in Medieval Christendom Jews lived under the constant threat of persecution, pogroms, or at least dispossession. They were not allowed to own land, to be part of the nobility, or to have a position in state administration. The paths of integration into respectable society were blocked to Jews, leaving only those professions available to them that were beneath a good Christian. Like finance, banking, or academic studies. Jews, whose culture has always valued learning and intellectual curiosity, proved to be very successful in these fields, which wasn't exactly the Christian intention.

In the Islamic Middle Ages, life for Jews was definitely better than in Western Europe for the reasons mentioned above. The Muslim religious fervor manifested itself more in conquering rather than in converting. The Muslims were much more tolerant towards other religions on the territories they controlled as long as the subjugated minorities paid their taxes and kept their heads down. But the popular concept of the golden age of Muslim tolerance is oversold. Minorities were second-class citizens without the protection of the law, at the mercy of the majority.

History - modern times

In the modern era, religiosity in the West has slowly receded. Modernity eroded the significance of ethnicity, birthright, and social status, and elevated the importance of education and intelligence. The ways of making a living Jews had been basically forced into earlier - notwithstanding that due to their traditional reverence for learning they had an affinity to -, like banking, law, and medicine, have become increasingly more important and more profitable. The old aristocracy of land was gradually pushed into irrelevance by the new one, the aristocracy of money, and it was disproportionately represented by Jewish families, like the Rothschilds. Religious animosity from the majority was increasingly replaced by material envy as the stories about baby-blood-drinking Jews were replaced by conspiracy theories of Jewish cabals secretly running the world.

From the nineteenth century, credit to these views was given by the fact that Jews were indeed overrepresented by the vanguards of ideological currents that turned the world upside down. Capitalism came first, which benefited those who held an already long tradition of being involved in finance, banking, and trading. Then Communism swept over Europe, which toppled the Christian regimes. Jews were in general disproportionally present among intellectuals, thus not surprisingly, even more so in anti-religious intellectual movements.

The Jews have been in the middle of another societal battle as well. Because of the prohibition of owning land and of their traditional professions, Jews have always converged to cities to ply their trades. The urban-rural political divide - that pitted the presumably unsullied people of the land against the decadent urbanites - always had a distinct antisemitic undertone. Furthermore, the Jews have stubbornly refused to fully assimilate.

But after the Second World War, open Antisemitism became a strong taboo in the West. Not in the Muslim world, though, where the creation and flourishing of Israel and its successive military victories over its Arab neighbors pushed them into a collective frenzy. Israel managed to defeat the combined forces of its enemies on the battlefield over and over again. Israel is a Western-style democracy, the Arab states are corrupt and incompetent. Israelis are living on Western standards (on the only land in the Middle East without oil), Arab citizens in poverty and oppression. Jewish Nobel-prize winners are a cliche, while the number of such scientists the Arab world has produced is exactly zero. The dissonance between reality and what Muslims think their rightful place in the world should be (being the receivers of the final revelation from God), is as enormous as the inferiority complex that follows it.

Matthew Effect

"For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."

There is another factor that is so mundane that it can be easily overlooked. Every instance of publicly blaming Jews for something grows the history of Antisemitism. So the next time someone is groping for a culprit to explain away his or his tribe's failure, he can recall some antisemitic rumor more readily - this is called availability bias. He runs away with his instinct and the self-reinforcing cycle is closed. This I think is just the Network Effect, or as sometimes called, the Matthew Effect. From all the social networks available to them, people choose the ones where they can connect to the most people. From all the available conspiracy theories that explain a given state of affairs, all things being equal, we tend to choose the ones shared by the most. And conspiracy theories involving Jews have been around so long and therefore have so many followers, that they are now impossible to displace.

Summary

To summarize, Antisemitism is rooted at the foundation of Christianity. Jews have been initially persecuted for purely theological reasons, then forced into certain occupations for the same reasons, which by chance and with time have given them power that earned the envy and jealousy of the majority. They have become the perpetual culprit for any calamity or lack of success of majorities, even when the original reasons were no longer relevant. The image of scheming Jews is unerasably part of our collective psyche. As long as Jews refuse to die out or assimilate perfectly, Antisemitism will be always with us.

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Zen and Stoicism

Imagine two persons equal in most aspects with one relevant difference. One of them follows Zen teachings, the other is a Stoic. A casual observer of their daily lives would find it hard to guess which is which. In personal relations, both are generous and compassionate. They both take hardships in life with equanimity and rarely give in to rage or anxiety. They notice and appreciate everyday joys but are unperturbed if circumstances stand between them. For those with eyes for this kind of things, they both carry an aura of detachment. And, among other unlisted similarities, they both tend to regularly spend some time of the day with quiet contemplation.

Zen and Stoicism are indeed strikingly similar, especially considering that they emerged independently of each other in very different cultures. One is from a land where spirituality permeated every aspect of life, the other is the product of a society that laid the foundations of the modern rational worldview. I make an attempt below to examine the likeness between the two, then the differences. Considering the many different schools of Zen especially, the observations below will be crude simplifications, but hopefully not far off their marks.

To start with the greatest common denominator, both traditions share the view that real and enduring happiness (or at least peace of mind) is to be found inside one's own mind irrespective of external circumstances. One can be poor or sick or in a prison cell and be free and at peace with oneself at the same time. Their shared psychological observation, thousands of years ahead of their time, is that our perception of reality is the source of our discontentment.

Both advise enjoying what life offers without becoming dependent on them. To be present in the moment and to see everything, possessions, loved ones, and life itself as impermanent that can be and eventually will be taken away. 

They are both indifferent about deities and the afterlife. This is barely worth mentioning today but was remarkable in their times of origin. Buddhism was born in India with its countless gods, and Stoicism emerged in a similarly polytheistic society. The norms in both societies demanded the veneration of gods, spirits, and alike, therefore in the eyes of Zen Buddhists and Stoics who lived thousands of years ago, supernatural entities and the afterlife were a given. They were also unimportant. Both traditions teach the importance of the here and now, and that one's redemption lies not in the hand of gods, but is to be discovered inside. It's safe to assume that indifference instead of hostility to existing religious beliefs was in both cases more of a rational survival strategy than a principled choice in times and places where open atheism could make one ostracized or executed. 

The Buddhists and Stoics were anyway much more interested in practice than theory. They share an emphasis on regular exercises, both mental and in interaction with others.

Finally, they both have the concept of the ideal they aspire to be. What is the Enlightened One for Buddhists, is the Sage for Stoics.

And now come the differences.

Among which, the most significant is the one in aspirations. The purpose of Stoicism is to live a good life, which according to the Stoics, is a virtuous life. The purpose of Zen is to see through the illusion and see the truth, reality as it is. The Zen concept of the world as an illusion is alien to the down-to-earth Stoics.

Instead of breaking free of it, the Stoics encouraged full engagement with the world. They recognized that humans are social animals and strongly advocated, like good Greeks, active participation in the life of the community. In Asian cultures from the Indian to the Japanese, the Enlightened one is expected to transcend the constraints of society.

The roads to perfection might be through continuous practice in both schools, but the concepts of practice itself differ. The Stoics preached continuous self-improvement in the modern sense. Day by day, you hone your skills, mend your imperfections, and slowly and steadily become a better and better version of yourself. Zen is much more ambiguous about gradual improvement. Some schools advocate for it, but some teach that Enlightenment just happens (or not), doesn't matter how long you have been practicing. Practice is simply maintaining a state of being open to possible Enlightenment there and then, and the gains don't accumulate. That being said, I think Western (or Secular) Buddhism is much closer to the Stoic way. 

The practices themselves are quite different. The center of Stoicism is to see obstacles in life (physical hardships, personal slights, social stepbacks) as tests of character and opportunities for improvement. The Stoics actively seek out difficulties (not shying away from hard conversations, abstaining from culinary pleasures, stepping out of their comfort zone) to perfect themselves. The Stoic meditator reviews his actions at the end of the day to identify what can be done better next time. The essence of Zen practice, mediation is wholly missing from the Stoic world. In Zen meditation (nowadays known mostly as mindfulness meditation), one doesn't engage in an active thinking process. On the contrary, one tries to calm his mind and dispassionately observe thoughts rising and passing in the mind. And while doing this one realizes that the self, as the coherent unchanging essence of being, is just an illusion.

The psychological insights Zen and Stoicism impart are profound and very modern, but the overlap is little. The core insight of Stoicism is that humans are affected by the events in the world not directly, but through their own interpretation of them, and the only real control one has in life is that over his own mind. Zen's main discovery is that most of the time we are the slaves of our minds and not the other way around. Thoughts and emotions come and go uncontrollably as they please, but one can learn to be aware of this process and break free of it.

To sum it up, practicing Zen or Stoicism produces very similar characters but through different exercises that are built on very different worldviews.

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The stupidest arguments against atheism

At its inception, this piece was meant to be titled "What is atheism", but then  very quickly realized that the topic would fill maybe a single paragraph, opening and end included. So instead, I decided to address some points religious apologists tend to raise in debates against atheists. There really aren't many of them and in one form another the same arguments are voiced by professional theologians and Bible-thumping yokels.

Let's define "atheism" first, which luckily can be done with very few words. Atheism, in the common usage of the word, simply means the lack of belief in God. Nothing more and nothing less. Further elaboration only paraphrases the above definition or deliberates either the reasons for or the consequences of it.

From an academic point of view, a distinction can be made between people who deny the existence of God (strong atheists) and those who simply don't believe in it while accepting that it's unprovable either way (agnostics). The first doesn't make much sense, as you can't disprove God the same way as you can't disprove unicorns. So in the following, I will use the word "atheist" in the sense as defined in the previous paragraph.

And now, let's get to those arguments!

Atheism is just another religion

"You make it sound as if it was a bad thing", one might respond. But the correct response is that it's just not. It's simply the lack of belief in gods. It doesn't tell what a person thinks about politics, art, economy, psychology, or anything but religion. "How does an atheist think about social justice?" is exactly as meaningless a question as asking what a non-firefighter thinks about social justice (as opposed to a firefighter). The word "atheist" in modern times should be considered as strange as "non-monarchist". It is a negation of something fewer and fewer people are today.

As Richard Dawkins said: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

This is not to say there are no people who put their atheism is at the center of their identities, for example, those who broke free from a very religious upbringing, but the number of such persons is insignificant compared to the masses of casual non-believers.

Atheists can't explain why the Universe exists

Absolutely true. But there is a great T-shirt inscription saying: "I Don't Know and You Don't Either". We don't know why we are here. Billions of people simply pretend they do, and this statement everyone who spends a moment to think about it must find true. Why? Because if you are a Christian, you "know" that all those Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. are wrong. If you are a Hindu, then...just replace a word.

Atheism is irrational because you can't prove there is no God

This is wrong in several ways. First, whoever says this, misunderstands who is expected to come up with some evidence in an argument. If I tell you I keep a gorilla at home (a schoolmate in first grade tried to sell this) and I want you to believe this, the burden of proof is on me. If I say nothing can travel faster than light and you disagree, the burden of proof is on you. Why, what is the difference between the two cases? The first example was about something very unlikely and therefore almost unheard of. Everyone can see what's wrong with it using common sense. Keeping a gorilla in a flat would be extremely inconvenient and probably against some laws, and would be newsworthy enough that you'd have heard of it already.
However, in the second example, I state a well-known scientific fact that has the backing of virtually all physicists in the world. Scientific theories get overturned sometimes, but that requires very strong arguments. Therefore, if you disagree with the commonly accepted limit of speed in our universe, it's you who has to come up with very strong evidence to the contrary.

Regarding the original statement, neither common sense nor evidence indicates that the world is created by any particular God. Few planetary scientists, physicists, or cosmologists are religious (and if they are, only in a liberal way) and everything we know about the origin of life flatly contradicts the Bible and all the other genesis myths.

The other problem with the statement is its assumption that the only alternative to atheism is my own God. Following this logic, since you can't prove that Odin doesn't exist, it's irrational to not believe in him.

Atheist are amoral

This asinine claim enjoys surprisingly wide support among simple-minded religious advocates and, even more surprisingly, in some vague form from Jordan Peterson (proving that a person can be brilliant in one field and very confused in another). According to the argument, the only thing keeping people from thieving, murdering, and raping is the fear of God. The statement tells more about the one who says it than about atheists.

A more philosophical version of this argument is that without God our moral values have no foundation. There is no objective right or wrong, and therefore the atheists live in the swamp of moral relativism, where the wrongness of even mass murder is only a matter of opinion. This is a question for philosophers, and whatever they have to say on the matter has little influence on how real people live their lives. Instead of speculation, we can just look at the empirical facts about whether the absence of faith make one depraved or not. They are plenty, and not supportive of the motion.

Children who have no concept of God don't go around bashing other kids on the head or stealing stuff. They do steal and hit sometimes, but they instinctively understand the concept of fairness, and quite often are nice and helpful with stranger kids. This applies to our closest relatives, the primates, and to other more intelligent species of the animal kingdom. There are both viciousness and kindness in nature, and the behavior of all sentient creatures seem to be tailored to, to varying degrees, reciprocity.

The most religious countries in the world are predominantly African, South-American, and Muslim, with crime rates through the roof or with outright state oppression. I don't think religion leads to depravity, it may well be that the miseries of life there or the iron fist of the state make people religious, but the numbers don't show that it makes people better either. If there is a genuine correlation between religiosity and crime, it's a positive one.

Or, someone who is reluctant to read up on history can just take a look at the Scandinavian countries of the present. They belong to the justest, most egalitarian societies of the world and the safest places to live. Also, they are the most atheist ones. According to surveys, only 5% of Norway's population think religion is an important part of life.

There have been many societies in history where the state religion didn't promise rewards in the afterlife (ironically one of them is the Jewish that gave birth to all monotheistic world religions) and they were not made up of rampaging lunatics. There has been no society on Earth where senseless murder, thieving, lying, or raping were condoned.  There seem to be universal moral laws that are wired into us, with or without the belief in supernatural sticks and carrots.

Atheism leads to the disintegration of society

This is the only popular claim that I think is defensible. Societies don't run on laws and policing only. They need forces of cohesion to keep them together (what the former states of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia lacked), and one of those can be religion. 

But there is no evidence that religion is indispensable, especially if we look at modern European states.

Atheism led to Nazism and Communism

It's a very old, very tired, and very annoying argument, but it can give one a pause when first encountered. (It also contradicts the previous anti-atheism point - does atheism leads to tyrannies or total dissolution? Please, make up your mind)

The Nazis weren't antagonistic to Christianity, their 1920 manifesto even paid some lip service to it. Apart from the Jews, no one was persecuted for his belief in the Third Reich. Instead of rejecting faith wholesale, they channeled their society's spiritual energies into some pagan-flavored race-worship and the personal cult of the Fuhrer.

Communism, on the other hand, is an outspokenly anti-religious ideology. But there is no evidence that the terror regimes it bore had been any less monstrous if it had been neutral on the issue. And in fact, once one starts to think about it, Communism seems more and more like a religion (especially Catholicism) in surprisingly numerous aspects. It had its prophets and messiahs (Marx, Lenin), holy scriptures and dogmas (the writing of these men), heretics (Trotsky), popes blessed with infallibility (Stalin and Mao), sectarian wars (Tito vs Stalin, China vs USSR), martyrs (thousands), inquisition (show trials and purges), the ritual of confession (communist self-criticism), and finally, its followers believed to be part of something infinitely bigger and powerful than themselves. 

But we don't need to speculate because history actually tells us whether atheism leads to murderous tyrannies or not. It does the opposite, as discussed in the previous point. Modern Scandinavia probably has a much smaller proportion of believers than Nazi Germany or even the Soviet Union, where despite the aggressively antagonistic state around a third of its citizens claimed to be religious.

And here we reached the end of the list. I think it covers it all. Therefore I was briefly considering removing the "stupidest" adjective from the title because these seem to be not just the worst ones but the full list of anti-atheist arguments. But they are still stupid, so I just left it like that.

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