90% of teenage girls believe they are overweight, according to a recent survey. That’s something to worry about — there’s the reality, that a lot of us are overweight, but there’s also the perception problem, that many girls are convinced that they must lose weight when they really don’t. There’s an article that speculates on the cause of this problem, whether it is an obsession with celebrity, peer pressure, or pressure from the diet industry, but it comes up with a strange explanation:

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Read Ophelia’s take on the Israeli ‘modesty buses’. Would you believe certain buses in Jerusalem are set aside to make special accommodation for orthodox Jews?

Women are compelled to sit in the back of the bus.

In the back of the bus. I think they need a Jewish Rosa Parks.

The most disingenuous argument in favor of this discriminatory policy is the excuse that not all the buses are ‘modesty buses’ — that all you have to do is wait a little longer at the bus stop and take a different bus that doesn’t enforce the idea that women must be segregated. As a former commuter on an overcrowded bus and subway system, I know how ridiculous that suggestion is. “Separate but equal” is a policy that always emphasizes “separate”, not equality.

This interview with a Rabbi Sacks is rather hard for me to wrap my brain around. The first part is about something Sacks is very concerned about: Jewish continuity. He seems strangely concerned about Jewish young people marrying outside their group, and has run ad campaigns to convince young Jews to raise their children in their faith. It’s all very weird; I know my grandmother was concerned that her grandchildren marry good Scandinavians, and I even got admonished about what ethnic groups I could date when I went off to college. I’m afraid that when my Norwegian/Swedish grandmother did that sort of thing, we just called it bigotry and ignored her.

Even now, I can’t quite imagine telling my kids who they are allowed to marry, or being concerned with maintaining an ethnic bloodline. Be different and unique, I say — no one should try to be who their parents and grandparents are, but should follow their own path, and we parents and grandparents should reconcile ourselves to our progeny’s independence.

There is one odd moment in the interview. I don’t sympathize at all with the ethnic purity angle, but this part I actually liked:

In the question and answer session that followed Rabbi Sacks was asked how he would convince someone like scientist and atheist, Richard Dawkins of the benefits of religious identity.

Mr Sacks responded: “We need atheists to remind us things are not God’s will, God does not want hunger, injustice or violence. I am quite happy Richard Dawkins stops us having too much faith. There’s a lot more religion in the world than there was 25 years ago and there’s a lot more violence in the world than there was 25 years ago.”

I suspect that while I enthusiastically agree qualitatively with Rabbi Sacks, we might disagree on how much religion is too much — I’d say anything above zero.

David Barash tries to review 11 recent books on the religion/science conflict, all in one essay of middling length. It’s not entirely satisfying, nor could it be with that excess of books in so little space, but it does have a convenient short list of what’s been published lately.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)

The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)

Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)

Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)

Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)

I’ve read most of these, and I roughly agree with most of Barash’s assessments except that he’s much milder in his criticisms than I would be. I was also disappointed in Wolpert’s book, which was a bit too scattered.

Next on my list: Boyer. It’s going to have to wait a little longer, though, until this term ends.

You recall that nice scarlet letter “A” for atheism t-shirt? I like it so much that I’ve decided to get it tattooed on my forehead. And this is so important to me that I’m also dragging my kids into the tattoo parlor to have it done to them. After all, my beliefs are important and this minor procedure will make my children more attractive, so they shouldn’t object — it’ll also make it easier to find partners with a similar cultural background. This is a win all around; I really don’t understand why Skatje is hiring a lawyer to oppose me.

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