Counting people in the US: “White people” may be a minority in the US by 2042. And apparently it is difficult to count the number of Jews, Muslims and other smaller religious groups who live in the Land of the Free.
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Sometime ago, the Organization of Islamic Countries released a report on anti-Muslim hatred in Europe.
But why don’t they release reports on issues that affect their own countries, such as the evisceration of ancient Christian communities in Iraq?
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Following Razib’s example of how the law in secular states inevitably support one ‘interpretation’ of religion as ‘essential’ to that identity, compared to other interpretations, here is a brief description of a German court ruling from the mid-90s:
Brandeis University’s Jytte Klausen, in her book “The Islamic Challenge,” provided the perfect example of this quandary. A German court ruled in 1995 that while Jews could be exempted from the strict laws governing animal slaughter, Muslims could not.
The rules governing Kosher slaughter and Muslim customs are similar. The Jewish authorities, when consulted by the court, were adamant that their religion absolutely required ritual slaughter. When it came to the Muslims, however, the court consulted Islamic authorities in Cairo, who told them that, in an emergency, Muslims could do without ritual slaughter.
Muslims in Germany were furious. “We are not lost in the desert, there is no emergency here,” a German Muslim told me as he gestured at the well-stocked Berlin cafĂ in which we were sitting. “If Jews can be allowed their religious customs, why not us?”
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The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the state’s business to secure religious uniformity within its polity — or at least to exclude Dissenters from important rights — was crucial to the formation of the early modern state. By contrast, the secular Enlightenment theory that the political community consists of an abstract collection of equal citizens was propounded as a criticism of the religious inequality characterizing the absolutist state. The most famous document embodying that theory was the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The theory was critized almost from the moment it was first stated — notably by Burke for the license it gave destructive passiosns, and by Marx for disguising bourgeois self-interest. However, the decisive moments that helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than secular — Tractarianism in England and Ultramontanism in France and Europe generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints of an earthly power. An important consequence of abandoning the total union of church and state was the eventual emergence of “minority rights” as a central theme of national politics. Members of minorities became at once equal citizens, members of the body politic (”the people as a whole”), and, as a minor body, unequal to the majority, requiring special protection.
–Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press, 2003.
