the mellow tigger's musings

The internet connects society, and it permits the collection of huge amounts of data about people. You can be sure that companies are mining that data. I know only three cases where the results are shared back directly with the population base that contributes the raw data.

Today's example comes from a social dating website called OKcupid.com. People there post detailed descriptions of themselves. People also answer multiple-choice questions generated by other users of the site. Those questions make for a very interesting mix of ideas and potential interactions.

They occasionally mine their half-a-million profiles for nuggets of interesting knowledge. The news last week was specifically about findings of racial differences. Click on the gender image at the top of each racial profile to switch between male and female results. Being an infovore, I enjoyed reading through the revelations about various trends in the data.

Buried towards the end of the long entry, however, are some nuggets about literacy that are separated by religious identity. They used a formula called the Coleman-Liau Index to rate the "readability" (grade level) of the text that people write into their profiles. This formula ignores word meaning and instead focuses specifically on structure complexity (characters per word, words per sentence).

Here are the literacy charts by race, religion, and religious fervor. The results practically write their own punch lines.

( Cut for 3 large images... )
As they summarize at the end of the blog:


Kudos to the Buddhists and the Jews for keeping pace (almost) with the freethinkers.  That almost all of these groups operate at an average Junior High (7th and 8th grade) reading level is a testament to the efficacy of the American education system.

As it turns out, foeclan had a copy of "The End of Faith" in his room.  He's loaned it to me, and I've been reading it today.

How utterly depressing.  I thought I was already upset about Jesusites and other religious terrorists, but it gets worse when someone views it more objectively than I did and writes rebukes more succinctly than I did.  *sigh*  I hope this book offers some optimism later on.  It does have me wondering, though...

How is it that the Greeks let their gods fade into myth without giving them up altogether?  By what social process did the demands of religion transform into the insights of theater?

I want to know.  Maybe we can still duplicate their good fortune.

I hope, when the time comes, that I have the presence of mind to escape. Failing that... I hope, when the time comes, that I have the bravery to die rather than kill. I'm not certain of my own pacifist leanings, but I can at least hope to be a better example of a thoughtful person than my attackers.

Some 15 years ago, my boss (on the political right) and I (on the political left) were discussing politics and we both agreed that America would see civil war within our lifetimes unless civil discourse found a revival. People need to keep rational minds and civil tongues in order to safely explore opinions and to find points of compromise or at least find ways to live together in tolerance.

My subconscious seems ready to accept that civil discourse has ceased. I blame mostly the "right" for this effect (see: Nazi, death panels, gun stealing, constitution shredding, and other claims without any rational justification that I can find (and I have tried to look for it)), but the "left" is finally waking up to the fact that they are trying to debate with irrational people. I expect civility to collapse before Obama's first term is out. I voted for him because I hoped he had the brains and the voice to hold this country together through such tearing.

It is a deadly serious matter to me.

"God never "felt" anything about it, he commanded it and said they should be taken out and killed. ... You want to know why sodomites are recruiting? Because they have no natural predators."

and

"Go find one of these queer churches, they'll put the faggot behind the pulpit. ... Our country is run by faggots. ... He's a pedophile. He has been arrested for interacting with boys that are in their teenage years when he's in his 50s. ... That's Barney Frank. That's who just sold our country into fascism. ... I'm not going to stand by and let a faggot run the church. It's bad enough that we've got a lot of faggots running the government."

- both available at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/god-commands-you-kill-gays.html

I don't usually hang out at such websites, but I am trying to examine both far-right and far-left news this week. I could find no news article justifying the claims by this man about Barney Frank.  The closest that I could locate was an old Washington Post article, and it refutes his claims.  The "recruiting" argument is so ludicrous that it doesn't even deserve refutation here.

I'm beginning to wonder if the immediate dissolution of the United States might actually be the most peaceful outcome available. The "right" is getting shrill in a way that involves weaponry. Peaceful or deadly resolution? A matter of choice.

I hope that I choose to die rather than kill. Peaceful protest may lose as many lives as outright warfare, but it leaves its soldiers unscathed by moral compromise. I find it curiously coincident that God hates the same outsiders as the people themselves already hate.  God can kill humans by divine will. God has angels that can kill humans.  Why does God need angry mobs to kill for him, and on schedules that fit their own political tide?

"What does God need with a starship?"
- Captain Kirk, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYW_lPlekiQ

I find that certainty about who should live and who should die is a poison that seems to consume some people through and through.  Following the Abrahamic metaphor, the apple and the Knowledge Of Good And Evil seems to have poisoned some souls more than others.  A great many people seem certain of who is Good and who is Evil and what order should be established for every human on the planet.

They have a lot more certainty about such arrangements than I do.  I cannot be allowed to exist in their world, so they believe.  My own father has hunted queers as a group sport.  Is this brand of fun poised for a comeback?  When rationality and civility are totally lost, how will I respond?

I hope that I choose to die rather than kill, when they come for me.  But here too I lack their certainty.  Perhaps soon we will be able to distinguish the correct one (if any) among the four theories of human violence.