Diversity!

Dave Weigel, posting at Reason's Hit and Run, is today's hero of good humor in the face of venality for locating Rep. Virgil Goode's constituency in the Kingdom of Prester John. The post is a response to another Goode effusion in Re: the Subject of Mohammetan Im'grints. You may be assured that they are bad, and that Keith Ellision (D-Mecca), who it turns out is not an immigrant, is worse. It all has to do with Judeo-Christian Values. A quick polling of the staff here at Who Is IOZ reveals that no one can actually identify what a Judeo-Christian Value is.

I note, in any event, that among the so-called major monotheisms, Christianity and Islam share many more affinities and particulars of practice than either does with Judaism. They share their missonarism, which is largely alien to Jews, and they share the revelatory coming of a savior or prophet of singular religious and liturgical import, and they share a penchant for sectarianism and schismatism, and, of course, for geographic expansionism, anti-Semitism, priestly clericalism, monumentalist religious architecture, and a whole host of others, which might explain their historical antipathy--similarity, as any bunch of siblings can tell you, breeds more contempt than diversity of interests. When I hear a yokel like Goode yapping about Judeo-Christian values, I hear only that America is a Christian nation, but we won't go killin' them Jews like them Nazis did.