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Nov 13, 2023Liked by Jamie Paul

Another term I’d personally like to borrow from the LGBT community is allyship. The challenge I have as an atheist, around particularly devout Muslim family members, is they don’t have an interest in being an ally.

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To be American is to accept the primacy of mutual tolerance over any contrary directives of one's own religion - such as stoning adulterers or subjugating unbelievers - and so in a strict sense, no true American can be a true follower of any religion including such directives (most). All genuine Americans put the Constitution above any particular holy book - in this way it is really a sort of Unitarian framework, having the mere flavor of any given old-world religion an American chooses to practice.

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You set the bar very high, impossibly high for many people. I'd be more than happy to settle for simple compartmentalization. "Render unto Caesar..." and all that jazz.

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Nov 6, 2023·edited Nov 6, 2023Author

You could probably argue that setting the bar extremely high is part of the American ethos. We fail to meet it...in many ways...at many times, but it's not completely without merit. There's a story somewhere about blacks in slave owning America chanting "Give me liberty or give me death." (Duncan? Douglass?) They very much knew they were challenging others to live up to their ideals, which has a kind of value of its own.

"I'm not telling you what to believe. You told me what you believe. Now live it."

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Ideals are made to be aspirational and not necessarily fully attainable in practice, so I get it, and I agree. In practice, though, I'm happy to settle for compartmentalization.

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