A few short thoughts:
1. Sometimes we hear people say that they respect another person's opinion, but they disagree with it. They mean well but it raises the question, do we owe respect to the opinions of others. IMO the answer is no. We have a duty to respect others and to respect their right to hold their opinion, but sometimes those opinions are simply foolish or even evil, and it's equally foolish to tell someone that we respect it.
When opinions are foolish we should still show respect for the person who holds it, but when the opinion is evil the holder of that opinion forfeits their prima facie right to be respected. For instance, no one owes respect to someone whose opinion it is that molesting children is acceptable.
2. One of the queerest attempts to push wedges between the races is the resentment expressed by some at what they deem to be an unjustifiable "cultural appropriation" of certain aspects of what's considered to be black culture. The latest episode of this was when a white British pop singer named Adele wore "bantu knots" at a festival and was criticized for essentially purloining a hairstyle that is considered to be the cultural property of African Americans.
One might think that those who get upset about this sort of thing should actually take pride in the fact that others appreciate their cultural traits enough to want to adopt them for themselves, but Adele was chastised for her choice of hair styles:
A drag queen who calls herself (himself?) The Vixen tweeted, "Twice this weekend I have seen people do backflips to defend white women in Bantu Knots. If you spent the whole summer posting #blacklivesmatter and don’t see the problem here, you were lying the whole time."
User @sadhanamoodley wrote, "Seriously Adele... You should know better."
Journalist Ernest Owens tweeted, "If 2020 couldn't get anymore bizarre, Adele is giving us Bantu knots and cultural appropriation that nobody asked for. This officially marks all of the top white women in pop as problematic. Hate to see it."
It's all very silly, and in any case, the idea that only members of the race which gave rise to a particular behavior or style or item - like hoop earrings and bantu knots - have the right to adopt that behavior, style or item is as shallow as it is foolish. If the individuals who think this way are going to be consistent they should, unless they're white, forego the use of everything that was originally developed by white Europeans - including cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, motor vehicles, airplanes, medicine and medical technology, home heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, all electrical appliances, and on and on.
Rather than grouse about someone wearing her hair in bantu knots these folks would do better to spend a little time reflecting on how much cultural appropriation they themselves engage in every day of their lives.
3. In discussing the meaning of life students will sometimes argue that life's meaning doesn't depend upon there being a God. They insist that we can still find meaning in trying to make the world a better place, to improve life for our kids and others, whether there is or isn't a God.
What these students sometimes fail to recognize is that the belief that human progress is possible assumes that history is linear, a view that is distinctly and uniquely Judeo-Christian. The notion that history has a beginning and progresses to a climactic denouement was a product of the Judeo-Christian belief in creation, fall, redemption and eschaton that eventually permeated Europe. It never caught on anywhere else in the ancient world.
Most cultures outside Judeo-Christianity and perhaps some of its offshoots, such as Islam, have held a view that history was either static - that things are the same as they always were and always will be - or cyclical, that history moves in grand cycles ultimately returning to an original starting point. The atheistic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, famously held this view which he called eternal recurrence.
So, if someone believes that the world can be improved and that tomorrow can be better than today, they're borrowing an idea whose genesis depends upon belief in the existence of God even if they insist that the existence of God doesn't matter.
