My friend and fellow blogger, Jeremy introduced me to the term “ovarian lottery”. I say “introduced” because I obviously don’t pay enough attention to Warren Buffett my own damn self (I need to fix this). Jeremy and his wife just returned from a vacation in Bali and he’s done a few posts on the wealth divide in the areas they visited. Today at Le Cafe Witteveen he applies the idea of the ovarian lottery to religious identity. Rape trigger warning for the full post, but not in the segment below.
Imagine you were born on the island of Bali in a little village on a rice farm. The likelihood that you would become a fervent Hindu is 99.9%. You would grow up, learn your parents’ craft and religious traditions. You would grow strong, get married and teach your children the same thing.
Imagine, instead, that you were born just a few miles to the east and west of Bali on one of the two neighboring islands on a rice farm. The likelihood that you would grow up as a Muslim is almost 100%. The cycle would continue through your children and theirs.
Read the rest of his post here.
1 comment
Binjabreel
March 8, 2012 at 12:09 (UTC -5) Link to this comment
That’s some brutal, unvarnished truth right there. I like it.
But once I think about it harder, I realize that every religion has some massive mechanism for justifying it when this happens. Karma, original sin, they’re just fancy theological terms that mean “you deserved to have been raped.”