He is a weird fucking dude.
Again, the average religion comes with basic tenets. “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is HIs prophet.” “Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, taught and performed miracles, suffered and died, and then rose and ascended to heaven.”
Judaism has basic tenets too of course. Kabbalah has it’s own set. If you do not believe the basic tenets of Kabbalah, why attempt to practice it? If you don’t believe the basic tenest of Kaballah, is what you are doing even properly called Kabbalah?
Cultural appropriation is dismissed too easily by those who have never experienced it, but it is also an accusation too carelessly and broadly made.
Like “woke” it is a simple concept – be respectful and aware of others who aren’t like you – that was taken to an extreme where it became silly, but that extreme was made into an excuse for ridiculing and dismissing the whole.
It would be nice if there was a hard and fast rule for defining it, but as far as I know, there isn’t.
I have a problem with cultural misappropriation. Simple cultural appropriation is fine. It’s why we don’t still live in the stone age.
Bit of a sidetrack, but I feel like sports mascots are a separate issue that shouldn’t really get tied up in the idea of cultural appropriation.
Sports teams tend to follow a handful of patterns – they can be named after something relevant to their community (the Brewers, the Astros, the Jazz, the Cardinals), after something specific to the team itself (the Reds, the Yankees, the Athletics), or after something scary (Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my! Oh, and also Redskins or Indians).
There’s a difference between, say, a sports team naming themselves “the Persians” and appropriating aspects of Persian culture in a manner that’s disrespectful, and a team naming themselves “the Terrorists” and dressing up in stereotypical Muslim garb. The former is insensitive, the latter is using stereotypes in a hostile manner.
This. As a jew its incredibly offensive.
Again: because whatever you’re doing brings meaning and happiness to your life. Honestly, the world is full of people who don’t really believe the basic tenets of their religion, but participate in the rituals for that reason.
Probably not. I think @Smapti has said as much.
We have had numerous threads on atheism and Judaism. As a general rule, Jews are commanded to do certain things. We are commanded not to do certain things. We are not commanded to believe anything. There are entire Reconstructionist congregations that are effectively atheist. Being thankful you have food before and after every meal? That’s a good idea. No committing murder? Also a good idea. Whether you believe thos rules come from God or that God exists, they are good rules.
But, again, Kabbalh is based on believing a few things. Without those beliefs, the whole thing is pointless.
Pointless to whom? To God? To the Centralized Kabbalh Association? To physicists? To you? To Smapti?
You keep saying “again,” as if the only problem is that I missed it the first time. It’s not that I missed it: it’s that it’s not relevant what traditional Kabbalah is based on. Because religious practice only derives meaning from the internal states of its practitioners, it’s not relevant what other people’s internal states are.
In my opinion, Native American sports mascots are the ones that come closest to “cultural appropriation” being an appropriate term. The term “appropriation” carries connotations of a scarce resource, where if you appropriate it for yourself, you’re taking it away from someone else.
Since there were systematic attempts to destroy Native American culture but not those same attempts at the same time to disallow the use of it in symbolism, that does feel a bit like trying to take something from someone else for your exclusive use. I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect parallel, since the bits of culture used and denied may be different, but it fits the connotations of the word “appropriation” moreso than just using bits of someone else’s culture without saying that they can’t continue to use it.
Ah, sorry I misunderstood. I disagree completely. We can debate who should follow what practices and how they should follow them. In general, there is plenty of room for debate. There are parts of most religious practices that can reasonably be removed or changed. But, IMHO some practices have a important cores without which, you’ve got nothing.
If you’ve got some sort of satisfaction or insight from the practices, is that “nothing”? What else can you possibly get from the practices?
Learn great mystical secrets and acquire great power:
Do you personally believe all the things you wrote here, @DocCathode ?
I used to know this guy who was really into alternate health stuff. But his main jam was reiki, a bit of woo out of Japan about healing people by moving “energy” around in their body. Bunch of bullshit, of course, but he never tried to push it on me, and I wasn’t looking to pick fights with the guy, so I never got into it with him when he’d talk about this stuff.
Anyway, at one point, he was beefing with another guy in the health-woo field, specifically about cultural appropriation. The guy I knew was White, y’see, and reiki was dreamed up by Asians, and this was a problem.
It always seemed to me that the other guy was basically admitting that reiki was bullshit. Because it its real - if human bodies really do have energy fields that can be manipulated by vaguely waving your hands over someone’s body, and that this practice has an observable, measurable affect on a person’s health - then it’s not “cultural appropriation” if someone outside the originating culture does it, no more than washing your hands is cultural appropriation because the germ theory of disease was invented by a European.
Or its not real, in which case, I find it hard to give a shit. It’s about as important as a fight in any other fandom, and there’s no particular reason anyone outside the fandom should pick a side in the fight.
I can’t help feel this is basically the same situation. Either Kaballah is a legitimate method to understanding fundamental truths about the universe, or it’s a bunch of bullshit. If it’s the former, it should be open to absolutely anyone to explore, and it should be open to revision and experimentation in order to refine whatever process it uses to reveal those truths. Or its some bullshit some guy thought up because it sounded cool, and it has no more real-world moral weight than arguing whether balrogs have wings or not.
Note that Smapti has chsnged the title of his thread.
In the case of the Kabbalah rituals and how they’ve been refined or bastardized, practitioners still have the same general goal, to be closer to their god or find some spiritual peace. Braves fans doing their tomahawk chop or “war cry” are playing dress up. Reasonable people can argue that any changes to a spiritual practice are bad (although I personally disagree) but you can’t argue those two examples are the same.
Others have pointed out why this is a bad analogy, but I’ll add one more reason. Are you saying people would be offended by someone who makes bad conclusions based on not understanding QM? I know some physicists, and they would be exasperated and think the guy is an idiot, but they wouldn’t be offended.
For instance, I mentioned in passing something called “Hermetic Kabbalah”. The name is provocative, but the people who came up with those ideas in the first place did not necessarily call it that— however they were syncretists who studied Jewish mysticism, among many many other things, and genuinely desired to understand something.
There could be a difference between a scholar/philosopher making a genuine effort and someone who repeats mystical-sounding buzzwords because they think it sounds cool but do not even make the effort to understand what they are talking about.
Perhaps the risk is their nonsense being confused with the real thing by the public.
Since the Renaissance apparently. By way of comparison, Jewish mysticism was formalized into the Kabbalah in Medieval times, c. 1100-1300. Wiki is my cite. So we’re discussing dueling traditions going back 500 or 900 years.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about it, as we’re discussing non-central aspects of 2 or more religious traditions. I reject the concept of cultural appropriation, but part of freedom involves the ability to say, “No, you’re doing it wrong and you are confused.” Part of sanity too, broadly speaking.
Anyway, props to Smapti for altering his thread title.
I’m sure that there are physicists who get offended when people take their life work, and use it to argue for the validity of crystal healing, or whatever. And I can’t blame them for feeling that way. But, I think the crucial difference is that the people offended by it can say, “That’s objectively wrong, and I can prove it.” They don’t say, “Only people who are culturally German can make up shit about quantum physics.”
Maybe we should have a little compassion here.
Smapti seems to be a person with a lot of problems, maybe deeply disturbed.
He appears to be looking for an ‘answer’.
As far as I can see though, there is no ‘answer’.
Best we can do is follow the Golden Rule.