Yes, but let us not pretend. I know very well that I have a reputation for drama and renegade interpretations. I’ve heard all the jokes about my meds and whatnot. But I’ve taken my Tranxene, and I react like any other human being to what I perceive as disrespect or dismissal or whatever. What I believed was that, unless someone were knowledgable otherwise, he ought to concede that at least the word MIGHT — stressing might — have the same meaning in both cases. But that was not to be. There were merely insistences that I was silly and lacking in common sense. How would YOU react if someone responded to your argument by dismissing it altogether and saying you lacked common sense? Speaking for myself, I pretty much ignore what I perceive as a disrespectful tone, at least as much as I can these days.
Because for what, the fourth time? I trust DSeid. He does not insult me. He does not approach me with belligerence. He doesn’t parse my posts into a dozen phrases and dismiss them as silly or non-sequiturs.
(Incidentally, if you will permit me, it is a pet peeve of mine, and I realize it is not binding on you in any way, but the word is “sequitur”, not “sequitor”. I mean no disrespect in bringing that up. It’s just a bit jarring to see it consistently spelled that way.)
No, that’s not right. I asked whether Judaism held that a man and wife are literally one flesh. It was not an unreasonable question. Religions are full of strange and mysterious things, like the notion of drinking the blood and eating the body of Christ. When I felt it was ignored, I raised the question again. When it was finally addressed, I gave the verses in parallel, asking why they could not both be metaphors. I was then boohooed, shooed, scatted, and saw women running from the room and screaming as they pulled out their hair. And then, DSeid posted. Read his post. Read it from my point of you, and you’ll see why I accepted it.
Certainly, it is a simple modus ponens that if both usages of the word had been metaphors, then “one (God)” could have been open to interpretation because, well, that’s what metaphors are: figures of speech that are open to interpretation.
It sounds rather amazing to me that it sounded like all that. It began, as I said, as a simple question: why is the same word ('echad) a metaphor in one instance and literal in another. It was a why question. No one answered the why. Except for DSeid. His “why” was his assurance that he could show it to be a fact that it was a metaphor in one instance and literal in another. Again, he did not badger, razz, or bristle. He just simply asked me to trust him. Which was easy to do for reasons I’ve given repeatedly.
I don’t even understand that question. Who begins an argument that he believes in the first place is invalid? Why would he? I thought my argument was valid for the same reason you thought yours was: I thought I was right.
I don’t know. They’re kind of asking me the same question over in the Aesthetical Jesus threads. Why do I think differently from scholars throughout the ages on a number of philosophical topics? And I don’t know. I guess it’s just the nature of philosophy.
“All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.” Ambrose Bierce
When I started this thread I was under no illusion that Christianity was compatible with Judaism. I simply wanted to understand what the problem was with calling an ethnic Jew/Christian a Jew.
To some up what I’ve learned is as follows.
When refering to anyone as a Jew, it must be assumed that they are either atheist(neutral) or their religion is Judaist. No other deist religion is acceptable.
When labelling a person a Jew by ethnicity who has converted to another religion, one must qualify that label. Ethnic Jews of another religion are ethnic Jews but they are not Jews.
This does come across as somewhat snarky to me, but please trust me, no snark is intended. If anything, I feel somewhat dense in trying to understand what the rules are in labeling a Christian who happens to be named Morgenstern.
They do care about people faking up a spurious “Jewish” identity, because generally speaking people care about the appropriation of their identity. The suspicion is that they are doing so for an improper purpose, and 90% of the time that is exactly correct - using a fake idenity to subvert and convert those who really have that identity is an “improper purpose”.
Jews generally wish that Christians would, you know, stop trying to convert them. It’s tiresome.
Yeah, we all get it, you think religions is all bullshit and so the more crap heaped on the religious by infighting, the better.
Which is all very amusing no doubt, but this is about defining an ethnicity. Lots of Jews are atheists, and they don’t care for Christians masquerading as Jews any more than the religious ones do.
I am well aware of the infinite variety of Christological flavours. Point is, people for whom Christology is the significant religious concern are called “Christians”, not “Jews”.
The key here is “philosophical”. As you probably know, Taoism is both a philosophy and a religion - complete with priests, rituals, temples, and gods.
There is nothing incompatible with a Jew being a philosophical Taoist and imbibing the mad wisdom of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu. However, a Jew could not convert to religious Taoism and (say) worship at the shrine of Yu-huang, and still be a Jew.
I like to think it’s a bit more subtle than that - I look forward to a time where every individual picks-and-chooses what (if any) religious beliefs to hold, which I figure is a step toward the end of organized religion and its detrimental influences on science and politics.
As such, if someone wants to call themselves a Jew for Jesus, or an Imam for Confucious, so be it.
It was indeed. But it might be important to note that Nazi purification went beyond race. Gays were targeted. People with disabilities and deformities. That sort of thing.
They care only insofar as such people are not Jews.
Judaism is a religion/ethnicity that, above all else, is characterized by survival - survival as a group identity. Jews (and Judaism) have survived for so long by establishing certain rules determining who is - or is not - a “Jew”. If Jews accepted that one could be both Christian and Jewish at the same time, their resistance as a group to assimilation would be that much less - they would (most Jews believe) soon dissapear as a distinct group. Some Christians of course ardently desire this outcome (I believe there are millenial reasons for this), and Jews by and large (even athiest Jews) do not: if they did, they would hardly self-identify as “Jews”.
Or think of it this way: why would atheists approve of religious Christians’ quest to destroy, for entirely religious reasons, an ethnic identity and culture that they (the atheist Jews) identify with and find to be of value?
Still doesn’t make sense. Being atheists their only claim to being a “Jew” is ethnicity, right? And atheists by definition have no god beliefs, so why would they care who worships what non-existent sky-pixie in order to be a “proper” Jew?
Personally, being an atheist myself, it really makes no difference to me who calls themselves a Christian, a neo-Christian, a Buddist-Muslism and/or any combination you can think of – after all, in my experience, most people define their own gods/religions in ways that are consistent only to themselves. You know, the whole “personalized god buffet style religion thingie.” Now, if I ask someone what their ethnicity is (not something I do anyway) and they say “I’m Jewish” all I interpret from that is that they are of Jewish ancestry. Period. What they do or don’t believe is no business of mine.
Of course, if I see someone wearing a beanie and/or the long black coats and the curly sideburns, it’s pretty obvious what faith they belong to. But by the same token some of them may not have Jewish ancestry, correct?
Thus the whole thing seems rather arbitrary to me.
Because they believe that those who worship another flavour of non-existant sky-pixie are pretending to be like them for irrational sky-pixish reasons of their own, reasons of which the atheists do not approve.
Wrong, I’m afraid. Ethnicity and religion are only two factors. There’s also culture, history, a sense of shared fate and the acceptance and responsibility of other Jews. Basically, it’s being part of a group. Conversion to any religion other than Judaism gnaws away at this, by erasing the distinction between Jew and Gentile.
