But these mandates don’t exist in a vacuum. The reason there is a mandate to not bow down to another god is because the person who wrote that mandate believed that this particular God existed. If this God doesn’t exist, which is what atheists believe, there is no one “there” to be jealous.
Also, the fourth commandment says “for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me”
It seems to me that the phrase “of those who reject me” can apply equally to atheists and to people who believe in other gods.
You can easily claim to strictly follow the above if you simply believe that some other god exists, if you (1) Don’t bow down to him, (2) Don’t make sacrifices to him and (3) Don’t make any molten version of him.
Do have any clue as to the social downside of being atheist? Do you really think I get high-fives for it? I get practically spit on by most people. But my religious community values me and doesn’t see me as hypocritical. I am doing my best to be true to my beliefs and navigate this world. Ton suggest they are just for kicks and not sincere is insulting.
I love how the Jews here have shown their intellectual capacity and uniform respect for each other in what was originally a thread designed to put down Jews and potentially divide them.
$$ in synagogue dues every year + $$ expenses of Jewish holidays
$14k/year Day School tuition (luckily I only pay $2k/yr, thanks to a scholarship)
$$ in donations to the local beth midrash
Volunteering at Jewish Family Services
Schleeping the kid to Jewish events
Oh – that reminds me – paying for and figuring out transport for Jewish camps
Studying of Torah, Talmud, etc.
Jewish ed. classes
Keeping up with Israeli news
Keeping (some degree of) kosher
This bitch of tradition we call Passover (gives spring cleaning a new meaning!)
Taking off work and losing wages during holidays
For others - bar/bat mitzvah education, expenses, planning, etc.
Participating in threads like these
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it would be easier to convert to Christianity and call it a night.
This is semantically messy, but in Jewish tradition, worshipping a false god puts you outside the tribe in a way that simply not believing doesn’t. This is a convention adhered to by the state of Israel. Ethnically Jewish converts to Christianity (and that includes fraudulent paradigms like Jews for Jesus) are not permitted the right of return because they have chosen to leave the tribe.
What social downsides do you believe are being avoided?
In the US, I would argue that being an atheist has a hell of a lot more social downside than being Jewish. Antisemitism isn’t socially acceptable anymore, but atheists can be villified with impunity. Listen to right wing radio sometime, or watch Fox News.
I believe Argent was talking about the upsides of being an atheist in the social circles that the posters of this board likely hang around. I don’t think he meant that there are upsides to being an atheist in the broader US society.
You may think it is very foolish but that is indeed what the religion is all about: yes, “because the Torah says it.” You get it now. Few Jews would give a rat’s ass about convincing you that it is not foolish and few will be swayed by your calling their belief system “foolish”. It’s our belief system not yours. Enjoy yours, we’ll appreciate ours. I respect yours; a small shame that you don’t ours. We’ll get over it.
Now again many many many Jews, especially observant ones, do believe. For them the Law is divinely inspired. But again, those who believe do not generally care much about what other Jews believe.
Why? Ultimately I think because it is not much different than in those early days: it is about belonging. Belonging to your family, to your community, to a cultural tradition that you feel has value. Those of us who consider ourselves modern secular Jews, still see value in belonging and value in the texts. We do not read them as literal histories, we read them as trying to express greater truths.
Tell me something though - do you believe that all men are created equal? do you believe that there should be freedom of worship? do you believe in the rule of law? The words were written down by a few farmers and yet Christian, Muslims, Jews, Jainists, Wiccans, atheists and agnosotics … all make their decisions based on the rules written down in these papers and in the books of laws that followed, interpreting them, and in the values that those words espouse, without needing to believe they were divinely inspired. Foolish too?
Polerius I am absolutely sure that the people who wrote the Torah believed in HaShem. And that through history the vast majority of Jews have. I am pretty sure still do. Again, in my own way I do. Those statements however inform naught about what we are talking about. The worry wasn’t whether or not other Jews believed in HaShem so much as that they did not decide to believe something else. You could belong without believing; you couldn’t belong while worshiping something else.
(The “parable” below is an attempt to explain how I see things discussed in this thread. I hope it doesn’t offend people’s sensibilities or religion, because no offense is intended. I’m just trying to come up with something that tries explains things from my point of view)
The three-legged dog club
There once was a club whose first rule was
The only people who can join this club are those who own dogs with exactly three legs, no more, no less.
For centuries, people with three-legged dogs joined this club, and things were great.
At some point, the number of people who wanted to have three-legged dogs started to diminish, since it’s so hard to take care of them and raise them, and so the numbers of people joining this club started to diminish.
So, some club members started thinking that maybe they should start accepting people with four-legged dogs. After all, if looked at from the right angle, any dog can appear to have three legs, and the first rule of the club doesn’t unequivocally state from which angle the dog should be looked at when determining how many legs it has.
As a result, the club started accepting more members, and the numbers of the club did not decline. There was of course a splinter-group of three-legged purists, who, based on their reading of the first rule decided that they would never accept people with four-legged dogs. But they were considered too extreme by most, and the majority of the three-legged club members welcomed anyone who had a four-legged dog into the club.
One day, someone asked “Can I join if my dog has five legs? If you look at him from the right angle, it appears that he has three legs”. The response was “Of course not, you are clearly violating the first rule of the club”, to which he replies “Yes, but so do four-legged dogs, but you still let them in”. The response to that was unanimous: “It’s our club, so we make up our own rules about who can join”.
Moral of the story: Yes people from a club can make their own rules about who can join, but if they are not following the public rules of the club but some other more complex rules, they shouldn’t point to the public rules of the club when someone asks why they can’t join, since the public rules of the club are clearly being violated by people that are members of the club.
Again, so what?
The rules seem arbitrary and/or contradictory to you, but it’s what Jews have decided on. What is the point of your argument? That you don’t agree? We get that. But so what?
A Catholic man comes out of the Vatican and sees two vendors across from each other. One is selling huge expensive crosses and the other is selling Stars of David, smaller but for just as much money. He shakes his head, buys a big expensive cross, and then, as he walks away, tells the vendor of the Stars of David that maybe he should find another place for his stall. He leaves. Says the one vendor, Moishe, to the other: “Hey Schmuel, how you like how that guy tries to tell us how to run our business?”
Okay, so who in this thread has done that. Man, I’m sympathetic from the other end (I get shit on by my mom for not being Catholic and not believing in Jesus, AND shit on by my fellow Buddhists for believing in a deity in general) but that’s not really an excuse to get het up on these folks.
Someone brought up fraternities earlier in the thread. My own particular one DOES have a lot of rules, tenets, and rituals, despite not having the benefit of a divine reason. If people want to use Judaism as a social group because they’re comfortable in the ritual, and the arbitrators of Judaism (that is, each individual rabbi–there’s a Jewish story to the effect of "There were three rabbis at Yeshiva, debating a finer point of the Torah, and they grew so heated that God noticed. So he came down from heaven, and said ‘Actually, the verse is intended to be read as follows…’ but at that moment one of the rabbis said ‘Settle down, you only have one vote, same as the rest of us.’ ") say “that’s fine by us”, why does it matter?
Do you know what you call a leader with no followers?
A guy on a walk.
Like I said – you want to start your own religion, fine by me. Just don’t try to corrupt my culture in the process. You got personal in your post, so now it’s my turn.
Thirteen million people.
Think of it as a social contract. If, at some point, Judaism fails for us - if Jewish people just drop off - then we’re done. The rules don’t matter.
St. Paul clearly stated that these Nazarenes were* not* Jews. The covenant with God (otherwise known as “the social contract with the rest of the Jewish people”) was broken.
A law is only useful if it has power. It only has power if there are enforcers. Right now, you have thirteen million enforcers of that law.
Gentiles have been assaulting Judaism and have been trying to change our ways for centuries. Maybe we just don’t like it when someone else tells us how to run things.
To you that seems foolish. But if we thought the ideas in a book were foolish, why would we follow them? The law would cease to have validity.
Like I said: Judaism stands on itself. You can’t tell Jews what is or isn’t Jewish any more than you could walk into the Oval Office and tell the President that he wasn’t the President anymore!
Because I love my people more than I love your concept of God. That’s why.
I don’t want to live in a world where Israel doesn’t exist, or little children don’t ask the Four Questions, or Seinfeld loses half of its humor, or there’s no Yiddish slang, or no one reads the Talmud, or there is no shul where I can sit and feel how tiny I am in this world.
I don’t want to wake up one day and find out that Ivory’s daughter never had a bat mitzvah.
I don’t want to live in a place where there are no Orthodox Jews, because without the Orthodox, how would we survive? What devout learned men do we debate with? How awful it would be if this ceased to exist.
I don’t want to live without the Chabad and their seemingly strange ways and beautiful stories.
The Reform movement came out of traditional Judaism, and the Conservative was a response to the Reform. Who will keep traditions some of us find irrelevant if not the Orthodox who call us heretics? Today, we can share with our children, “That’s what we looked like two hundred years ago. And there is a place there if you want it.” If it weren’t for Orthodoxy, there would be no masorti. If it weren’t for Orthodoxy, there would be no me.
So why do I care if they believe in God?
And I don’t want to live in a place without Reconstructionist Jews, because without them, how many gays and lesbians would we have lost a few decades ago? How many children of interreligious marriages would have been lost to the wayside if it were not for the Reform movement?
I don’t want to live in a world where Hebrew is a dead language again.
I don’t give two dreks if your God exists.
**I **don’t want to live in a world where most of us could be annihilated because of some of the ideas perpetuated in this thread. Do you know how many Polish Jews died in the Shoah? Ninety per cent. Ninety.
That is my God, and that I will fight for.
It may be historically popular to blame it on the nearest Jew, but don’t take it out on us. I’m not saying you mean to be the way you come across.
We’re not overly sensitive here. But seriously. Stop.
You can’t determine what our religion says any more than you can redefine words in the dictionary.
Judaism has always been an intellectual pursuit. You can believe in creation and evolution in Judaism. You can argue Talmud. You can question Torah. We do not belong to a group that requires blind faith; we belong to a group that demands that we ask questions.
I’m sorry you are resentful. Don’t take it out on us.
I’m pretty sure ethnic Jews of Jewish fathers are allowed the Right of Return now, even if they did convert. They** aren’t** considered Jews by the government.
Personally, I think this is a dangerous precedent since it’s pandering to the Western Religious Right, but whatever. In Israel, a person who is descended from a Jewish parent is allowed the right of return. What was good enough for Mengele is good enough for the gander, I suppose.
Christians who were claiming to be Jews – not so much.
Jews can be religious and believe that the world does not require divine intervention to be. And they can see God in the structure of the universe. And they can believe in a literal interpretation of Torah or an allegorical one. And they can argue about those interpretations. And still be Jews, even righteous ones. Why does that fact offend you?
Except that they aren’t trying to join; they were already members.
Messianic Jews were born to the tribe as much as anyone else. If they have come to believe and espouse something the tribe considers antithetical to its identity, the tribe is of course within its rights to cast them out. But it’s inaccurate to describe it as if they are outsiders with no connection trying to horn in somewhere they never belonged.
