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"cnorman18,
First off since you're new here let me say welcome to the forums. While this discussion is a bit off topic from the OP, it's still proving to be interesting. You certainly have a lot to say and are obviously an educated and reasonable person. I hope you find this to be an enjoyable community to be a part of."
Thanks very much. I'm enjoying the H out of being here. Even the occasional letter bomb. This is a great place.
(BTW, the posters here are very civil and friendly, even to a benighted believer, and I deeply appreciate that.)
"I've never had the pleasure of simply sitting down with a Jew and learning about his/her beliefs and the faith; it's only been in textbooks and mis-information from ministers in Christian churches. So I'm finding this quite educational (not persuasive, but educational lol) and I'd like to thank you for sharing."
You're very welcome; there's nothing I enjoy more. Well, almost nothing.
As for "persuasive"--well, I should hope not! I should post a little sticker like you see on anarchist cookbooks and the like--"For Information Only! Not Responsible For Misuse! Do Not Try This At Home!"
"I'd like to expand upon my comments as well as quayak's.
Well the principals of justice and basic morality then seemed to state that you should kill gay people, those who couldn't prove virginity on their wedding night and those that worked on the sabbath. I'd say killing somebody because they worked on a certain day of the week is not moral in any age. This, however is the documented morality of the day."
Well, no, it's not. I know it's in the Torah and all, but from the very beginning, the sages didn't much like the idea of capital punishment, even if God did prescribe it, so they decided to make EXTRA sure that it was deserved by hedging their bets with so many conditions that it was virtually never imposed.
That was the intent, of course. Not defying God, exactly--but setting the screens so tight that nothing could get in.
Here's how it worked: there's a prohibition against working on the Sabbath, and it carries the death penalty. But for it to be imposed, the accused has to know, beyond doubt, that he knew what he was doing and the penalty for it. The sages decided that the only way to be sure of that was (1) the guy had to be warned, by at least two witnesses, IMMEDIATELY before, say, chopping down a tree on Shabbat. He has to have the ax in his hand and be about to swing it; if he's just on his way to the woods, it doesn't count. (2) He has to be warned in specific words, quoting the Torah and specifying the offense and the punishment. (3) IIRC, the punishment must be described in the most horrifically bloody and graphic terms. And, (4), the accused must REPEAT all this back to the witnesses, in every detail, with the additional requirement of saying "I know all this and I choose to cut down this tree anyway, knowing that I will be executed for it." Then he must, immediately thereafter, swing the ax or whatever and set about breaking the law.
To no one's surprise, I would think, this sort of thing didn't happen very much.
But what if it did? The result was predictable; the court would declare the guy insane and rule that he was not responsible for his actions. End of story.
A few more hedges, just in case; ALL members of the court had to be present for the entire case, and it was a very large group (the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem; no other court had the authority to hear capital cases); if one member was absent, the case was thrown out. The testimony of all witnesses had to agree, but if it agreed EXACTLY, collusion was assumed and the case was thrown out.
If the decision of the court was unanimous, it was considered a biased court and the case was thrown out.
You get the idea. I suspect that if the accused had a bad haircut, it would be ruled that that would prejudice the court and the case would be thrown out.
The sages--who were the court, and also wrote these rules--simply didn't want the responsibility of putting anyone to death. Similar restrictions were applied to every violation that carried the death penalty specified in the Torah.
In the actual records in the Talmud, a court that imposed the death penalty more than once in ten years was considered "bloodthirsty". None, to my knowledge, ever was.
"This is a ridiculous argument. Stating that because someone personally believes in woo we should discredit their advancements in science or politics is ludicrous."
I agree completely. That's why I posted what I did.
"You're trying to make the point that since we can divorce peoples contributions to society from their ridiculous beliefs without invalidating them, we should be able to apply the same separation in religious texts between the message and what's actually written."
Uh, no, I'm not. That argument never even occurred to me. If it had, I'd have discarded it. The cases are not analogous. I was responding to a statement by Ian, to wit, "You are wrong about everything else because you believe the superstitions of long ago, poorly informed people." Responding to that bit of overkill was all I had in mind.
"So this brings me back to my point earlier. Since you can clearly divorce the rubbish of damning people for their sexuality from your beliefs, why can't you simply get rid of the whole religion noise and just live life as good people?"
Because--and I think I've explained this at least three times now--the grounds for invalidating the objectionable passages are based on the principles taught by the rest of the book.
And, again; it's not as if this sort of thing is happening every week. It happens far less often than the United States adds an amendment to the
Constitution, and I don't see anyone consigning that document to the dumpster just yet, even though it's a good deal shorter and the amendments have a great deal more impact on the whole.
"It seems like you have done a great deal of mental acrobatics to explain how Judaism matches up with the age of the Earth, Evolution, etc..."
Just for accuracy, these "mental acrobatics" were not done by me, but rabbis and sages of hundreds of years ago; and they could not have been done to "match up with" anything, since those formulations were written long before evolutionary science or astrophysics were even conceived. The implication of your statement is logically impossible.
I don't take them as proof that Judaism is true or anything like it, anyway; I believe, as a matter of logic and common sense, that any kind of proof of the supernatural is impossible from the get-go, so don't lay that one on me. I have yet to see a proof of the existence of God that holds a teaspoon of water.
"But going on your writing I'm gathering that Judaism is not making the same assertion that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving."
Same as what? Early Judaism? Christianity? No matter; doctrines like that, about the nature of God, are easy to write or say but hard to pin down as to their actual meaning.
If it helps:
"The attributes of God include omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, eternity, truth, justice, goodness, purity and holiness.” (The Book of Jewish Concepts, Philip Birnbaum)
Nothing there about "all-loving", for starters.
More to the point, objections to belief in God based on (very debatable) lists like this usually go on the rocks pretty quickly:
"Is God omnipotent?"
"Yes."
"Then why doesn't He--"
Stop right there. He is Sovereign, remember? We don't get to decide what He ought or ought not do. He doesn't explain Himself to us.
On the other hand, there is a long and honored tradition of questioning God, and we do it all the time, starting with Abraham who argued and bargained with God directly over the fate of Sodom (where the issue was not gay sex, by the way).
I once had a roommate--an atheist--whom I asked, "What would you do if you came before
God?" His reply, which I've never forgotten: "I'd hold up a cancerous bone and say, 'How do You justify this?" that was a very Jewish statement. Christians, by and large (and remember I was a Christian clergyman), tend to take it lying down.
I will add this; when Jews question or even rage at God, they really are addressing Him. It's a personal confrontation, and a real one. Literally millions of Jews questioned God about His allowing the Holocaust to happen--I am one of them--and that debate will continue until God answers.
We do not, however, question God as a theoretical exercise in order to prove that He does not exist. We assume that He is real and listening, and our questions are for Him, not for the sake of an argument.
If you wonder why Jews by the thousands did not abandon their faith because of the Holocaust, by the way, the answer is--they did. And no Jew will condemn another for it, either. Our questions are real, and if our belief does not survive them, there are consequences.
Make of all this what you will. A common answer to questions, in Judaism, is "It's more complicated than that." and that's not a dodge; that's just the way it is.
"This is, of course, evident in reading the Old Testament which shares many writings with your faith. The God of the OT is obviously none of the above. However the books it does share are truly some of the most barbaric tales I've ever read. Did God or did God not command that attrocities be done? Did God or did he not demand animal sacrifices and harsh punishments for what seem in modern life to be petty offenses?"
You see, this is the problem with reading the Bible without reference to the tradition. In Jewish belief, the Torah has NEVER stood on its own to be taken at face value; the process of interpretation and inferral began at Sinai, with Moses himself, and that tradition is essential to understanding the text. One would not read a medical text and expect to make sense of it unless one had been trained in the language and concepts that it takes for granted in the reader. For Jews, the analogy to such training would study with other knowledgable Jews, either in person or though commentaries and the like.
The Torah is not Judaism, but it is essential to it. It is only a PART of the tradition, not the whole, and critics like yourself attribute more authority to it than it actually holds. Standing on its own, it holds none; standing with the corpus of teaching and tradition, it--and they--hold all.
"The same book that spews that kind of evil is the same book stating that God exists... without God, the rules in those books carry no weight."
Uh, okay, but since we do acknowledge God, I don't see the problem.
And by the way, who ever said that Jews believe in God because of the Torah? That's a very odd proposition, since the Patriarchs and Matriarchs--Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel--and the twelve sons of Jacob, and many more for generations that followed--all believed in
God, long before the Torah was written. Even if they are myths, I think it safe to assume that whoever wrote and edited the various documents that later became the Torah believed in God. If the belief predates the book, the book cannot be the source.
"It's only a matter of time before you've whittled away at your scriptures until there's NOTHING similar between what you believe and what's on paper as the origins of your faith."
We've "whittled away" maybe a whole two pages of Torah in three-and-a-half millenia. At that rate, it may take quite a while...
"In fact, most religions are so blinded that they're rejecting proven science in favor of superstition."
True, but Judaism isn't, and I don't see what that tragedy has to do with us, or with me. I have no intention of either defending that movement or accepting blame for it in any degree.
"The fact that Jews are still around is no evidence whatsoever that the beliefs held by Jews are true. ...Neither numbers nor survival give merit to the belief."
True, but that was not the point. The idea being countered was that religious faith always leads to bad consequences. In the case of the Jews, it apparently hasn't--and I think it's pretty obvious that that faith has sustained is and helped us to survive, whether it's true or not.
"So to go back to my earlier comment: How is this any different from dumping the religion? Instead of trying to do mental acrobatics to make it somehow still valid, just scrap the whole thing and live your lives as good people. It's not that hard. I don't see why there has to be a God to do that if you're going to throw out or cherry pick the only thing that says he exists. The Judaism of today doesn't resemble the Judaism of the OT times at all. So what gives?"
Well, since this question boils down to, "Why don't Jews give up believing in God?" I don't think it requires an answer. It's not like changing one's socks.
It's easy to tell someone that, isn't it? Let me put it the way Jews hear it:
"Why don't you just abandon the most essential part of your identity? Just dump the one thing that has determined and shaped how you look at yourself, the world and the people in it, and and the relationships among and between them. It's only the tie that binds you to millions of other people that share your values and beliefs all over the world, and to people of the past who maintained their traditions and culture for four thousand years. What's the big deal? It's only the food you eat, the garments you wear, the holidays you have celebrated and loved since childhood, the jokes you laugh at, the songs you sing and the dances you dance. Words of ancient wisdom that you live by, prayers that you say when you lie down and when you rise, when you eat, when you wash your hands, when you get sick and when you get well.
"Your people have survived more persecution, bigotry, displacements and banishments, and efforts to exterminate them--in some places and times, successful ones--than any other people on Earth, and kept their faith, practices, ideals and laws intact. Untold thousands of them died horribly because they would not do what I am asking you to do now; but they were fools, not martyrs. Abandon all that; there are some stories in your most ancient book that are disturbing to some who have never studied their meanings nor examined the lessons that your tradition has drawn from them--and therefore that book should be burnt and never read again. The towering tales of heroism and courage, of sacrifice and tragedy, of slavery and liberation, of love and family and devotion to each other and to an ideal shared by none in its beginnings and since adopted by most of the civilized world--those are of no moment, because a few lines of text, long since explained or discounted, are on the surface objectionable.
"The fact that your tradition instituted or invented so many principles that the world takes for granted today is unimportant; these ancient men and women who first believed that wives were persons and not property, that animals ought to be treated humanely, that personal disputes should be resolved in courts of law and not by personal combat, that kings and the wealthy should be equal under the law with common men, that the care of the poor, the sick, the old and the orphaned were the responsibility of the whole community, that nonbelievers and foreigners should be treated with the same respect and justice as one's own, that the king himself was subject to a law higher than himself and was not a god--and who conceived of all these specifically because of their belief in a just and caring
God--these men and women were ignorant barbarians, and the record of their lives and work should be forgotten. They believed in God, and were therefore fools. Every one of their advances, so radical and unusual in the ancient world, must have been a coincidence, because we know today that belief in God can only lead to brutality and oppression and ignorance. Your heritage, and all that of which you are proud, is a mere ignorant mistake.
"What is all that compared to the intellectual judgment that there is no God and that all those who believe in Him are fools, never mind their achievements and contributions to the world in His Name? Only the evil that has been produced by your religion should be considered or remembered, though it be renounced, decried and held up as a warning for more than three thousand years.
"Your religion was and is no better than the idolatrous cults that surrounded it and practiced human sacrifice, temple prostitution, self-mutilation, the abandonment of female infants, and the worship of god-kings with unlimited and absolute power. All religions are the same; evil. There is no God, and nothing else is important."
Gosh. Where do I sign?
If you mean the later Horus which is identified with Osiris in the late Hellenic period, that post-dates the Christian mythos? I am not sure what you mean by this.
