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http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3446952,00.html
(Some of you may want to post something positive in the Talkback section; there will be enough negative responses from the internation nutcake brigade.)
J F R
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)
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I'm pleased for them, JFR. But I don't feel I can comment because the comments are either ludicrous (make no sense at all to me) or seem to relate to Olmert's politics or policies, which I know nothing about.
Incidentally, I ought to comment on the quotation in your signature; Bill Gates denies he ever said it, and I'm inclined to believe him (it's impossible to establish when, where or to whom -- if he said it to a journalist, for instance, or at a trade talk, there would be a date and location). The best you can say is that it is 'attributed' to Gates, but even then without a citation it is a rather weak attribution. See: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00.html
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=640k+enough+for+anybody&btnG=Search&meta=
David
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>I'm pleased for them, JFR. But I don't feel I can comment because the comments are either ludicrous (make no sense at all to me) or seem to relate to Olmert's politics or policies, which I know nothing about.
Heheheh! I've never let my lack of understanding get in the way of posting! I sent in my two-cents worth. And with today's economy, that isn't worth too much.
Youth crisis hot-line 866-488-7386, 24 hr (U.S.A.)
There are people who want to help you cope with being you.
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Hi Paul -- glad you posted, but surely Christian fundamentalists (and US churchgoers) are likely to be in a minority on an Israeli web site?
David
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Benji
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Likes it here |
Location: USA
Registered: August 2007
Messages: 297
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G_D, I hope they keep their nose's out of Israel, remember the website is probably the devils playground!! Everyone have a Happy Rosh Hashana next week!
Benji
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They might remain in the minority. But it only takes one Fundamentalist U.S. Christian to read this post and the word will spread at the speed of light. There will be church ladies busily emailing to pastors and congregations. Americans take intense interest in anything Israeli. After all, Fundamentalists believe that Armageddon can't take place until after the Jewish temple is re-instituted in Jerusalem. They want the Jewish state to remain pure so that this can happen. As much as they abhor the abomination of homosexuality in the U.S., the idea of it gaining acceptance in Israel is complete anathema to them. Perhaps the letters to the editor will only be sent to American papers, but believe that they will be sent.
Youth crisis hot-line 866-488-7386, 24 hr (U.S.A.)
There are people who want to help you cope with being you.
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Deeej wrote:
> Hi Paul -- glad you posted, but surely Christian fundamentalists (and US churchgoers) are likely to be in a minority on an Israeli web site?
True, but the same arguments about biblical commandments versus modern social values exist even more in Israel than in the US. Orthodox Jews find 617 commandments in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Christians believe that most of those have been superseded by the New Covenant.
It seems to me that both Christian and Jewish biblical literalists find ways to enforce commandments they like while ignoring the intent of the inconvenient ones. The main difference is that Jewish literalists find loopholes. An interesting discussion of this is at the same web site: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3443099,00.html.
Peter
P.S. When I click on the above link, I get an Access Denied message, but I had no problem accessing it from the ynetnews site. If you really want to see it, go to http://www.ynetnews.com and type shmita in the search box near the top of the page; then click on go to the right of that search box.
[Updated on: Fri, 07 September 2007 20:51]
"Tu non altro che il canto avrai del figlio, o materna mia terra..."
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Well, I am the first to admit that I don't really understand the US relationship with Israel. I only know how I, personally, view Israel: as a sovereign state, one that is predominantly of a different, if historically related, religion (Judaism rather than Christianity).
I do know that were US fundamentalists suddenly to start criticising a similar topic on a British secular web site (rather than an Israeli one), that would most likely be seen as an unwarranted assault on British cultural values. American Christian fundamentalism is fortunately still alien and undesirable to most inhabitants of the UK. I'd be interested to know how common fundamentalism is in Israel, regardless of religious denomination. Does anyone know?
David
[Updated on: Fri, 07 September 2007 21:28] |
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In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. - Mark Twain
Youth crisis hot-line 866-488-7386, 24 hr (U.S.A.)
There are people who want to help you cope with being you.
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I know a lot of guys on here are around my age, seventeen, and in high school or college. Maybe they have been wrestling with this whole religion issue too. This is a copy of a blog I posted a while ago about what I believe in, and what I don't. Just offered for information.
CREDO
My Mom and Dad are constantly on my case about going to church. It never lets up. The trouble is, I just can’t believe in all the stuff that hangs onto Christianity, and I feel like a hypocrite every time I go to church. My former girlfriend is from a very strict, very sort of fundamental believing Southern Baptist family, and she was on me too about church, and what I believe and all the rest of it. Her family has a big Bible on the coffee table in their living room, and whenever anything happens that’s nice they’re like “Oh, praise God” and “Praise Jesus!” and stuff like that. Whenever anything bad happens then “it’s the Will Of God.”
I know it’s hard for my parents and my two older sisters to understand how I feel. When your family has been in the same church since the church was built in the 1730’s it’s hard to understand how totally a member of the family rejects virtually everything the Episcopal Church stands for. Back in those days, I mean when the church was built, it was called The Established Church. It was The Church of England. Everybody had to tithe to the Church. My family has records where we gave so many pounds of tobacco a year and so many bushels of corn for tithes and that was in Colonial times when there wasn’t much hard money going around. Then after the Revolution it got turned into the Episcopal Church.
It’s not like these ideas about religion came on me suddenly or anything. My Dad said it was a normal part of growing up to question things, and to question authority. But this goes way deeper than that. Even when I was little and being forced to go to Sunday school I never believed the stories they told us. I just didn’t. They all seemed too fantastic to me. Ribs being taken out of people to create other people, and angels talking to people, and all the rest of it. I think it’s all bogus, like this is the mythology we happen to believe in, while thinking the Greeks and Romans were pagans for having mythology just as weird. One time I told the Sunday school teacher that God must have taken two ribs out of Adam, because boys have an even number, and one side of our chests doesn't have one rib short. I was told to behave.
So, blogs are like diaries and they’re supposed to help you clear your mind. All my family wants to know what I believe in, so here goes.
I believe in God. When I think about God, I don’t think about an old dude with a long white beard and dressed in flowing white robes floating around in the sky. I don’t think of God as the Earth Mother. God to me is sexless. To me God is a Force. God is a Power. God is a Spirit. God doesn’t get pissed off at people and make terrible things happen to them, and God doesn’t think other people are better and give them “blessings.”
I believe that God did create everything. I don’t know how God did that, nobody knows how God works. I believe, like lots of the Founding Fathers of our country, that God started the process we have come to call evolution the instant the spark happened that created the universe. After the spark, God just sort of chilled out and let the process develop. I don’t believe for one second that God gets involved in everyday stuff on Earth. God doesn’t cause illnesses, or earthquakes, or suffering. Things like that are most definitely NOT “God’s will.” I don’t believe in miracles either. Science, medicine, natural selection, those are the things that cause unbelievable cures, not God’s intervention.
I don’t buy into the Bible. I don’t believe that God created man in his own image. Totally bogus. We know about evolution, and only brain dead people, or religious fanatics, believe in anything else. My opinion.
I figure, if God created man in his own image, then God either created the monkeys from which we evolved and that would mean God started out as a monkey and is evolving along with us, or if life started as plankton, or whatever, it’s only rational to assume God started out as the whatever and is likewise evolving along with us. It’s ridiculous. But since I don’t believe God has a physical form, then the whole argument is nuts.
While I do believe in God, I don’t believe in “the God” in the Bible. Visiting wrath and terrible things on people for being people. Bad things happen. Floods happen, fires happen and people get killed. These are natural things, and God has nothing to do with them. The Bible to me is not the revealed Word Of God. It’s written by human beings, each with a personal agenda to pursue and most of it was written in the Babylonian Captivity to give the Jewish people some sense of their own history. The bunch of stories we call the New Testament is just what the majority of bishops thought was the truth back in the early days of what is called Christianity. What if there had been more bishops believing something else? Like the Arians or those other guys? Christianity would be totally different. There are many, many more “gospels” that didn’t get included in the Bible because they weren’t “politically correct” for the times.
People invented “the God” in the Bible because they needed some explanation for everyday things. All that stuff about not eating this and not eating that, it’s just because desert dwellers couldn’t keep stuff fresh, and they learned that pork spoiled faster than goat, and shellfish spoiled faster than fish, and they learned if you mixed meats and milk stuff together then everything got spoiled. My best friend is Jewish, and he told me all this, which is why his family is Reformed Jewish. They eat everything. So back then, they needed fear to keep people from making the mistakes with their food. So they made all these religious prohibitions against everything that they knew would cause sickness or death.
I’m not gay, okay, I'm still trying to figure all that out, but the same thing goes for all the “thou shalt not sleep with men as thou sleepest with women” bullshit you hear. Bogus. Times were so terrible back then, and infant mortality was so high, and life expectancy was like what, thirty? So any relationship that didn’t help increase the tribes was not tolerated. In fact, I’ll bet that the boys were having so much fun with each other they neglected the girls, and the birth rate started to get low, so bingo! Let’s make boys having sex with boys a religious taboo. The club my family belongs to, The Episcopal Church, is going through a whole pile of crap because one diocese consecrated a gay bishop. Who cares? God’s evolution process developed us as sexual animals, and gave us our sexuality to enjoy and as a way to duplicate ourselves. If sex wasn’t fun there wouldn’t be any babies. But sex is fun, and we should enjoy it regardless of who we enjoy it with. If two people agree they like sex with each other, hell man, go at it! Girls with boys, Girls with girls, boys with boys; it’s all good. We should be responsible about sex, and never force each other into something that might hurt another person, but nobody has the right to tell anybody else what is allowed and what is not allowed between a couple who are expressing their love for each other.
There are no eternal punishments and no eternal rewards. People invented the idea of hell, and being punished by fire because that’s the worst way to die. I do some volunteer work in a hospice and sometimes I have to help with getting people to the hospital, and I have seen burned people. It’s terrible. People learned that the first time one of them caught on fire sitting around the campfire in their bear skins. Being burned alive is the worst way to go, so they made that the ultimate punishment for breaking the rules. I don’t believe in hell, and I don’t believe in heaven either. When you’re dead, you’re dead.
We should be good on earth to each other not because of some religious promise that we’ll be rewarded after we die, but because being nice to each other makes life in general more enjoyable. It’s nicer to be nice. It’s better to tell the truth, It’s better not to kill people, it’s better not to steal other guy’s stuff, it’s better not to fuck another guy’s girlfriend. These things are better because the world works better if we all get along, not because “God” dictated some shit to an old dude on a mountain.
I don’t believe that there is a place called “heaven.” Like they invented “hell” as the final punishment, they invented “heaven” as the ultimate reward for toeing the line in whatever religious club people belonged. Death is very scary. Nobody wants to die, I sure as hell don’t. I guess nobody else does either. Thinking that you will just die, and nothing will be left is hard to take. But I believe that once a person’s place in the evolution of the species is over, it’s over. It’s done. Like trees in the forest that die and rot, we die and rot, or we would if we didn’t have all these weird ideas about the resurrection of bodies and all that shit, and embalm people and put them into coffins, and then vaults, and bury them. The best thing human beings can do is to get cremated and have the ashes spread in the woods and fields as fertilizer. At least we’ll be giving something back to the earth for having taken so much out of it.
I believe in the historical person called Jesus of Nazareth. My best friend David says his name was probably Jeshua ben Joseph back then, but that’s neither here or there. I don’t believe that Jesus was the Son Of God like the Bible says. We are all sons and daughters of God because we are all part of creation. I do believe that Jesus was a great teacher, and a prophet if you will, and that he had some totally radical and excellent teachings on how we should live our lives. I have a copy of the Bible with the words Jesus supposedly said in red printing. One time I read JUST THE RED WORDS and I was like, wow, this dude had his shit together! I could be a Christian if it meant believing in the red words, but being a Christian, and “being in the club” means you have to buy into all the crap that’s been hung around Jesus’ neck over the centuries, and I can’t do that. My parents made me go to confirmation classes, and I asked so many questions the teacher couldn’t answer, and raised so many doubts in the other kids minds, they actually told my parents that I wasn’t ready for confirmation. That meant I was too curious, and wouldn’t swallow all the crap that surrounded the red words. I asked the teacher where the women came from who married Adam’s sons. That was just one thing that got them going. I asked them “if the Bible says it’s bad to eat pork, and we do it, are we going to hell?” They said no, so I asked them “well how about gay guys? The Bible says not to be gay and they are anyway, so are they going to hell? And the teacher said yes, so I asked “how come we obey one law and forget all the rest?” And that’s what got the call to my parents. I don’t agree with these people who pick and chose shit out of the Bible to “prove” stuff. I mean, people say that Sodom was destroyed because everybody was gay there and wanted to have sex with the strangers. Bogus! None of that actually happened of course, it’s Jewish mythology, but if it did, then why wasn’t Lot punished for offering the guys his own daughters to have sex with? It’s like “Oh, dude! You can’t fuck the visitors to my home, but here’re my daughters, fuck them instead!” See what I mean? Different standards. People read what they want to read, and believe what they want to believe. You know, you can read the Bible, and prove that slavery is okay?
I think Jesus was born at a time and in a place that was ready for a religious and political reformation and revolution, and Jesus and his message got perverted for political ends by some zealous Jews who wanted an armed insurrection against Roman rule. I believe that Jesus was tortured and crucified because we have historical records for that, I think that was terrible and I feel sorry for all the shit he went through, but I’m really sorry to say that I just don’t buy the story of the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus’ body, and the rest of the miracle stories. Jesus’ followers stole his body to make him an instant hero for the cause. Every religion needs their particular “hero” to have miraculous powers and perform “miracles” and to be special above all others. The Christians have made Jesus into a hero like that, and most Christians have totally lost the real meaning of what Jeshua ben Joseph was teaching.
I believe that most "Christians" are not Christian at all. If any so-called Christian uses the words “I hate….” in connection with other people; like persons of color, gays, lesbians, foreigners, Asians, Jews, Moslems….then I say they are NOT Christians. Jeshua ben Joseph never hated anybody. I can’t say I love everyone. I can’t say I even like everyone. But I can say I don’t hate anybody. I try to be tolerant of people who are different, and try to be nice to everyone. I try to practice what Jeshua ben Joseph taught about not judging others, and about not finding fault with others before I correct the faults in myself. I try to be honest in everything, and I try not to hurt people’s feelings. I know I fail at these things sometimes, and I’m sorry. I know that sometimes I show disrespect to my parents, and I’m sorry for that. I know that I have hurt other people’s feelings without even knowing it, and I’m sorry for that too.
Even though I don’t go to church, I still worship God. I worship God, or the Creator and Sustainer, or the Great Spirit, by caring for the little bit of Creation I live in. I try not to destroy nature, I try not to consume more than my share of resources, and I try to respect and care for all the other creatures that God’s evolutionary process has caused to live here with me. I try to be at peace with other people, and I try not to behave in ways that hurt other people. I hunt animals because I like to eat them and not because I enjoy killing them. Shooting a deer with my bow doesn’t make me feel powerful and dominant. Catching fish with a hook or netting crabs doesn’t make me feel better than the creatures I will be eating. Like the Indian peoples, I try to remember to say I’m sorry to the animals I eat, even though I really like eating them.
I think that organized religion, any kind of organized religion, is bad. Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Shinto, Buddhist, whatever. All bogus. It’s like a group of people get together and say “We’re going to have this special club, and this club is going to have these special rules, and these special books and these special beliefs, and if you agree to all of these special things, then you can be in our special club. But if you don’t believe in then, then you can’t be in the club, and not only that, but God is going to punish you because God loves our club the best.” Then later, a few of the club members get different ideas, and say to the club, “no, you guys are wrong, we have this new idea that is better, and we’re going to go and have our own special club with these slightly different beliefs, and God will love us better than you.” And then even later, some of the new club’s guys say, “Oh no, now we need these different beliefs from even the second beliefs, and God will love us best of all!” That’s why there are so many so-called “Christian” churches. Just look in the yellow pages! Why should there be ten different kinds of Baptist churches, and five different kinds of Presbyterian churches? And now the Episcopalians are having splits, and it’s just totally crazy. It’s also total bullshit.
One of my fave subjects in school is history. I’ve had social studies and civics and world history and now I’m in American history. I think more people have died in religious wars than for any other reason. I think religion, and the feeling that it gives people that they are “right” and everyone else is “wrong” has caused more trouble in the world than anything else. When people start to believe that “God” is on their side, terrible things happen. This goes for Moslems and Christians and Jews.
I do say prayers. I don’t have a clue if God hears what I say or not. I think not, but I’m willing to be open on the question. So, if God doesn’t listen, why pray? I don’t know. I don’t beg God for miracles because I don’t believe God interferes in our lives like that. But I need to say thanks, even if my thanks go out into space and never get picked up by God. Sometimes you just need to say thanks. Thank you God, for starting creation; so amino acids could combine and form cells, and cells could combine and form organisms, and eventually I could be here typing this.
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Benji
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Likes it here |
Location: USA
Registered: August 2007
Messages: 297
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Fascinating reading! Your family has been in this country a very long time. I'm 3rd generation Irish, coverted to Judaism(reformed)25 years ago, from the Catholic Church at an early age for many reasons, (they had theirs and I had mine) I don't agree with everything in your beliefs, but I admire your dogmatic approach to your "bible teachers". I remember being rebuffed as well, instead of answering you with "I don't know, let me get back to you" They too felt threatened by my questions they could not answer. Any way it seems you head is screwed on ok, I'm sure you're doing well in school. Good luck and again a fine written piece !!
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Hi! Yeah, the family forefathers got "transported" here after that mess in Scotland in 1715. I've always had the feeling that we were lucky to have escaped with just that punishment. It's weird how time blurrs the image from criminal in 1715, to patriot in 1776, back to rebel in 1861, and back to patriot in 1917, 1941, 1950 and 1965, to "respected member of the community" today. LOL. it used to be the tradition in our family to volunteer for duty under arms, but I think I'll just go to college, and respect from a distance those of my generation who feel the need to practice the Rebel Yell in some wadi in Iraq fighting for "Dick" Chaney and his fellow criminals.
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