Judaism Beliefs Quotes

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.

It should go without saying that these rival belief systems [Judaism, Islam, Christianity] are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.

Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.

...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine. ...As to the decision of your author, though I wish to see the book {Flourens’s Experiments on the functions of the nervous system in vertebrated animals}, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin. Incision-knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not. That there is an active principle of power in the universe, is apparent; but in what substance that active principle resides, is past our investigation. The faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the universe. Let us do our duty, which is to do as we would be done by; and that, one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it. Your university is a noble employment in your old age, and your ardor for its success does you honor; but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America, to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. I salute your fireside with best wishes and best affections for their health, wealth and prosperity. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 22 January, 1825}

Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and fearful. It would be just as silly to assert that disbelief in God is a crutch for the immoral and the ill-read.

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality.

Every one of the “great” belief systems of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, insists on women’s inferiority as an article of faith. Individual

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like... We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. Right practice rather then right belief. That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible.

WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them.

On the other side, Church spokesmen could scarcely become enthusiastic about Planck's deism, which omitted all reference to established religions and had no more doctrinal content than Einstein's Judaism.

When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God. When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God. While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend. It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.

To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.

As far as I know, all major religions that subscribe to a belief in God—including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—believe that the universe was created by God at a finite time in the past. The one major contemporary religious tradition that does not incorporate God, Buddhism, holds that the universe has existed for all of eternity. Looked at another way, a universe with a beginning must have had a creation, either by a divine being or by quantum physics. But a universe that has existed forever needs neither.

I also do not think belief in God is necessary to incentivize moral behavior. Some of the most ethical people I know are atheists. They

The belief in the bodily resurrection has no religious foundation, and the doctrine of immortality refers to the after-existence of the soul only.

It’s also worth pointing out that Israel is not solely comprised of Jewish people and is not the defining representation of the global Jewish community. There are many non-Jewish Israelis – about 25% of Israeli citizens are non-Jewish and mostly Muslim with some Christians – and of course there are many non-Israeli Jews, including American Jews for example. However, the above statistics are either underreported or lost in the paranoiac thinking so common to those who assess such disparate subjects as Jewish people, Zionism, Judaism, Israel and the Holocaust as if they are all one and the same and inextricably linked. The all-too-real problem of rising anti-Semitism around the world is unfortunately often a result of anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli beliefs. This phenomenon can usually be traced to the blurring of the lines or general confusion in gentiles and their apparent inability in the main to differentiate between the global Jewish community and the distinctly different and separate nation of Israel.

Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done—question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture—it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.

Ultimately, however, he held that a person’s theology or beliefs, like the ritual he took part in, were unimportant. They could be interesting but not a matter of final significance. The only thing that counted was the good life;

Some books about the Holocaust are more difficult to read than others. Some books about the Holocaust are nearly impossible to read. Not because one does not understand the language and concepts in the books, not because they are gory or graphic, but because such books are confrontational. They compel us to “think again,” or to think for the first time, about issues and questions we might rather avoid. Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust is one book I found difficult, almost impossible to read. Why? Because I had to confront the terrible underside of Christian theology, an underside that contributed in no small part to the beliefs and attitudes too many Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – had imbibed throughout centuries of anti-Jewish preaching and teaching that “paved the road to the Holocaust.” I cannot say that I “liked” Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust. I didn’t, but I can say it was instructive and forced me to think again about that Jew from Nazareth, Jesus, and about his message of universal love and service – “What you do for the least of my brothers [and sisters], you do for me” (Matthew 25: 40). As Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, the Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust began with words. And too many of those hate-filled words had their origin in the Christian Scriptures and were uttered by Christian preachers and teachers, by Christians generally, for nearly two millennia. Is it any wonder so many Christians stood by, even participated in, the destruction of the European Jews during the Nazi era and World War II? I recommend Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust because all of us Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – must think again, or think for the first time, about how to teach and preach the Christian Scriptures – the “New Testament” writings – in such a way that the words we utter, the attitudes we encourage, do not demean, disrespect, or disregard our Jewish brothers and sisters, that our words do not demean, disrespect, or disregard Judaism. I hope the challenge is not an impossible one.

beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to accept certain credal propositions. It stresses orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.

That is the fantastic intolerable paradox of my life, that I have gone questing for what I possessed initially -- a belief to invest my days with dignity and meaning, a pattern of behavior through which man might most articulately express his devotion to his fellows.

The Buddha was trying to show that language was not equipped to deal with a reality that lay beyond concepts and reason. Again, he did not deny reason but insisted on the importance of clear and accurate thinking and use of language. Ultimately, however, he held that a person’s theology or beliefs, like the ritual he took part in, were unimportant. They could be interesting but not a matter of final significance. The only thing that counted was the good life; if it were attempted, Buddhists would find that the Dharma was true, even if they could not express this truth in logical terms.

This quarrel over the messianic status of Jesus within first-century Judaism had profound effects on Christianity and prompted it towards a fateful turning point that switched the emphasis from following the way of Jesus to believing things about Jesus. Gradually a Christian came to be thought of not as one who lives and acts in a certain way, but as one who holds certain convictions or theories. The trouble with religious convictions or beliefs is that, since we can rarely prove or disprove them, we get anxious about them and start quarrelling with people whose convictions or theories differ from our own.

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which ‘God’ appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.” 2 Atheism is as unintelligible and meaningless as theism. There is nothing in the concept of “God” to deny or be skeptical about.

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss] [Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.

Religion is the most powerful entity on earth. A phenomenon that has conscripted millions to give or sacrifice their lives without so much as a minuscule query about their chosen beliefs or particular ideology. And today thousands of years on despite the huge advent, discovery and the advance of science forensic or otherwise, millions are still prepared and equipped to fall or kill in the name of their God, their Holy Scriptures, their messengers, their prophets and their faith’.

Years ago, a Muslim woman called my radio show and asked me why I was not a Muslim. She asked this question with complete sincerity, and I answered her with equal sincerity. The name of her religion, I told her, is Islam, which in Arabic means submission (to God). The name of the Jewish people is Israel, which in Hebrew means struggle with God. I’d rather struggle with God, I said, than only submit to God. She thanked me and hung up. The answer apparently satisfied her. Arguing/struggling with God is not only Jewishly permitted, it is central to the Torah and later Judaism. In this regard, as in others, the Torah is unique. In no other foundational religious text of which I am aware is arguing with God a religious expectation. The very first Jew, Abraham, argues with God, as does the greatest Jew, Moses. (It is worth noting that though Muslims consider Abraham their father as well, arguing with God has no place in the Quran or in normative Islam.) It is difficult to overstate the importance of this Jewish concept. For one thing, it enabled Jews to believe in the importance of reason — God Himself could be challenged on the basis of reason and morality; one does not have to suspend reason to be a believing Jew. Indeed, it assured Jews that belief in God was itself the apotheosis of reason. For another, it had profound psychological benefits to Jews. We do not have to squelch our questioning of, or even our anger at, God. One can be both religious and real.

I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean?

What is the Sabbath?2 A reminder of every man’s royalty; an abolition of the distinction of master and slave, rich and poor, success and failure. To celebrate the Sabbath is to experience one’s ultimate independence of civilization and society, of achievement and anxiety. The Sabbath is an embodiment of the belief that all men are equal and that equality of men means the nobility of men. The greatest sin of man is to forget that he is a prince. The Sabbath is an assurance that the spirit is greater than the universe, that beyond the good is the holy.

He read Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and a host of German philosophers, including Felix Wellhausen, who rejected the traditional belief in the Torah as divinely inspired. Adler returned to his father’s Temple Emanu-El in 1873 and preached a sermon on what he called the “Judaism of the Future.” To survive in the modern age, the younger Adler argued, Judaism must renounce its “narrow spirit of exclusion.” Instead of defining themselves by their biblical identity as the “Chosen People,” Jews should distinguish themselves by their social concern and their deeds on behalf of the laboring classes.

Instead of such idolatry, Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, “Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of al-Lah” (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.

Someone once said to me, 'There are so many religions in the world. They can't all be right.' And my reply was, 'Well, they can't all be wrong either.' All religions in the world today share more commonalities than differences, yet language blinds many from seeing these truths. Some people will tell me that what I write about is straight from their holy book, but the truth is that the main principles found in all holy books were already engraved in all our hearts. If you think common sense, the golden rule and knowing right from wrong are exclusive only to your faith, then you need to open yourself up to the rest of the world's religions.

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.

To the question Was Jesus God or man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 AD, their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple: many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans. By removing that distinction, the Christians took themselves irrecoverably out of the Judaic faith.

Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for shallow things, shallowly. Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure. These beliefs are all very nice, but they are also secondary. What Europeans no longer believe in are the things from which their beliefs spring: Judaism and Christianity; liberalism and the Enlightenment; martial pride and capability; capitalism and wealth. Still less do they believe in fighting or sacrificing or paying or even arguing for these things. Having ignored and undermined their own foundations, they wonder why their house is coming apart.

Let's take a look first at what Pantheism is not. Theism (from Greek theos = God) is the belief in an all-powerful, omniscient, thinking God who created the universe and watches personally over each one of us. He may be present to the universe in carrying out his actions or sustaining things in existence, but essentially he is thought of as infinite and eternal, beyond space and time. This is the God of the central traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Pantheism does have its own "God" (though many pantheists choose not to use the word), but this "God" is the Universe itself. Some pantheists such as the Stoics have believed that the Universe has a collective soul or a purpose in its evolution. But many simply revere the physical universe that science and our senses reveal to us, just as it is.

The curse of life The story of Man’s10 abrupt expulsion from Eden – be it fiction, metaphor or literal fact – has become etched too deeply on the collective unconscious to ignore, for it has set in stone Judaeo-Christian attitudes to men, women, original sin (and therefore children), the Creator and his opposition, Lucifer/Satan/the Devil. This all-powerful myth has imbued us all at some level of perception with a belief that life is a curse, that death is the end – a collapsing back of the body into its constituent dust, no more – that women are inherently on intimate terms with evil, that men have carte blanche to do as they please with not only all the animals in the world but also their womenfolk, and that God, above all, is to be feared. Snakes come out of it rather badly, too, as the embodiment of evil, the medium through which Satan tempts we pathetic humans. The Devil, on the other hand, is the only being in the tale to show some intelligence, perhaps even humour, in taking the form of a wriggling, presumably charming, phallic symbol through which to tempt a woman. As both Judaism and Christianity depend so intimately on the basic premises of Genesis, this lost paradise of the soul is evoked several times throughout both Old and New Testaments. The crucified Jesus promised the thief hanging on the cross next to him ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’,11 although it is unclear how those listening may have interpreted this term. Did they see it as synonymous with ‘heaven’, a state of bliss that must remain unknowable to the living (and remain for ever unknown to the wicked)? Or did it somehow encompass the old idea of the luxuriant garden?

RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an “orthodoxic” religion; it is principally one’s beliefs—expressed through creed—that make one a faithful Christian. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Judaism, a quintessentially “orthopraxic” religion, where it is principally one’s actions—expressed through the Law—that make one an observant Jew. It is not that beliefs are irrelevant in Judaism, or actions unimportant in Christianity. Rather, it is that of the two religions, Judaism places far greater emphasis on orthopraxic behavior than does Christianity.

Only when Christianity came into its own as a political force, and emperors as well as other Roman officials embraced the Christian faith and were subject to pressure from Christian leaders, did Jews everywhere began to experience physical peril regardless of whether they had long maintained peaceful relations with governing authorities. The question of what to do about the Jews was far more pressing than what to do about pagans for the church fathers, given that Christianity developed out of Judaism and was seen as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. These prophecies eventually had to be twisted to fit the official events of the Christian story. The refusal of faithful Jews to accept that the story of their faith ended and was fulfilled by the arrival of Jesus was a constant challenge and reproach to Christianity in a way that the unrelated beliefs of pagans could never be.

Here is a fundamental distinction between Judaism and Christianity. The Gospels record the miracles performed by Jesus at length, and miracles play an extremely significant role in Christianity. The wondrous acts of Jesus, such as reviving the dead, healing the incurable, and transforming water into wine, are meant to serve as cogent evidence not only of his divine authorization but of his divinity. The virgin birth and the resurrection are not only major events but also fundamental articles of belief; this, despite the specific warning in Deuteronomy that "if there arise in your midst a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and he gives you a sign or a wonder" and that sign or wonder is used as a rationale for rejecting any part of the Torah, then the "miracle" must clearly be rejected. In Christianity, miracles were sufficient to warrant the replacement of the Old Testament by the New, the message of Moses to be superseded by that of Jesus.

The truth is that for two centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus sometime in the early 30s CE, Christianity is hard to pin down. It started as a radical Jewish sect, but how and when it became clearly separated from Judaism is impossible to say. It is not even certain when ‘Christians’ started regularly to use that name for themselves; it may originally have been a nickname applied by outsiders. They were for many years small in number. The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’. And they held a whole variety of views and beliefs about the nature of god and of Jesus and about the basic tenets of Christian faith that were gradually, and with great difficulty, pared down to the range of Christian orthodoxies (still not a single one) that we know today. Was Jesus married with children? What exactly happened at the crucifixion? Did he die or not?, many wondered, not unreasonably.

During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God. The natural sciences provided the only reliable source of knowledge because it could be tested empirically. Ayer was not asking whether or not God existed but whether the idea of God had any meaning. He argued that a statement is meaningless if we cannot see how it can be verified or shown to be false. To say “There is intelligent life on Mars” is not meaningless since we can see how we could verify this once we had the necessary technology. Similarly a simple believer in the traditional Old Man in the Sky is not making a meaningless statement when he says: “I believe in God,” since after death we should be able to find out whether or not this is true. It is the more sophisticated believer who has problems, when he says: “God does not exist in any sense that we can understand” or “God is not good in the human sense of the word.” These statements are too vague; it is impossible to see how they can be tested; therefore, they are meaningless. As Ayer said: “Theism is so confused and the sentences in which ‘God’ appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.”2

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished—this is precisely the “ glad tidings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it. The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a “belief” that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles (“neighbour,” of course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their mandates (“Swear not at all”). He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity.—And under all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.— The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life—and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the “glad tidings.” The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith....

The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself!

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

The end of the war will see the final ruin of the Jew. The Jew is the incarnation of egoism. And their egoism goes so far that they're not even capable of risking their lives for the defence of their most vital interests. The Jew totally lacks any interest in things of the spirit. If he has pretended in Germany to have a bent for literature and the arts, that's only out of snobbery, or from a liking for speculation. He has no feeling for art, and no sensibility. Except in the regions where they live in groups, the Jews are said to have reached a very high cultural level! Take Nuremberg, for example: for four hundred years—that is to say, until 1838—it hadn't a single Jew in its population. Result: a situation in the first rank of German cultural life. Put the Jews all together: by the end of three hundred years, they'll have devoured one another. Where we have a philosopher, they have a Talmudistic pettifogger. What for us is an attempt to get to the bottom of things and express the inexpressible, becomes for the Jew a pretext for verbal juggleries. His only talent is for masticating ideas so as to disguise his thought. He has observed that the Aryan is stupid to the point of accepting anything in matters of religion, as soon as the idea of God is recognised. With the Aryan, the belief in the Beyond often takes a quite childish form ; but this belief does represent an effort towards a deepening of things. The man who doesn't believe in the Beyond has no understanding of religion. The great trick of Jewry was to insinuate itself fraudulently amongst the religions with a religion like Judaism, which in reality is not a religion. Simply, the Jew has put a religious camouflage over his racial doctrine. Everything he undertakes is built on this lie. The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco- Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis! The Jew has a talent for bringing confusion into the simplest matters, for getting everything muddled up. Thus comes the moment when nobody understands anything more about the question at issue. To tell you something utterly insignificant, the Jew drowns you in a flood of words. You try to analyse what he said, and you realise it's all wind. The Jew makes use of words to stultify his neighbours. And that's why people make them professors. The law of life is : "God helps him who helps himself!" It's so simple that everybody is convinced of it, and nobody would pay to learn it. But the Jew succeeds in getting himself rewarded for his meaningless glibness. Stop following what he says, for a moment, and at once his whole scaffolding collapses. I've always said, the Jews are the most diabolic creatures in existence, and at the same time the stupidest. They can't produce a musician, or a thinker. No art, nothing, less than nothing. They're liars, forgers, crooks. They owe their success only to the stupidity of their victims. If the Jew weren't kept presentable by the Aryan, he'd be so dirty he couldn't open his eyes. We can live without the Jews, but they couldn't live without us. When the Europeans realise that, they'll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together. The Jew prevents this solidarity. He owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist.

Judaism and Christianity both agree with Islam in affirming a downward trend for humanity which is to continue until the cataclysms heralding Doomsday. Sometime during the late stages of this process, the Antichrist shall appear, who is not only the epitome of all evil but also the inverted image of Jesus, may peace be upon him, whom he will claim to personify. The Prophet, may God’s blessings and peace be on him, called him the ‘Impostor’ (al-Dajjal) since his characteristic attribute will be relabeling good as evil and evil as good, Heaven as Hell and Hell as Heaven, himself as the Christ and Christ as the Antichrist. And this is precisely what the West has already succeeded in doing. They have redefined the human being by bringing his physical form to the fore and denying his spirit, redefining him thus as an animal; and they have set the stage for putting everything to the service of the body and thinking solely in material terms. Whereas all religions say that man is degenerating, the West claims that, on the contrary, he is improving by the day; with the implication that they are now far more ‘advanced,’ far more clever and mature than anyone in the past. This evidently gives them the right to dismiss lightly the Prophets and sages of old and their timeless wisdom and speak of them in condescending and derogatory terms. Religion has been redefined as superstition, and the life-to-come as a childish belief deriving from an inability to face reality.

the declaration by Paul that Christianity is the one true faith and therefore supersedes or replaces Judaism, both in belief and in deed—became an essential tenet of the new faith.

Many scholars believe the Arab-Israeli conflict did not start out as a war between religions, but as a territorial dispute between two competing groups—Jews and Arabs—with nationalist claims and aspirations, and that religion was one of the characteristics that identified the competing nationalist groups. I will agree that that is what it might look like on the surface. But for these two particular groups whose religion, at least for the Muslims, is a significant daily part of their lives, it is hard to believe that religious beliefs do not influence their thinking and aspirations. All you have to do is read a few scriptures from the Koran about the Jews and hear the holy book recited weekly in every mosque and you’ll begin to understand where this resentment is coming from, regardless of what country this hate verbiage is coming out of. The major difference between the religions is that Judaism does not aspire to convert the world as Islam does. Jews can live within the context of a different society without seeking converts. Jews do not go to temple every Friday and read that God’s will is victory over all Muslims. They do not read that all Muslims are apes and pigs because they are cursed by Allah, which is what Muslims teach about Jews in their mosques. Muslims are out to convert everyone. Once they have the upper hand, they want to run the whole show and subject everyone to their own rules.

Criticism of the sanctity of books such as the Qur’an was voiced by the Mu’tazilites, who claimed that the Qur’an should not be seen as a divine work, but rather as a work of literature.Caliph al-Ma’mun shared this belief, and applied rational criticism to religious texts

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John1:1 Words carry great power, it is quite important to know not so much what the dictionary says that they mean, but what the ancients say that they mean. Judaism believes that the entirety was created by rearranging the 22 letters of its alphabet into words, and whatever was spelled by God was created. "And God SAID let there be light and there was" God said/spelled a word first before any creation. In the beginning, was the word. Jesus, while on the cross, could have easily said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they say

But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt. What keeps the vehicle moving isn’t the belief that it will but the heat generated from a thousand simultaneous disagreements. This might sound glib or pedantic but it’s evident in one of Judaism’s most foundational facts. Our most sacred text isn’t the Torah, the purported word of Hashem, but the Talmud, a multi-volume companion text that interprets, expands and comments. Essentially the Talmud is marginalia, a conversation. A beneath-the-line comments section. What Judaism essentially amounts to is a four-thousand-year-old argument.

The close ties which the Pharisees had with the Greco-Roman world caused them to adopt many of their beliefs and customs, such as witchcraft and other superstitious rituals which were completely alien to Scripture.

A mantra is defined as an expression of syllables, words, and sentences spoken in the form of ongoing repetition, in the belief that this action releases spiritual powers. Apparently, the source of the mantras was Hinduism and was originally made in the Sanskrit language.

Judaism has consisted of four components: God,Torah, Israel, and Chosenness; that is, the God introduced by the Jews, Jewish laws, Jewish peoplehood, and the belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jews’ allegiance to any of these components has been a major source of antisemitism because it not only rendered the Jew an outsider, but more important, it has often been regarded by non-Jews as challenging

Although many members of the Orthodox Jewish community opposed Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not because Orthodox leaders were averse to the idea of a return to a Jewish national home centred on Zion. Instead, the disagreement arose from the Orthodox belief that the return to Zion should come "at the end of days," when the Messiah would lead the Jews from the "four corners of the earth" back to their home. In this early period, Zionism was seen to be anticipating the end of days and usurping the role of the Messiah.

Christianity did not bring in foreign elements, pagan or otherwise, to Judaism in order to create a new religion. Rather, Rabbinic Judaism cut off huge swathes of the belief and practice of the Second Temple period in order to create a deliberately non-Christian religion that relied on a pared-down reading of the Hebrew Scriptures.

General Hube and his Chief of Staff, General von Bonin – a vital motivation was the profound belief that they were part of some bigger, esoteric force that was directing them and for which they had to be worthy: the righteousness of Aryan superiority. ‘The white race,’10 wrote Mauss, after a lengthy philosophical discussion in the XIV Panzerkorps headquarters mess, ‘by spirit, ethic and body, absolutely must remain on top.’ Christianity, they believed, because of its origins in Judaism, had lost its right to exist.

The essential message of Judaism and Christianity is that life is not an end in itself. Life is to be a means—to goodness, to sanctity, and to God. The belief in life as an end in itself is a form of idolatry.

We often fail to grasp the seriousness of the menace to the Jewish heritage involved in the modern ideology because we use the term "traditional conception of God" loosely. If we use it in the sense of the belief in the existence of a supreme being as defined by the most advanced Jewish thinkers in the past, there is nothing in that belief which cannot be made compatible with views held by many a modern thinker of note. But if by the term "traditional conception of God" we mean the specific facts recorded in the Bible about the way God revealed himself and intervened in the affairs of men, then tradition and the modern ideology are irreconcilable. The chief opposition to the traditional conception of God in that sense arises not from the scientific approach to the study of nature in general, or even man in general. It arises from the objective study of history. The natural sciences like physics and chemistry cannot disprove the possibility of miracles, though they may assert their improbability. But the objective study of history has established the fact that the records of miracles are unreliable, and that the stories about them are merely the product of the popular imagination. The traditional conception of God is challenged by history, anthropology and psychology; these prove that beliefs similar to those found in the Bible about God arise among all peoples at a certain stage of mental and social development, and pass through a process of evolution which is entirely conditioned by the development of the other elements in their civilization.

The temporal and geographic connection between the alphabet and monotheism in Egypt-Palestine during the middle of the second millennium may be more than coincidence. What might tie them together? The notion of a disembodied, formless, all-seeing, and ever-present supreme being requires a far more abstract frame of mind than that needed for the older plethora of anthropomorphized beings who oversaw the heavenly bodies, the crops, fertility, and the seas. Alphabetic writing requires the same high degree of abstraction and may have provided a literate priestly caste with the intellectual tools necessary to imagine a belief system overseen by a single disembodied deity. Whatever the reason, Judaism and the West acquired their God and their Book.

As a young adult, Naomi became a teacher to help inspire children; to aid the creativity and channelled passions of their fertile minds. Now, the kids would read these Protocols; that 11yr old boy would be joined by an army of thousands, countless thousands, even millions. How long until the twisted poison of language could scar purity, and forever pervert the children of Britain into a hateful, vengeful, violent clique of racists? *Jewish life was life unworthy of life.* How could she have ever ignored and belittled this work? So maleficient was its content, to perniciously penetrate the conscious fears of all European nations – and presumably the rest of the world – to transcend cultural differences, and encompass all facets of cultural decay and parasitic operation to insidiously affect the thinking of – and thence bind together –all peoples of Britain, America and Europe to the modern form of anti-Semitism and scientific racial loathing. From the medieval beliefs of sacrifice and well-poisoning to this modern resurrection of ancient fears, with its sinister new ambition and devilish upgrade in scale; Naomi realised with trepidation that once more, her people truly had been chosen.

That is, if any proof for the existence of God were successful we would be dealing with a God who is the conclusion of a human argument, a God who is a valid inference of human reason, a God who is known reasonably only insofar as that God is within the grasp of human reason. According to Judaism, Christianity and all the rest of the world’s classic theistic faith traditions, any such god, any god drawn by human reason, would be a graven image, an idol.

In Kabbalah (mystical Judaism) there is a concept called “Tikkun Olam” which alludes to repairing the world. It is my personal belief that true and complete Tikkun Olam cannot and will not occur until there is a balance of

We usually define members of religions by using a kind of checklist. For instance, one could say that if someone believes in the Trinity and incarnation, she is a member of the religion Christianity, but if she doesn’t, she isn’t a proper member of that religion. One could say, conversely, that if someone does not believe in the Trinity and incarnation, then he is a member of the religion Judaism, but if he does believe in those things, he isn’t. One could also say that if someone keeps the Sabbath on Saturday, eats only kosher food, and circumcises her sons, she is a member of the Jewish religion, but if she doesn’t, she is not a member of the Jewish religion. Or, conversely again, if some group believes that everyone should keep the Sabbath, eat only kosher food, and circumcise sons, they are not Christians, but if they believe that these practices have been superseded, then they are Christians. This is, as I have said, our usual way of looking at such matters. However, this manner of categorizing people’s religions runs into difficulties. First, someone has to be making the checklists. Who decides what specific beliefs disqualify a person from being a Jew? Throughout history these decisions have been made by certain groups of people or individuals and are then imposed on other people (who may, however, refuse—unless the deciders have an army). It’s a little bit like those “race” checklists on the census forms. Some of us simply refuse to check a box that defines us as Caucasian or Hispanic or African American because we don’t identify that way, and only laws, and courts, or an army could force us to if they chose to. Of course, it will be asserted that the decisions about Jews and Christians (not Americans) were made by God and revealed in this Scripture or that, by this prophet or that, but this is a matter of faith, not of scholarship. Neither faith nor theology should play a role in the attempt to describe what was, as opposed to what ought to have been (according to this religious authority or another).

I think historians have dealt a bad hand to Spain regarding its treatment of Jews. Of all the European nations that have mistreated Jews, Spain was the least cruel. Spain never persecuted Jews as a people; it persecuted Judaism as well as all other religious beliefs that fell outside the Catholic faith. Spain gave Jews the possibility of converting to Christianity and living under complete equality with gentiles.

While the Jewish concept of faith underwent a certain transformation, influenced by other systems of belief, and the formulation of Jewish doctrines appeared necessary, particularly in opposition to the Christian and Mohammedan creeds, still belief never became the essential part of religion, conditioning salvation, as in the Church founded by Paul. For, as pointed out above, Judaism lays all stress upon conduct, not confession; upon a hallowed life, not a hollow creed.

Think about it for a second: Babies are not born prejudice, they are not racist,they don’t hate, they don’t judge, and are not born believing in christianity, buddhism, sikhism, hinduism, judaism or any other ism. We, as adults, teach them all these things.

On June 13, 2012, Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown was banned from the House floor because she pissed off House Republicans when she was defending the right to choose. She used the word “vagina” and that is what got most of the attention, but what she said about her religion is very important and should not be discounted or ignored. She said, "Yesterday we heard the representative from Holland speak about freedom of religion. I'm Jewish. I keep Kosher in my home. I have two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for dairy and another two sets of dishes on top of that for Passover. "Judaism believes that therapeutic abortions, namely abortions performed to save the life of the mother, are not only permissible but mandatory. The stage of pregnancy does not matter. Wherever there is a question of the life of the mother or that of the unborn child, Jewish law rules in favor of preserving the life of the mother. The status of the fetus as human life does not equal that of the mother. I have not asked you to adopt and adhere to my religious beliefs. Why are you asking me to adopt yours?

As anyone who read religious history could attest nothing cemented people's belief faster than a human being dying for his cause. Christ on the cross. The Kedoshim of Judaism. The Shahid of Islam. Martyrdom is at the heart of all religion . - Robert Langdon

Always, Judaism stresses deed before creed. Your actions, not your beliefs, are the true measure of your character...Judaism teaches that whether a person is considerate of others is as important as whether he prays daily. We are the sum of our actions, and most of our actions are small deeds, not large gestures.

Quotes By Transcendologist Kurt Kawohl 1941 - If the medieval practices and the medieval beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that are based on superstitions were eliminated, then we could start building a rational and logical belief system that is based on truth and an understanding of spirituality. This is the value of truthfulness and rationality. The goals of ALL religions are the same; a deserved, appropriate, just finale. God is the rational Purity that does not require servitude, ritualistic prayers or a forced slavery in order for the soul to be a part of that Purity for eternity. God is spiritual, the progressive and accumulative spiritual intelligence of all the righteous souls who have passed into the spiritual realm. God does not and never has meddled in the tangible universe. It is of no importance during our physical life whether God exists or not if one so chooses. Whether or not one believes in a spirit or God really makes no difference to God. Righteous living will determine the continuance and destiny of our spirit/soul. Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Bahá'u'lláh, Zoroaster, Ahmad, Nanak and many others of various faiths are believed to have achieved spiritual enlightenment by mastering the art of spiritual transcendence. Everything in the universe follows the universal laws which separate the physical and the spiritual existence. Energy is power, vigor, liveliness, intensity. It is a measurable quantity, without reference to its nature or source. Energy, or life is a fundamental attribute and function of the universe. Our bodies build up and harness a minute amount of spiritual energy that is transferred into the spiritual dimension upon our death. Then this spiritual energy is limitless because it lacks resistance and this energy can assimilate as a unity or be separate and individual. It is this spiritual energy that is God. It is a composition of the spiritual intellect of the universe, of every soul that has passed from the physical universe into the spiritual universe. It can create a spiritual existence of beauty that is beyond the imagination…my spirit has experienced it.

Do we have any independent evidence that there were early Christians who did not believe in the miraculous conception of Jesus? [...] Eusebius tells us that in the early-to-mid second century there were certain Jewish Christians who did not believe in the virgin birth. The Jewish Christian sect of the Ebionites ("the Poor"-see Gal. 2:10) [...] Here we must remember one of our fundamental axioms: if we possess two versions of a story, one more and one less spectacular, if either is closer to the truth, it must be the latter. [...] The existence of the belief in the natural conception of Jesus must be understood as the stubborn persistence of an earlier belief in the face of the popular growth of a subsequent belief, perhaps influenced by pagan myth: the virgin conception of Jesus. It is easy to imagine how a natural origin such as everyone else has should eventually be thought unimpressive, especially since rival savior deities could boast of supernatural origins. On the other hand, imagine a scenario in which Jesus was widely known to have had a miraculous birth and someone has it occur to him: "Hey, wouldn't it be great if Jesus was no different from anyone else? That's it! He had a ... a natural birth!" Not likely.

There are explicit statements from various quarters of the magisterium, up to and including Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, asserting the rights of the secular to remain secular, of the Jews to remain Jews, of the protestants to remain protestants, and the schismatics eastern churches to remain in schism. How is it, then, that a Catholic faithful to immemorial Catholic tradition is to be taken to task for remaining Catholic? Talmudic Judaism, masonic secularism, and heterodox Christianity need not change at all, but Catholics must change all?!? This is not merely unfair, this is absurd! Beyond its absurdity lies an utter unnecessity: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and so is His Body, the Catholic Church! None who clings to Christ needs to repent his beliefs, to apologize for his beliefs, or to change his beliefs. The obedience demanded of the Catholic is permanent, therefore, the Church to which he offers his obedience must be permanent in her teaching, in her practices, and in her rituals! (page 366)

Any time Jesus sounds like a Cynic or Stoic or like Socrates, we may wonder if we have evidence of Gentile Christians coining sayings to distance Jesus from Judaism and thus to legitimate their own preferences. For instance, when Jesus is made to abandon fasting since the kingdom of God has arrived, and one cannot force the new spiritual reality into the outmoded forms of Jewish observance (Mark 2:21-22), we have to wonder: are we seeing here a religious revolutionary breaking with his own culture? Or are we seeing an excuse by Hellenistic Christians for why they do not intend to continue Jewish fasting practices? [...] Surely this is theological propaganda for Gentile Christians repudiating alien Jewish norms. Was Jesus a radical, or has a later faction of his followers rewritten him in their own image? If sayings of Jesus strongly echo Christian belief, practice, or wisdom, we have to wonder if someone is, again, attributing to him what they had come to believe on other grounds, providing a dominical pedigree once debate arose. We will see in the next chapter how this principle disqualifies virtually all the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of John: they are unparalleled in other gospels, closely paralleled in the Johannine Epistles, and they explicitly state sophisticated Christology that seems to have formed through a complex process of Christian reflection, not just to have dropped from the lips of Jesus himself.

Reading these books raises what will be a recurring theme: given that they tell a story rather than give instruction on what to believe or to do, the path from the biblical text to religious belief and practice in Judaism or Christianity today is far from straightforward.

Circumcision For Adults Has Approval from Medical Experts IIn a few religions like Judaism, circumcision is an essential ritual. It gets performed when the male child is eight days old. During this, the foreskin on the genital gets removed. And almost all Jews follow this without fail. But sometimes, due to unavoidable circumstances, it may not be possible to circumcise baby. Yes, then the mohel may recommend some other auspicious day for circumcision. The family follows all the Jewish rituals during this ceremony. Indeed, there is a belief that doing so has a lot of health benefits for that person. Not all religions follow this custom. So, there is always a debate about whether it is beneficial to perform this ritual. Avoid Infection with Circumcision And research has proved that it is advantageous to do the bris ceremony. There is a reduced risk of contracting infections like STI, UTIs, and cancer of the penis. It has also proved that there is an improvement in the hygiene in the genital area. So, an expert may recommend an adult to undergo circumcision who has not done so in infancy. Yes, but you must get this procedure done through a professional. You can find many an expert mohel who can perform this ritual for children as well as adults. Essential To Hire a Professional This procedure gets performed in a sensitive area that needs a lot of precaution. So, you should engage only an expert in circumcision Los Angeles for this. a novice or an amateur may make mistakes. And you may have to face a lot of trouble because of this. And when a professional gets hired, especially for an adult circumcision, it will avoid post-procedure complications. It is not prudent to take a shortcut concerning health. People who resort to them get into more trouble. So, it is best avoided. Approval From Modern Science Look for a qualified rabbi and get it done as soon as possible. Modern science also approves of this religious ritual. It may seem that people undergo this procedure because of religious beliefs. But anyone who wants to stay safe and not get infected by some diseases should circumscribe themselves. The benefits of doing so are many compared to not undergoing it. And if you contact a mohel who is a professional, it will get done in no time. It is always advisable to stay safe rather than get infected and then for its treatment.

That Jews aren’t really a race is an argument beloved by racists and anti-Semites alike, but a rarer, adjacent truth is that Judaism isn’t really a religion. You might think it’s semantics but I’d argue it’s mechanics. Look under the bonnet of most major religions and you’ll find a system of beliefs that’s at least internally consistent (the clue’s in the name: they’re faiths). But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt.

Every Jewish community in every generation invents itself anew. Conservative Judaism is one such brilliant reinvention, one which now finds itself in a phase of dynamic reinvention. With roots in European Jewish Emancipation of the nineteenth century, Conservative Judaism provides an approach to Jewish thinking and practice that allows us to engage with the broader world and live our lives fully as Jews in that world. As a result, Conservative Judaism nurtures the optimistic faith that an ancient tradition can be successfully carried forward by people wholly invested in the success of an open society … if they use methods of inquiry that are intellectually honest, and also developed in the framework of a caring spiritual community. Conservative Jewish Torah thus becomes the “grid” on which the religious and spiritual framework of modern Jewish life and thought can be built by those committed to engaging with the world—intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. And so the Conservative approach has evolved. Generations of knowledgeable practicing Jews have brought the Jewish passion for justice, community, and Torah into every sphere of life. The movement has helped build and support the State of Israel; Conservative Jewish scholars and knowledgeable Jewish professionals lead institutions of all types around the world; and Conservative Jewish communities have taken root in every major city, providing opportunities for Jews throughout the world to live lives guided by the tenets of the Torah, as interpreted for modern times through the lens of Conservative Jewish ideology and belief. The essays in this book are a product of modern times, speaking to the realities of Jewish life in the twenty-first century. The wisdom and learning of the rabbis who authored them remains emblematic of Conservative

Each in its own way, the five major belief systems of Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam by their nature insisted on the inferiority of women and demanded their subjection to values and imperatives devised to promote the supremacy of men.

other pagan beliefs which have found a home in rabbinical Judaism, such as the existence of demons in bathrooms,[193] the breaking of glass in weddings,[194] reincarnation of souls,[195] belief in the existence of the little Mermaid,[196] practices of witchcraft,[197] God versus the god of the sea,[198] the belief in a time of purgatory,[199] prayers for raising the souls of the dead (“kaddish”),[200] the industry of amulets,[201] turning Purim into a pagan carnival,[202] putting rocks on tombstones,[203] worshipping pictures of saints,[204] using sacred candles,[205] changing the new year (i.e., Rosh Hashanah) into a pagan date,[206] and the custom of women separating a tenth of the challah bread (הפרשת חלה).[207]

The women’s belief that they were fulfilling the path laid out by their grandparents provided a sense of identity, a connection with a larger order and with their roots.

While Christianity posits that Jesus is the divine Son of God and a part of the Holy Trinity - consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - Judaism firmly upholds the belief in a singular, indivisible God. This fundamental difference creates a theological divide between the two faiths, as the notion of God taking human form and the idea of a triune deity directly contradict the principle of monotheism held by modern Judaism. Consequently, the doctrines of Christ's

We call this an apocalyptic worldview because it reflects a system of beliefs that includes the idea that what humans see and perceive as their earthly experience is in fact not the whole story. There is the deeper and invisible reality of a divine and heavenly realm. Moreover, the God of this heavenly realm reveals himself (hence “apocalyptic,” from the Greek word meaning “to reveal”) to his chosen people, his “elect,” and he tells them how the world really is—how it is structured, what the angelic realm is like, etc. (e.g., 1 En. 59:1–3; 60:11–23; 69:17–25). This enables the elect to live rightly and with hope that despite the way things appear now, God is at work and in control.

Judaism was not principally about belief per se; for most Jews, Judaism was a set of practices

Musa ho, isaa ho , ya khatmun-nabi Mohammad Ae aadam, ae Abraham teri aualado ke dil ki gaflate mitaa —Wajid shaikh Be you Moses, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad divine, O Adam, O Abraham, in your grace we entwine, Forgive the hearts of your kin, let your light shine.” —Wajid Shaikh Translation: "Whether you are Moses, Jesus, or the Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad, O Adam, O Abraham, erase the errors of your descendants' hearts." Explanation: This verse appears to be expressing a plea to figures from various religious traditions, such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and the final Prophet, Muhammad. It suggests a desire for them to help remove the mistakes or sins from the hearts of their descendants. It reflects a universal and spiritual message of seeking guidance, forgiveness, and purity in the context of different religious beliefs.

Notwithstanding the preeminence of cultic observances, religious life during the Second Temple era increasingly emphasized personal duties to purify oneself, follow the Torah, and perform daily rites. Jews prayed in both public and private, beyond as well as within Jerusalem. Scripture study emerged as a principal function of a new local institution, the synagogue. Injunctions for holy living (like dietary prohibitions) multiplied. This shifting emphasis toward God's relationship with Jews individually, as opposed to Israel collectively, was manifested theologically by an intensified interest in the workings of God's justice and personal redemption, stimulating heated speculation about resurrection, free will, and eternal judgment. In some circles, apocalyptic (Greek, "revelation") theories explaining evil's persistence and Jews' subordination posited a final war between the righteous and the wicked in which the former would triumph, led by a messiah (mashiach, "anointed one") who was ordinarily conceived as a transcendently powerful human figure and occasionally as a cosmic one. Still, Jews coalesced around their rules of conduct, not their beliefs.

What about Judaism has provoked anti-Jewish hostility? There are four answers. For thousands of years Judaism has consisted of four components: God,Torah, Israel, and Chosenness; that is, the God introduced by the Jews, Jewish laws, Jewish peoplehood, and the belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jews’ allegiance to any of these components has been a major source of antisemitism because it not only rendered the Jew an outsider, but more important, it has often been regarded by non-Jews as challenging the validity of their god(s), law(s), national allegiance, and/or national worth. By affirming what they considered to be the one and only God of all humankind, thereby implying illegitimacy to everyone else’s gods, the Jews entered history—and have often been since—at war with other people’s most cherished beliefs. The antisemites also hated the Jews because the Jews lived by their own all-encompassing set of laws. And because the Jews also asserted their own national identity, Jews intensified antisemitic passions among those who viewed this identity as threatening their own nationalism. As if the above were not enough, Judaism has also held from the earliest times that the Jews were chosen by God to achieve this mission of bringing the world to God and His moral law (i.e., ethical monotheism). This doctrine of the Jews’ divine election has been a major cause of antisemitism. From its earliest days, the raison d’être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, “to repair the world under the rule of God”). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly been a source of tension. As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led higher-quality lives than their non-Jewish neighbors in almost every society where they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbors aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. As a result of these factors, the quality of life of the average Jew, no matter how poor, was higher than that of a comparable non-Jew in the same society (see Chapter 4). This higher quality of life among Jews, which, as we shall show, directly results from Judaism, has, as one would expect, provoked profound envy and hostility among many non-Jews.

Jews have always regarded antisemitism as a response, however immoral, to Judaism. Thus, most Jews until the modern era, and most religious Jews to this day, would describe Jews murdered by antisemites not as victims of ethnic prejudice but as having died al kiddush hashem, that is, as martyrs sanctifying the name of God before the world. Once one understands why Judaism has precipitated antisemitism, the unique universality, depth, and permanence of Jew-hatred also become understandable. It takes infinitely more than economic tensions or racial prejudice to create the animosity that often has involved the torturing of children and the murdering of entire communities. Only a people representing a threat to the core values, allegiances, and beliefs of others could arouse such universal, deep, and lasting hatred.

We should not be so naive as to regard all antisemitic accusations as the reasons for the antisemitism. For example, the modern belief that economic factors cause antisemitism, besides confusing exacerbating factors with causes, grants the accusations of antisemites far too much credence. It is analogous to the efforts of some fine historians to determine the historical accuracy of the Christian claim that the Jews killed Jesus, because Christian antisemites called Jews “Christ killers,” as if proving one way or another would have ended Christian antisemitism. It is also analogous to the tireless efforts of other fine historians to decipher the exact number and circumstances of Arabs displaced during the founding of Israel, as if those who single out Israel from all other countries to support efforts to destroy it do so because six hundred thousand Arab refugees were created in 1948. The questions for those wishing to understand the roots of antisemitism are not whether some Jews helped execute a fellow Jew two thousand years ago, or how great a role Jews played in the German economy, or how many Arabs fled Israel in 1948. The questions are why, to begin with, people hate Jews, and then invent reasons to do so. The answer is Judaism, its distinctiveness and its challenges, and we have offered four reasons why this is so.

The Jews’ belief in God threatened more than their neighbors’ gods. It challenged many of their fundamental values. “It was Judaism,” wrote the Reverend Edward H. Flannery of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, “that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world”; willingly or not, “the Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.”1 The world to which the Jews have introduced God and His moral demands has often resented this theological and moral challenge. It is little wonder that hatred of the Jew became, as Father Flannery wrote, “the greatest hatred in human history.

National Socialism in all earnestness says: ‘I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.’”5 Because of the threatening nature of their religion, the Jews, who through both Judaism and Christianity had introduced monotheism, had to be destroyed. Communist regimes also perceived monotheism’s threat. Communist party members agreed with their religious opponents that one can either be true to God or to the party, but not to both. The moment one believes in God, one has an external standard by which to judge the government. This is why a person who advocated belief in God in the Soviet Union, for example, risked incarceration.

I am sometimes asked how it feels to have exposed the magic trick of the priesthood and robbed people of their faith and belief. I recall the words of Musashi who said, "Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.

Possibly the deepest and widest split, however, was between Zionists in Europe and Palestine, on the one hand, and American Zionists, on the other. American Jews—even those positively inclined toward Zionism—were living in a setting radically different from that in Europe and could not embrace the statehood-centric version of European Zionism. Even the First Zionist Congress foreshadowed how difficult it was going to be to get American Jews on board; despite the fact that there were some 937,000 Jews in America, of the approximately 200 delegates to the Congress, only four came from the United States.* American Judaism was becoming anti-Zionist even before there was Zionism. In 1885, American Reform rabbis adopted what is now known as the Pittsburgh Platform, the movement’s statement of core beliefs and commitments. In it, these rabbis declared, in part, that the Jews were no longer a people but now constituted a religion. “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men,” they said as they jettisoned Judaism’s long-standing particularism and embraced the universalism then much in vogue in philosophic and cultural circles. “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” they said, and since Jews were no longer a national community, they expected “neither a return to Palestine,* nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

Ioudaismos

Access to God became universal, and far more easily attainable: the answer lay in belief. This key Christian concept—the notion of faith in one personal redeemer, the representative of God’s logic in the universe—broadened the appeal of Judaism to billions of people over history in a way Judaism never would have: Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense.

But what is perhaps most curious about the English experience is the way in which a belief that they had been chosen by God could have produced a version of religion so temporizing, pliable and undogmatic. After all, orthodox Judaism, which is built upon the assertion that the Jews are the chosen people, is one of the most demanding, prescriptive religions on earth. But there is scarcely anything prescriptive about the Church of England.