since christians are really just radical jews and recruited gentiles who buy into the same hooey as jews do PLUS the jesus myth, and islam owes a great deal of it's overall panache to the same yet modified hooey, and since today it is 2005 and tribalism is still alive, can we please love one another as a brother and share a little wine? it will make us feel fine. and link our beneficence and raise up each other. if traditions don't die, we'll be stuck, chuck. new traditions are necessary in order to bring about a real inclusiveness in social policy and end the polarization of the world's citizenry. how about it? are we spiritually mature enough to "drop the spiritual blankies" and stop attending churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc. and realize that God/Yahwe/Allah is within each and every person, is within each and every blade of grass, every dog, bacteria, atom, subatomic partical, and we are, all of us, if nothing else, ancient at the core, knowing only love?

I'm glad to see that this issue is being addressed to US Commission on Civil Rights. Especially Columbia University. Hopefully it will change some of the practices going on.

Greg - listen to yourself: "can we please love one another as a brother and share a little wine"

This is dedicated, culturally specific Christian language.

Universalism is always probelematic because we all learn to think within culturally-specific contexts.

What might work, is mutual respect, tolerance, and courtesy between cultural groups.

But for it to work, you would have to acknowledge - for example -that many cultural traditions find the Christian injunction to treat all men as brothers absurd, preferring to enjoin respect for the rights and humanity of the stranger.

Post-Enlightenment Jewry turned desperately to various "alternative Judaisms" that would ease their path to assimilation. Both nationalism - membership in a modern democracy - and socialism were trumpeted as containing the core moral messages of Judaism, with none of the onerous ritual burdens.

Then the "National-Socialists" (AKA NaZis) came and proved these Jews wrong.

Now the final "substitute Judaism" - liberalism - is turning in on the Jews who first framed its modern agenda of "human rights",
"standing up for the underdog" and "social justice".

All these slogans are now turned against the Jews.

How about trying Judaism?

i'm not a christian, i'm not a jew, i'm not islamic, i'm not buddhist, i'm not hindu, i'm not athiest, and not quite agnostic. i battle against my own prejudice daily, having been raised a WASP. and strongly recognize the rights and humanity of us all. i love this country because of freedom from religion, yours and everyone elses. i am unencumbered by limiting myth in my thinking, yet am forced to live with it every day in the form of calenders and the unscientific demarcation of time in the form of the archaic clocks and time zones we all use. there is nothing good about organized religion. it foists upon us all the ignorance of the flock.

My dear Greg,

All of us are products of specific cultural traditions, and speak in the language of those cultural traditions. We cannot help ourselves. What you misconceptualize as "prejudice," is often merely context. Within the Christian context of your background - however attenuated - you assume that all good people will demonstrate their goodwill by treating all men like brothers. This is not right or wrong, merely particularistically Christian.

Of course, negative prejudices also exist - of the sort that sees, for example, culturally American Christian blacks as in some way inferior to culturally American Christian whites.

But a preference for a particular brand of Southern Baptist culture over, say, Thai Theravada Buddahism, or visa versa, is not prejudice. Merely difference.

A limited range of culturally bound values can be universally condemned. Human sacrifice, rigidly defined caste, suttee, honor killings and a few other practices would make my list. but at the top of the list would be the principle that a particular people has the right to initiate wars of conquest. Of particular concern to readers of this blog is jihad - the notion that Allah gives Muslims the right and the duty to conquer and subjugate their peaceable neighbors. Hating pthis belief is not prejudice. Merely it is hating evildoers and the proponents of an evil ideology: jihad.

To claim that "i am unencumbered by limiting myth in my thinking," is merely to delude yourself.

As for the statement that "there is nothing good about organized religion. it foists upon us all the ignorance of the flock." Mere willful blindness. Of course there is good in all the organized religions with which I am familiar. Along with some degree of bad. Only Islam, however, sinks to the level of actually making jihad a central principle.

my dear liz,

your interesting viewpoint is refreshing. and i suppose that i am actually more engaged in unencumbering my thinking from the swirling maelstrom of human-borne myth than actually truly unencumbered. and i'll agree that a few things about organized religion are appealing, i.e. fellowship. however, i must vehemently disagree with the assertion of willfull blindness. if only i could be so lucky. islam is the prime example of authoritarian oligarchy gone wild, as in spreading out of control like a wildfire. it is difficult to keep the moral highground when dealing with naked hatred. peace times like we enjoy at home in the states make other ingrained lesser threatening type things like time demarcation insidiously hidden stunting potential progress. science is a religion too. i'm not right, i'm also not wrong. just callin' it as i see it. there's room in my worldview for us all, even the crazies, just not as our neighbors.

BenDavid,

Interesting point, and I see what you are getting at both here and in the email you sent (which I still haven't had a chance to do justice to yet). Good food for thought.

I would say my feeling that religion functions in our society as a sort of Constitution of moral behavior, and the consequent great distaste I have for the various and gratuitous attacks on religion I've been seeing going on in American (and European) society is my way of actualizing this realization.

This would all be fodder for another post or two, but in short, I can't practice rituals I don't feel, but I can at least respect them when others practice them. (As far as practicing formal Judaism goes.)

You've expressed your point very well, though, and I'm with you in spirit.

I have been reading your blog for a while and i finally decided to post.

I am very glad to see this issue being taken up on a Federal political level. I live in Canada and am currently a university student and i can say that there have been times that I have felt academic freedom was taken a bit too far. Just last year I was in a Sociological Theory class and one of these Sociological theorists that we studied was Edward Said. I felt quite intimidated and a little persecuted but I did not feel comfortable enough to bring up my opinions in this class.

It becomes very hard for Jewish students at time especially with the rise of anti-semetic incidents on campus. In Winnipeg where I live, we have some wonderful organizations such as the Winnipeg Zionist Initiative, as well as a very close knit community that we can turn to if we have any problems. However this is not the case for everyone.

I also found the comment that there is the idea that all jews are white to be interesting as well.