Your attitude to Judaism and Christianity

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Faith, by its very definition, is not knowledge. It is assumption and some of us feel that religious assumption to be unwarranted and some merely swallow it whole for various reasons.

Same here. I am open-minded enough to listen to just about anything from just about anybody, but I keep my brain from falling out by investigating and "coming to know" from my own experience.



True, but faith was not being discussed and knowledge is still what it is.

"Let's eat!" will generally stop the verbal wars. For the vast and most part, Jews can argue passionately and not end up slaughtering those who disagree with them. This is very unlike Muslim Jihadis.

Here is what you have seen: Muslim enthusiasts hijacking planes and crashing them into tall buildings. Muslim enthusiasts laying down I.E.D. s and blowing up people they disagree with. Muslim extremists strapping on the explosives and blowing up a lot of people who have never done them harm.


Here is what you have not seen. Bahai, Budhists, and Orhtodox Jews hijacking planes, making I.E.D.s and strapping on the bombs.

Do you discern a difference?

ruveyn

Most certainly ... but what might be a common thread or bit of knowledge there?

The god of the old testament, yhwh/adonai, is a tribal god. The god of the new testament is a universal god.

To be perfectly honest I dislike religion in all its forms, when someone uses phrases similar to "thanks to god things worked out" I turn off and have difficulty listening further. Although I do have a few close friends who fit this description, I am bewildered by intelligent people who believe in god. In a world ruled by Mr Dent, religion would be given a large hall in a Museum of Philosophy, where people would marvel at its ability to maintain such a tenacious hold on humanity for so many millennia.

I was raised Church of England, which is about as lukewarm Christian as you can get. (For my parents, church was for funerals and the odd slightly drunken Midnight Mass at Christmas after the pub closed.)

It's possible that my grandmother may have been Jewish. She ran away from home, basically, and nobody knows who her family of origin were or what faith they followed, but she gave vague hints about them, and sometime, somewhere, she mentioned something that made her own family think she might have been Jewish. No real way to tell, though; I would ask my uncle, who was the family historian, but he has dementia now. At any rate, if she was, she wasn't observant.

Anyway. Saying what I think of Christianity and Judaism is, I think, a bit vague because people interpret those terms in so many different ways.

So the real question is: What do I think of Christians and Jews? And that's much easier. It depends on who's calling themselves by those names. Insofar as they do their best to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, or tikkun olam (which, I believe, would to such wise souls amount to the same thing) by doing good to their fellow humans, I salute them. Insofar as they go round doing the 'My way is right and everyone else's is wrong!' thing, they're at best irritating, at worst dangerous.

The same applies, of course, to all faiths. And none (because I'm sure the same extremes exist within atheism).

Your use of enthusiasts to describe criminal Islamic extremists is a pathetic, childlike attempt at manipulation. You wilfully ignore the fact that these crimes are commited and supported by a tiny fraction of the Islamic community and instead try to convince the reader to fit the crimes of a tiny minority to the vast majority of peaceful Muslims.

The Israelis are such nice people, taking far more land than was annexed for them and dispossessing so many Palestinians, using white phosphorous bombs, bulldozing buildings with the occupants inside, etc etc.

I sometimes wonder what planet you are on.

The wrong one.

There is a war of extermination going on (which apparently you have not noticed) the Palestinians and their Muslim buddies have every intention of eliminating the Jewish presence in that part of the world. The Israelis are as nasty as they have to be in order to survive. On the other hand no one is trying to exterminate the Muslims. But the Muslims insist on fighting anyone who does not follow their religion whenever they can get away with it.

Read what the Q'ran has to say about the dar al Salam and the dar al Harb.

ruveyn

Do you mean as imagined by men?



Well said, I say!

WOW what a myopic view of the situation, the poor little harassed Israelis, all these innocents are trying to do is fight for survival. The Hagana were not murderous thugs intent upon evicting Palestinians from their land, no they were heroic freedom fighters.

Mind you I should expect nothing better from you. You so often spew forth violent rhetoric, and offensive ill informed, xenophobic garbage regarding Muslims. It should not surprise me that you can not only ignore the suffering of the Palestinian people, but fully justify the murderous intent of the Israeli government towards them

No one has ever come after your pale Gentile a**. On the other hand my pale Jewish a** has had a target painted on it for the last 2000 years. Or are you a Holocaust denier?

ruveyn

Godwin would be proud of you, two replies and you invoke his law. Of course I am not a holocaust denier. Is this really how simple your argument is - we have been hated for two thousands years because we killed christ, this christ killer hatred culminated in an attempted extermination so therefore we have a right to return to our ancestral God given lands removing the illegal squatters.

Yes, many foul atrocities have been committed against Jews over the centuries. i would suggest that if you had removed the 'christ killers' excuse from the equation and looked with more introspection at just why so many societies got the s**ts with Jewish communities you might get somewhere. Perhaps not going around lauding yourselves as "gods chosen people" and treating the rest as goyim, might have been a good place to start.

The arrogance that Zionists show is astounding, how dare they decide to force the Palestinians to give up their homes and land just to accommodate a race of people who have no right to the land other than their claim that a supernatural entity 'promised it to them'

And before you blame my views on my racial heritage be careful, that assumption could get you very unstuck.

You're 2000 years old?

Quit living the role of a victim. I bet no one has even cared that you're Jewish in the past 20 years other than that you probably mention it ad nauseum.

My opinion is that all of the Abrahamic religions are rubbish, all careful schemes devised to control people.

Christianity is the one that I hate the most, they always try to convert everyone and I take offense to being told that I'm going to be in pain forever in some place called hell.

Islam doesn't bother me, they don't seem to try and convert people as much as Christians do, the extremists are bad news but there are hardly a lot of them.

Jews are fine, they keep to themselves and don't even mention their religion in my experience.