Warsaw Jewish Cemetary (begun in the early 1800s)
Twelve years back, responding to concerns raised by the Jewish community, the Mormon Church promised to end its practice (as to Jews) of posthumous baptisms. It has breached its promise.
I should say before I go further that I won't be offended should others want, when I'm gone, to attempt to re-make me into, through any kind of hocus-pocus, a Mormon, a Muslim, a Janist, a Hindu, a Presbyterian, or a Carmelite Nun (though I wouldn't pass the Carmelite Nun physical). Oh...wait...there'd be no physical....).
A Carmelized Nun? Wait....nope...have to watch the sugar.
Turns out, though, that during a routine genealogical data-base check of the Mormon Church, information surfaced showing that the parents of the late Simon Wiesenthal have been swami'd into a pair of Latter-Day Saints.
Yep, that Simon Wiesenthal's parents...the parents of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the man who found Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, the Adolph Eichmann who made the trains to the Camps run on time, the Adolph Eichmann tried and hanged at Jerusalem in 1961...the Simon Wiesenthal who found and rooted out so many more systematic killers of Jews-because-they-were-Jews.
Simon Wiesenthal
While the Mormon Church has, it says, disciplined those responsible --and I've no reason to disbelieve it-- I do wonder if this tasteless voodoo, has really ended or if it has ended only for well-known Jews.
Since the third century churches of nearly every stripe have, at one time or another, played fast and loose with Jews' sensibilities (and in tens of millions of cases, our lives). This isn't about my taking personal offense. It's about tastelessness.
Is it really too much to ask that this shabby, threadbare behavior be seen for what it is, a crass and crude practice done in the name of "saving souls"?
Is it too much to hope that we be left alone, at least once we're burned, gassed, shot, or more naturally returned to the dust?
from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles
The Salt Lake Temple
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I mean, in NYC, if a Catholic Bishop does something tasteless regarding another religion, its very easy for Rabbis, Imams, Protestant ministers and the like to have a meeting with him. In Utah, its a different cup of tea.
The lack of diversity in parts of the West, in ways, can sometimes foster this sort of insensitivity, I think.
It is just too bad they do not have the key to paradise.
The dead know better,and they are having a party at the other side
of the veil.
Rated
Traditional Judaisn, in fact, holds, that a person of any faith may partake in the World to Come if the person has lived an ethical life.
I was imagining the Mormons walking around trying to save souls.They can easily be distinguished in their clean haircut and spotless suits.
What you have said,indicates once more how much tolerance there is in Judaism.
r./
They are rewriting history right before our eyes. Think about that for a minute
a) why you think it'll be forgotten, particularly by Jews (we have long, long cultural memory) and
b) what you think the implications really are.
Maybe it's karma running over their dogma.
I would prefer to think of it as one MORE brick of hypocrisy in an already well built wall of same.
Oy vey and Jesus, Mary and Joseph I'm glad I don't adhere to any religion, praise be to Allah. It continues to be problematic even after you die.
--r--
Then again, if all of the wives have to be Jewish also, perhaps we should keep on kvetching.
HUGGGGGGGGG
It matters not that I'm an atheist, that I don't believe in the soul, and that I consider this practice of Mormons to be a foolish totally ineffectual waste of time, no different than rattling bones or any other shamanistic voodoo witch-doctor ritual superstition.
It is the absolute enormity of this chutzpah, this damn unmitigated gall, that gives one the worry that, given the chance, Mormons would not see a problem with exercising totalitarian control over society. This involuntary modification of a person's metaphysical status rises to the level of tyrannical ruthless logic that disregards individual will entirely as subjugated to infallible ideological correctness. After all, it's for their own good, right? Just ask Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. It's a frightening thought considering that one of them is running for President of the US.
Even though I'm sure I have no soul, and that once I die nothing further will affecte me in any way, I resent the very thought that these people would use my name to perpetuate their false and destructive delusions that weaken humanity's ability to address reality in a constructive and intelligent manner.
This creeps me out. Glad I'm a heathen.
Chutzpah: the youngest of the major supposedly Christian religions attempting to lecture the oldest. Fascinating.
when my daughter was quite small, my extremely devout in-laws had her 'secretly' baptized against both my beliefs & wishes. i was outraged & they were smug & self-righteous, but they seemed to truly not understand why i cared.
sometimes i think religion is like cataracts... narrows the field of vision.
In the end, the Jews are still Jews...the dead know only one thing - it is better to be alive.
This seems like any other sort of religious issue in a way, the sort where one type decides their way of seeing religion/faith is the only way, while any other type of devout faith is just wrong.
To such extremes??
Ai yi yi.
Thank you for writing about this process.
rated with love
showing how good they are
by trying to glom onto
truly great people.
twain said: book of mormon= chloroform.
Beauty 1947 made a good point too about her Ojibwe heritage.
People are strange.Do we need another 1000 years before the human species recognizes the equality of men?
I have another thought:The practice of re-baptizing the dead is in my opinion a sacrilegious.
I hadn't heard of this. 'Night' - The author:
`
Of the 'Night' book . . .
Elie Wiesel . . .
He was critical of this.
`
Politicos 'ought' to:
`
stomp out forest fires
smoke war-helmet-pot
flop on a mortician lap
and sit on staffs lap top
`
I am here just here briefly
politicos 'ought' to go barf
Elie Wiesel is so wonderful
You can hear his inner grief
`
Fake human - now vain beast
When they are judged post-
pre-Dead ... laying in a death-
bed . . .
`
condemned man
requesting for last meal
Girl Scout cookies
`
"What horrors he has seen in this life. Why should he be baptized into some strange heaven envisioned by a religion..."
This practice of the Mormons is not only distasteful;
it's much worse,and like I said earlier,it's a sacrilege.
Seriously, why does anyone care?
No one is digging up bodies.
One of two things is true:
1. The Mormons are right about what happens in the afterlife, so they are doing the humane thing and saving souls.
2. The Mormons are wrong about what happens in the afterlife, so these baptisms that don't involve any physical remnants or consent of the deceased are essentially pretend and don't actually count.
What's way, way way unlikely (and I don't think any belief system out there postulates) is
3. that Mormon posthumous baptism either prevents a soul from getting into Heaven or actually results in one's being expelled from Heaven.
If we eliminate the third option, the Mormons are going to continue with this practice because they view it as their moral obligation to save souls and this is how they think it is done. If they're smart, they'll just stop talking about it because it's rude.
If I were to say: "I hereby convert your dead ancestors to worshippers in the Cult of the Tooth Fairy," would you say I was being offensive?
Is the problem that the Mormons are saying that the rest of us are theologically wrong? Every religion thinks that about every other religion. (As Jews, we get called "arrogant" and sometimes "stiff-necked" for that; most other faiths get left alone though, I guess, in this case Mormons don't.)
Tempest in a teapot. Just make a fresh pot and be done with it. I'm up for, given the setting, Constant Comment, thanks.
Nothng that has the effector can have the effect to perpetuate myths abt the living should be ignored, imo.
Baptizing anyone after death when the "Saved" soul has no way to indicate their lackinterest or need of being saved of is incredibly high-handed. It's also remarkably POINTLESS. Even if I believed all the end of life theories about Heaven and Hell--which I'm not at all sure I do, wouldn't I have taken care of last minute business before shuffling off my mortal coil?
rated
He reminds me a cartoonist Zippy.
Zippy the Pinhead was why I buy:
`
The Washington Post. - He was fired?
I no buy the newspaper after that deed.
I request Dr. Zippy Mutter-Job to recall?
You promised to remember USA in wills.
I'll accept a living-will of half-billion asap.
I have a craving for NYC's Cheesecake too.
Dr. in the house can say Grace after we eat.
I hope Dr. Zippy Mutter-job no mugs folks.
I came back to read . . . I forgot why I came.
Maybe I smelled cake with `FusanA's icing
Howabout digging up a Mormon or two and have a bris?
Maybe they would get the idea?
r
Mormons baptize the souls of all non-Christians they can find, including pre-Christians. This isn't aimed specifically at Jews. Though Jesus is venerated in Islam, I don't think Muslims are baptized per se so I would think they would also qualify for posthumous baptism.
Sometimes the fact that we don't belong to an evangelical tradition has consequences - if others hold beliefs that we find, uh, inconsistent, we don't have something better to offer them. A peculiar position, but there it is.
The Mormons do not believe in "hell" or eternal damnation. They believe there are three levels in the afterlife. Almost all will be in the first level, the terrestial. You would have to be LDS to make it to the second level, the tellestial. You must be quite devout to make it to the third level, the Celestial Kingdom, where you will become a God or a Goddess. The act of a temple worker being baptised in the name of a nonmember is not to save the person from damnation - it is so that they can "progress" in the spirit world. I just had to clear that up. It's interesting....
You know that I'm not suggesting anything here re: that.
You also know what I have suggested here, if you've read; I've made the point.
I also did a post on this topic- a couple of days earlier ...
hahahahah
But I think there is more to it, regardless of whether or not you believe there are actual metaphysical consequences of this practice.
To the believer, as it has been mentioned, this is offensive sacrilege. And it can have more effect on the living than the dead simply due to reenforcing negative stereotypes or offensive fallacies.
To the unbeliever, this is phony fraudulent self-aggrandizing. It's like not caring about Bernie Madoff by dismissing his victims as deserving fools. This practice is a part of the repertoire used by the Mormon church to exercise power over people and to manipulate them into parting with real money in the form of tithing.
The practice is offensive any way you look at it, and not as harmless as it might appear at first glance.
1. No, I don't think they'd get around to converting Jesus though Jesus was of course never a Christian because the creation of Christianity was necessitated by Jews not accepting the resurrection. At the time of Jesus' death, Christianity didn't exist, nor did Jesus act as though he had anything in mind other than reforming Judaism, certainly not creating a new religion.
Of course, the logical extension of a posthumous conversion of Jesus to Christianity would be the conversion of God to Christianity. The endpoint of that chain would be worth a novel, potentially an interesting one.
2. No, Eve was not Jewish. Eve was pre-Jewish. As was Noah. Judaism doesn't enter the picture until Abraham. So, that particular logical inconsistency is nonexistent.
I appreciate your consideration of my observations and I am curious as to how Judaism originates with Abraham in contrast with the actual rather intimate contacts between the Jewish god Jehovah and his created Adam and Eve. This is a genuine question and not an attempt at argument. I simply do not know. As an atheist, the whole thing, to me, is a matter of mythology but nevertheless demands some sort of logic.
For what it's worth:
The Rabbis hold that the Hebrew Clans do begin/Judaism itself does begin w Abraham's sense of 1 God.
Genesis, prior to the Abrahamic family stories, is not, the Rabbis teach, a history of Hebrew Clans or of Judaism's origins, but of human origins. Adam ('earth", in Hebrew language), and Chava (Eve), are an attempt at a human origin tale and a prior story to the story of a Jewish people.
Nevertheless, the "characters" spoken of in Genesis are "people" to whom the Rabbinical commentaries judge by more or less the same ethical standards as they judge the Abrahamic clan, with some notable exceptions.
One exception is that when Kayin murders his brother, Hevel (Cain/Abel), the perp is banished and not killed by God (on the idea that he could not have known what the result of his temper/anger/brute strength would be--death of his brother).
If I can be of more help, I'll be happy to try.
The Rabbis hold that the Hebrew Clans do begin/Judaism itself does begin w Abraham's sense of 1 God.
Did God exist prior to Abraham ?
Was it the same God, just waiting until the right lineage formed, or was there another God before ?
Seriously. Smite me with logic. I'm not ( for a change ) being awful ( deliberately ) ~ just like Jan, with half the intellect, curious. My partner is Jewish, & she was no help either. She offered to put it to her Rabbi, but they're a bit 'estranged,' so we let it slide.
I think even the Rabbis acknowledge that the origin stories are murky as to their historicity.
God is eternal, backwards and forwards, according to traditional Judaism, so there is no reason to posit A&E believing anything in particular. That Adam is pictured as having actual conversations w God ("What Have You Done?"/"She Made Me Do It"---eat the apple--) does assume a God's existence even if the pair aren't Jews per se.
The example you put ( giving rise to, 'What would you have done ? ) is a good one, & maybe the very beginning of Philosophy ) but I'm still unclear about the identity of God before Abraham.
I suppose what I'm trying to ask, in my convoluted way, is : Did Abraham somehow package or institutionalise, or in fact lay claim to ownership of God, in the modern trademark sense, or did God exist for everyone, even Australian Aboriginals, at the time ?
ps. Loved the post.
Traditional Judaism holds that
a) God pre-existed the creation and is not a part of it. This is a rejection, in effect, of Naturalism.
b) While God existed before and after the creation of humans, and while all sorts of gods existed as objects of worship by humans prior to Abraham, Abraham's special insight, it is said, is that there is and always was and will always be 1 non-material, impossible-to-objectify (or even name) God.
c) When Moses asks God, What shall I tell Pharoah your name is (the subtext being...'so that Pharaoh doesn't think me utterly nuts when I denand in God's name that he manumit his slaves) Exodus has God replying that his name is something akin to I AM THAT I AM...in other words, that being who needs no pre-existing event or being prior to me, AND meaning: I Am Sufficient (now, for your needs as slaves...and always).
I'm dim, I admit, in this area.
(now, for your needs as slaves...and always). ~ that's cryptic. I wasn't sure if you were talking about Pharaoh or God.
But thank you ~ :-)
Perhaps, but your question was not a metaphysical question so much as a doctrine question. So, to answer it in a bit more detail:
Adam and Eve knew only God because they had insufficient knowledge to theorize about anyone else and not enough curiosity to speculate. That was where the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge came in. After that, people (eventually, in theory, grouping into peoples) came up with their own creation myths and deities. Abraham's distinction was to conclude that the polytheists and idolaters were wrong. I guess it might be fair to say that he was the first (which might not be historically true) to actually choose monotheism.
Judaism really has two identifying moments, now that I think about it. Abraham is the origin of the choice of a relationship with God and also of our tribal identity. It is his descendants who ended up in Egypt, became more numerous there, and eventually migrated back to the land he ended up in on his journey from Ur in Babylonia. Moses is the vehicle for the introduction of the laws and parameters which define religious Judaism per se.
(This next answer is to a comment that may not have been yours.) As to Islam claiming Abrahamic descent, Jewish lore provides for that through Ishmael. However, keep in mind that Judaism's existence dates back in some form to Abraham with a narrative that's unbroken since then. Islam wasn't introduced for another two and a half millenia. There are detailed records of Judaism that predate the foundation of Islam by half a millenium (particularly including the Qumran Scrolls) and other evidence that predates the foundation of Islam by well over a millenium. In the seventies, an archeological site was found near Jerusalem that dated from the late First Temple period, about 600 BCE. A child on the dig broke through what was thought to be a stone floor and turned out to be a stone ceiling which fooled not only the archeologists but over twenty centuries' worth of looters, so the contents were undisturbed (and far older than what else was on the site). Found there were some rolled up pieces of silver about the size of cigarette butts that were engraved with an early version of Hebrew writing, the earliest found up to that date. It took many years of painstaking work to unroll the strips of silver. What they contained was something called the Priestly Blessing ("May the Lord bless you and keep you.."). I still say that over my kids - excuse me, kid - every Friday night. That is not mythical continuity, it's documentable continuity. Back to Abraham, no, but way closer.
The story of Abraham is where the Torah starts to get very specific. The migration path is pretty detailed and I don't think there was a good political reason to fabricate it in this way. Our people had to come from somewhere and there's nothing about the outline of this story that isn't credible (aside obviously from the interactions with God).
There is a theological point that predates Abraham: the criteria for entrance to Heaven (which we don't emphasize in the first place). They come from the Noah narrative and are called the Noahide Laws. Basically, they say you have to be good to other people and not be a pagan (probably because pagan religious law wasn't humane enough to be acceptable). What that adds up to now (but possibly not then, though there may have been other examples of monotheism in the area) is that you don't have to be Jewish to get into Heaven.
I hope I've helped answer your concerns.
"the creation of Christianity was necessitated by Jews not accepting the resurrection."
Truth Told. An unavoidable, if inconvenient for some, cold hard fact. Once this is the starting point, and what sane inquiry could being elsewhere?, a conversation actually worth the time can begin.
I appreciate your genuine consideration. I am, of course, pretty much totally naive in many of the basics of Judaism and have spent the best part of my life puzzling over the general unbelievability of much of the fundamental concepts which are accepted by the faithful of almost all religions. I do not doubt the sincerity of many of the believers but since the alternatives presented by total rationality as to the existence of all life and its development out of basic matter and the rather obvious observed destination of each individual back to elemental components after death is chillingly grim I can comprehend the rejection of reality in preference to a sugar coated fairy tale although this is a bit too much for me.
Like all persecuted minorities the solidarity of their strength is derived a great deal from that very persecution and there is no doubt that Jewish traditions of learning and respect for human values and intelligence has done well for their survival and successes. But, as with all religions, there is a rather large set of rote ceremonies and rigid beliefs intractable to rationality and since the rather long Jewish history has many doubts out of perhaps delightful but fanciful tales within its traditions which seem to me to be oddly contradictory at times (again, as with most other religions) I must retain a rather suspicious and critical attitude about the whole business.
I doubt that politics is a dominant factor in fabrications. There are other, even merely literary, elements that are probably involved moving into fables promoting accepted moralities. The actual existence of even major Jewish Biblical figures has been called into doubt and I see no reason to withhold my uneasiness in this area.
I have no wish to upturn the applecart but wonder this : What might be the difference between Moses & Joseph Smith, since they both had 'visions' and heard 'voices' on the mountain ?
Is there something written or demonstrated that one is right & the other wrong, or are they much the same, or what do we suppose ?
http://nowscape.com/mormon/moses-news.htm
First, I want to say that I appreciate that all of this has been said w mutual respect.
Second, I wholly agree w Jan's point abt how utterly "local" Judaism and other religions here appear to be.
Third, and just as a point of information: traditional Judaism holds that, unlike Jos. Smith's experience, while Moses is said, (in the Hebrew) to be the only human ever to see God "panim il panim", or "face-to-face", the tradition also says that once Moses came doen Mount Horev with The Law, the entire group of escapees from Egypt, some 600,000 (they say) saw what in Hebrew is called "Shechina", or the spirit of God (a poor translation by me, here), along with enormous sky-based phenomena emanating from the mountain. So trad. Judaism claims that multitudes say the delivery, at least, of The Law. The tablets, of course, had the Ten, the Ten ruled that serve as categories for the complete 613 'mizvot", or Musts/Commands.
In any case, while I have no problem relegating all this to myth, I also appreciate the Jewish texts as wisdom texts and as a key to understanding the ancient Hebrew Mind.
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But how much of the information can you rely on given that the purpose of the Church’s mission regarding genealogy is to verify a man’s right to the priesthood?
When we look back on history, over very long periods of time, we rarely have access to the stories, opinion, and personal tragedies of the ones who lost. It is said, and not without relevance, that the winners write the history.
Who is most likely to “win” in this matter? The Mormons, who make genealogy “fun” and teach everyone how they can find out they were related to Egyptian priests, and Indian princesses? Or the Jewish people, who do not, publically, encourage the openness and value of genealogy records? Yes, they cry foul when things are done that are wrong, but if the practice is not STOPPED, permanently, and emphatically. Then all of their protests will fall on deaf ears, and be forgotten.
In three hundred years, I predict, not only will there be official records showing that millions of “Mormons” were killed in the Holocaust, but it is conceivable that the history of the Mormon movement itself will become blurred, after all the records will show all of these “Mormons” (you know looking at the genealogical records) who lived hundreds of years before Joseph Smith ever lived, and who will question the authenticity of those records? It says it right in the six lines of information in the data base that Wolfgang Shultz, who lived in 1677, was baptized as a Mormon (speaking hypothetically of course).
And why?
Because what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints needs more than anything is validation. The Mormon movement has been under fire from its beginnings to erase the circumstances of its origin. The history of the Mormon movement is controversial, at best. It has been challenged, and called a cult, and rallies against these accusations under a banner of conviction and faith, but it is not nearly as strong, say, as the Catholic “Law of Contradiction”, but it wants, no, needs to be that strong, and there is no better way to establish authority and validity, than to have mountains of evidence that faith in the Mormon doctrine goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and mountains of evidence that that faith was persecuted.
Today there are a number of people who challenge the truths of the Holocaust. In three hundred years, without sufficient diligence and determination, that challenge will grow, and the work of the Mormons, today, undermines the defense of the truth, and only adds strength to the challenge.
It must not only be stopped, but all LDS records must be made public, and scrubbed of every entry of a person being baptized into that organization without their knowledge and consent, and believe me it is far greater than just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust who have been included in their rolls.
Thank you. There's a task I'm committed to completing before I post again, which kept me from posting from early December to early January, at which point an event occurred which will be the subject of my next post. At that point, the cause for my subsequent absence will be obvious. I'm not fully active yet but I have commented on some friends' blogs lately.
Jan,
My answer to you will be a rather messy one because your comments about religion in general fit Judaism to a slightly more limited extent than it might look at first glance. I'll elaborate:
No one is asking you to believe the Bible per se from a Jewish standpoint. To expect you to have faith would be ridiculous. I understand your tendency to evangelize for atheism (a deliberately flippant way of putting it but there's more than a kernel of truth here) because, as far as you're concerned, you're evangelizing for rationality. No problem. However, understand that any evangelism here is strictly a one-way street - I have no desire or inclination to recruit you.
Your biggest objection to Judaism, and to religion in general, seems to be about the irrationality of faith. The trouble is that faith is not at the center of Judaism - conduct is. Faith is at the center of Christianity and Islam but not Judaism so I will object to our being painted with the same brush. The most faith-based of us, the Chasidim, have a saying: It is better to be a good person and an atheist than a bad person and a Jew. An analogous statement would be impossible in most if not all of Christianity.
The real point behind Judaism, and many Jews might disagree with me on this but it's true anyway, isn't even the Torah; it's the rabbinic lens through which Torah is analyzed and viewed. Not that I think it's always been 100% successful, particularly by modern standards, but there has been thousands of years of effort to interpret Torah as humanely and justly as possible. As I've pointed out elsewhere: a scriptural prohibition of Sabbath violation to the point where it's a capital offense becomes an obligation to violate the Sabbath in order to save a life. A commandment to fast during Yom Kippur is interpreted as off-limits if you're sick. A list of capital crimes weren't treated as capital crimes even in late Biblical times because execution was reserved for really extreme, airtight cases that came along perhaps once in half a century. Then there's the phenomenon of Midrash: the making up of theoretical scenarios in order to figure out how a particular law could be interpreted as just because a lack of justice couldn't be left on the table, even in Torah, the assumption being that if we found something unjust, we were missing something.
There are really two important factors here: 1. a strong emphasis on serious, honest, qualified analysis and in educating a population to be capable of such analysis, and 2. putting that which is just and humane before everything else.
Yes, there are some people who would really worry about a question such as "Was Eve Jewish?" but most of us wouldn't and, if we did, it would be as part of the process we go through to sharpen our skills, not because we think that this particular question qualifies as particularly important. Was Eve real? A lot of Orthodox might say "sure" but only to answer the question; a lot of the rest of us would either say "no" or, to be more honest about it, "that's not a critical question." What's important to us, particularly that far back, is not what happened but what moral lessons we can derive from studying it. That is, ultimately, also true of the Orthodox.
That lens has rational value. Practicing its use has led to what I think is the oldest and most successful producer of committed humanists the world has ever seen. The production of committed humanists is a rational goal, even to an atheist, and adhering to a method that has extremely long-term success is an extremely rational act.
Preserving such a method is also a rational act. And that's where we get into the muddiness that is Zionism. (Man, I know this is a Comment, but wouldn't it make a great post? That's how a lot of them start.) We tried to preserve it for two thousand years without a homeland but that preservation was constantly a moving target. Now we have a homeland and it's STILL a moving target! Who knew? A third of us get killed for reasons that were fabricated, we finish founding a state in the aftermath, another population tries to get rid of the state only to conclude (mostly) that the state would be acceptable if it returned to boundaries we used to have before that same population raised hostilities to the point where war broke out, and now we're dealing with a country whose leaders talk about ridding the world of us and denies the Holocaust (contrary to ridiculously extensive Nazi records, some of which were just released) while developing nukes. A lot of which results in the election of leadership which is far more concerned with preserving the Method than in maintaining its moral integrity.
Preserving the Method remains a rational act. Argue against religion all you want but no more straw dogs.
Lezlie
Your interest in and thoughts about my objections are a compliment to me but I find them a bit out of synch with my experience. I remember many years ago when I lived on 18th street near McDonald avenue in Brooklyn and I was approached by a teenaged girl on the street with an envelope on the Jewish Sabbath. She asked me to open the envelope so she could read the letter. I asked her why she couldn't open it herself and she reacted angrily as if I was mocking her. Apparently reading the letter, requesting someone else to open it, even walking down the street were not forbidden. I opened the letter for her but could not but mentally conclude that religion had driven her insane. Insanity such as this pervades all religions and people are wasting badly needed time and money and energy and are plagued by unnecessary fears and unjustified expectations by this total nonsense. I have read statements by orthodox rabbis in Israel declaring all non-Jews fit only to serve as menials and perhaps slaves to Jews who were given the world and perhaps the universe on a silver platter as the will of their particular almighty. I cannot accept this as being anything but extreme megalomania and a frightful danger to the entire world considering Israel's atomic arsenal. As decent as some of the basic strictures of many religions might be the accompanying irrationalities involving grotesque ceremonies of little if any basic value and the accompanying demands of exclusivity that demeans anybody not of their particular faith horrifies me at a time when the entire planet is in great danger of transforming its ecology to one inimical to life as we know it. If there were a real ethical base to all religions this frightful danger should leave religious leaders howling in demands to set the world back on a sensible path but they remain almost totally silent and fiercely object only when their idiotic dogmas are challenged. The Jewish religion is no exception.
My comments in the latter part of this thread have been by way of explanation and not of justification.
I have no interest in what anyone else thinks abt Judaism except when those thoughts might tend toward my or my family's harm.
That there are lidicrous claims/practices in every religion I thought was a proposition on whuch we'd, most of us, long ago agreed.
There was nothing personal in my comment, merely an observation that Judaism was not an exception.
Judaism as a whole may not be an exception but Reform Judaism is, and that's the biggest American branch.
Orthodoxy is variable. It has gotten somewhat crazier in the last couple of decades. Also, the dynamic in Israel is very different from the way it is in the US because, in Israel, there is a dichotomy between Orthodox Judaism and secular Judaism with very little in between. There is a small and growing Reform movement there but it is as yet pretty insignificant. In the US, on the other hand, the Reform and Conservative movements are major, and there is also something called Modern Orthodox, which entails literal obedience without letting tradition stand in for law.
Fundamentalism is dangerous anywhere. Where I find the distinction is actually easy to define: When the balance between the twin religious priorities of vigilance and compassion tilts toward vigilance, expect trouble, regardless of the religious setting. In that sense I would say that my problem with the ultra-Orthodox in Judaism is not that they are too Jewish but that they are not Jewish enough - as far as I can see, they got so obsessed with the details that they got the basic balance wrong.
From personal experience I can also tell you that certain rituals, like mourning rituals for example, help psychologically with the process.
I have chosen to assemble my own set of viable, compassionate, and hopefully, workable attitudes to deal with my problems. I have rejected the bulk of meaningless traditions and amusing imaginative myths from my reality and have tried to face the implacable cruelties and unexpected random destructiveness normal to all passages through merely being alive and try to treat all creatures, human and otherwise as equals in this strange struggle. I have lived a pretty long life and misery and death is no stranger although I have had exceptional luck in the matter considering what I have seen in other venues. You either learn to accept it and continue or succumb. There is no other choice. There is much delight in merely having the experience.