My ongoing journey through the Torah

Scientology = Crackpot Cult

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6650545.stm
Row over Scientology video
By John Sweeney
BBC News

Forwarded from Nicolaw.

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Boy tells Catholic mom that he is an atheist

Boy tells Catholic mom that he is an atheist.  hmmm… has anyone else ran into family members that are very vocal about your religious beliefs?   When I converted to Judaism, I only had support from everyone around me.  I must have won the lottery

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Why did I switch religions?

Every once in a while I’m asked why I switched from Christianity to Judaism.  Far too many people think I switched simply because my wife and my in-laws are Jews.  It is very simple to explain:  I was already one but didn’t know it

Let me explain before anyone gets uppity the definition of being Jewish….

When I was a young child, I believed everything everyone told me.  My brother, Michael, once convinced me that he was an alien with super-human powers and I really believed him!  This was a time when I thought darn! was a mighty swear word.  The “F”-word nobody used around my mom else risking a washing of the mouth with soap (she never actually washed out our mouths with soap but the threat of it kept our mouths relatively clean).  My sister, Pauline, was a natural extension of me - I pointed and she got things for me…  like a proper younger simbling should… right?

Getting off track here a bit.  The point is that I was so very gullible and I didn’t stop to ask questions.  When I did start asking questions that , I was usually shot down as just plain wrong to ask questions.  Doubting the teachings of the Christian (insert favorite denomination) Church was wrong.  Even with family friends it was a very touchy subject and it seemed to me, at the time, that the individuals that I was asking the questions to just weren’t that knowledgeable about such things.  It turned me off of religion for a long time but I did continue researching religions.

From the quasi-new age Wicca (about 125 years old) to Hinduism to Odin (the Father of Gods in Norse Mythology), I couldn’t find anything that said this is the one.  The idea of classical Buddhism is appealing, where Buddha is an enlightened human teacher that leads by example, it starts to fall apart as many other religions as we start tacking on “I’m a better (whatever) than (that other person) because I do (this) too to show my piousness”.  That and we tend to raise teachers up on high and eventually make them gods.  Don’t believe me?  Take for example, Jesus.

According to the Gospels, Jesus was a carpenter, a learned teacher (Rabbi), the Son of God, and God incarnate.  I can believe the first three quite easily:

1. Carpenter:  A quite common profession that Jews at that time were adept at.  It wouldn’t be unreasonable that Jesus was a carpenter.  It probably wouldn’t make any difference if was a privy raker but being a carpenter is more glamorous.
2. A learned teacher (Rabbi):  Since the beginnings of Judaism, we Jews have always encouraged people to learn and debate everything including God.  The parables attributed to Jesus in the Christian Bible tend to support that he was a highly intelligent person with a gift for public speaking.  Whether he was literate and able to write is up for debate because according to everything I’ve read, Jesus didn’t actually write anything for the rest of humanity (perhaps because literacy was very rare even among the Roman nobles?).  He depended on his disciples to carry his messages to the populace in the Mediterranean.  Primarily in the Roman Empire.
3. Son of God:  In so much as each and everyone of us are Sons and Daughters of God.  It wasn’t uncommon for Jews back then, or even now, to have sex prior to marriage.  Unlike in Christianity, sex is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed of.  Having sex prior to the marriage was considered part of a compatibility test for those people that are considering the possibility of marriage.  Getting pregnant was a very real possibility and not that much of a problem.  THERE ARE NO BASTARD JEWS.  Why?  A child is a good thing and a blessing.  It is quite likely that Mary (Mariam) became pregnant in one such encounter.  Whether it was immaculate conception or a wild time in the hay, shouldn’t make any difference.  It is the message that Jesus, on behalf of God, gave to the world that matters… right?

The last one where Jesus is God is a bit of a stretch.  I think this is where the early Church (first 4 hundred years) and the middle Church (dark ages) shows their ugly heads.

The early Church had very little to do with Judaism because most of the converts, actually almost all, had worshiped the Roman gods.  When the Roman Empire was rapidly declining, the Roman Emperor Constantine changed the state religion to Christianity (Constantine was not a Christian and never actually converted himself) due to a power shift from the Roman Priests to the priests of the new cult of Christianity.  Most of the Roman festivals and rituals were transformed, slightly, and adopted by the early Christians.  Very little was different for the common man - nothing really changes accept the name of the god you worship.

When the Middle Church came to power, it was about power.  The western Roman Empire had fallen (the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire then eventually to the Ottoman Empire) with no real stable government on the horizon.  The Middle Church largely took over the role of the Roman Empire… bind and subjugate neighboring lands under the guise of religion.  They learned from the fall of the empire that it was necessary to keep a strict hierarchy within their ranks and to keep the populace ignorant.  It is a whole lot easier to control your empire that way - at least for the short term.

When I met my wife and had my first seder at her parents’ home, I took a serious look at Judaism.  What I read before was off.  In some cases, way off.  I suspect that the authors of the books that I read about Judaism may have been either deliberately misleading their readers or didn’t know jack about Judaism.  Probably a bit of both.

Judaism is a lot of things but primarily it has one focus:  Understand the world.  God is part of the world but to what extent he/she/it actually interacts with it is unknown.  You know what?  It is okay and even encouraged for people to ask questions.  Even those silly or blasphemous questions that I asked when I was young.

As my mother-in-law would say, “That’s way cool!“

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