Jewish Atheist

“CLERGYMAN., n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.”

Ambrose Bierce

Every now and then I take a little walk on the wild side, listen to the ramblings of religious believers, and try to understand the world from the believer’s perspective – and assess the logic by which the religious psychosis/fantasy is held in place.

Case in point: the President’s message from the current newsletter of chabad.org, dedicated to fundamentalism. I’m delighted to be on their mailing list, and every so often the nuttiness is on florid display.

Here we go.

Every year on the 9th of Av (this year, starting at sunset this Monday [July 25, 2010] and lasting till nightfall Tuesday night), Jews fast, eschew pleasurable activities and amenities, and lament the destruction of the Holy Temple and our nation’s exile.
After nearly 2,000 years of mourning, might it not be time to get over it already?
But to “move on” is out of the question for a nation who thrice daily faces Jerusalem and prays to be returned there, a people who believe with every fiber of their being that the Holy Temple is not only part of their past, but also part of their future…
Instead, as the prophet Isaiah says, “For the sake of Zion, I will not be silent, and for the sake of Jerusalem I will not rest… And give Him no rest, until He establishes and until He makes Jerusalem a praise in the land.”
So when will we “get over it”?
That’s a question G-d has to answer. The ball’s in His court. May the answer be very soon in coming.
In the meantime let’s continue to do our part. Another mitzvah, another prayer, and then one more just for good measure…
P.S. For elaboration on this topic, see Why We Mourn. For the start time of the fast in your location click here, and here for the fast’s end time.

Once again the nature of religion’s grip on the believer is evident. The putative rational/skeptic straw man is well-articulated in modern slang — get over it – which contemporizes the “problem,” i.e., that our holy building isn’t in its holy place, and we have to fret about it, today and endlessly.

Can’t get over it

But we don’t get over it BECAUSE…the ancient book and events hold us totally in their power.

But what does the book actually say?

The phraseology from Isaiah is quite cryptic. If the writer had meant that “Jews must not rest until they re-establish their temple ON THIS VERY SPOT,” he/she could presumably have said so, instead of being so oblique. The Bible writers can be very precise when they choose to, e.g., the multitudinous tributes and goodies that God requires in Leviticus.

I make this commonsensical linguistic observation because, as is so often the case, the text doesn’t mean quite what the clerics say it means.

Ball’s in God’s court

As for how long we have to celebrate this national tragedy, again slang: it’s in God’s court, as if the relationship between humans and Imaginary friend is like a tennis match, an exchange in which each side hits the spiritual ball back and forth. Wrong. Humans pray, God doesn’t return the ball. Pretty one-sided.

BTW, that’s G-o-d, you superstitious cowards with your reverence-hyphen. The irrationality around God’s name is at its height among Jews, and the taboos are severe. Many of them move up one level rhetorically and say ha-shem, ‘the name’ instead of God.

When fundamentalists trumpet their faith like this — and use contemporary slang to make the ancient, irrelevant issue relevant – they give us an invaluable insight into their minds.

Prayer = good deeds

In those minds, ritual observance is perceived to be of the same intrinsic value as good deeds. This is the key to the disconnect between religion and morality.

One more good deed = one more prayer. To Jews, God is, among other things, an accountant.

This is how pious people in every faith, from Catholic child molesters to Mormon polygamists (love that teenage pussy), commit inhumane or criminal acts. Orthodox Jews also have their share of assholes with personality disorders, who break the law and cheat their fellow Jews.

Exiles?

Note also: Among Orthodox and other Jews, we find the very inflammatory use of the word exile. A great wrong has been committed, a people expelled from its native land.

What crap! All throughout history, people have migrated, whether by choice or force. With the Jews, it was both. They’ve made significant, stable lives for centuries, in dozens of countries. There’s no mass movement to get back to Israel. But promulgating the concept of “exile” means job security for rabbis. One more reason for religious activity, one more reason for Jews to feel special.

If I were really rich, I’d give each “exile” a one-way ticket to Israel. They’d be happy, and the rest of us wouldn’t have to hear about this awful “exile” (as I have for my entire life).

God will come through - NOT

Finally, there’s the passivity. Deliverance will come from beyond, as usual. God’s going to give us what we want, loving parent that he is, in his own good time.

This aspect of religion’s message is particularly poisonous, particularly to Jews. How many died in the Holocaust, in every pogrom and act of mayhem over the centuries, because rabbis kept telling Jews to leave it in God’s hands?

This aspect of religion also defies the humanist’s comprehension. It is based on stories, on prayer and passivity, on smoke and mirrors. Rabbi Wine used to say that after the Holocaust, the nicest thing you could say about God is that he doesn’t exist.