I said:
I think it's fair to say our Jewish members have gone through a rough time on the boards of late: not least the round condemnation of Israel's invasion of Gaza, but also the resulting erroneous association of Israel=Judaism; plus we've had the resurgence of a Neo Nazi on the forums; and now someone who has had a whole string of aliases banned has returned and started out in such a way that more recent Jewish members think he could be a Neo Nazi as well. IO has even been accused a few times over the past week of having a Jewish bias. If I were Jewish, I'd probably feel twitchy.
the fact is, it isn't just the boards, it's also the other blogs and discussions i'm involved in, the MSM (mainstream media) and general discourse. i've never seen it so bad. i don't remember attacks on chabad houses and chaplains getting tortured to death. i don't remember when synagogues in north london were getting firebombed and people who dress traditionally getting attacked in the street. i don't remember people i thought i knew turning on me and getting vicious - and i'm not even a right-winger! as a parent, i'm also pretty damn aware when the security budget for my child's school gets upped by 50% because we need a full-time guard and the government and police say they can't afford to protect us. compared to that, an increased level of nastiness on web forums is merely the static, not the signal. if people think i am being paranoid or confrontational, perhaps they aren't appreciating what is going on in real life. in such a situation, you yourselves might get a little short being less inclined to put up with people indulging themselves with a little light virtual jew-bashing. one might even think that i could be forgiven for failing to be inclined to spend my time separating out the self-righteous tossers from the truly nasty racists - obviously i'd far rather speak to the former than the latter, wouldn't i?
And the Judaism board has, so far, been a jewel in terms of faith dialogue, with some great discussions between BB and Dauer on intra-Jewish issues, plus some great additional feedback from interested persons such as Bob X (see the recent Base 7 counting thread - brief, but extremely interesting). It's exactly the sort of thing that underlines the forums best founding intentions.
thanks, brian. dauer, bob (and avi) and i disagree fundamentally on many issues, but we always try and keep it civil.
blanket assertions that Judaism is all wrong
yes - far better to ask "what does X mean?" or "what is Y about?" than put it in terms of "isn't it true that X?" or "why is it that Y?" - we can all spot a rhetorical question or one expecting a predictable answer; what's the point?
nativeastral said:
if by disrespect you mean questioning held fast beliefs then surely ones faith is not strong enough to withstand such scratching or 'subversion'; interfaith dialogue means just that and doubt is the other side of certainty so you cannot have one without a little bit of the other.
look, you can question fast held beliefs without going "only an idiot/bigot/child molester/murderer would think anything other than X" or assert that an entire system is set up to serve the nefarious purposes of the aforementioned IBCMMs. as carl sagan would put it, extraordinary assertions demand extraordinary proof. and when you've been dialoguing as long as i have, you can recognise someone that is only looking for either violent agreement or violent conflict, that "my way or the highway" tone. accusations of the same against a class of people is simply a debating tactic seeking to preclude by pre-emption.
cant comment, cant study here when we are gagged because of personal insults?
what nonsense. are you seriously suggesting that you are unable to discuss the above without falling foul of paranoia? that is ridiculous.
holysmoke said:
Show proof of hatred of Jews in anything I've posted.
would you prefer "presumption of guilt"?
You do not seem to know the difference between dislike of theologies or ideologies and hatred of people.
you do not seem to know the difference between general dislike and specific disagreement. you've not yet provided a specific example, preferring instead to beg the question by positing a "jewish paranoia of gentiles" backed up by your own specific experience as if it proved a rule and then going on to base thinking on it as if it had been proved rather than asserted.
your religion's territorial enterprise
there you go again. you talk as if judaism is monolithic, as if i had signed a pledge somewhere to defend the views, policies and actions of everyone from avigdor leiberman to noam federman or moshe feiglin by the fact of sharing a religion with them. you seek to hold me responsible for their actions and, truth to tell, they are obviously capable of embarrassing me, but unfortunately i don't run a "jewish inquisition" with a brief to anathematise jews whose views, policies and actions i strongly disapprove of. my common ground with them is assumed, not asked as an open question. you speak as if i was accountable to you for the actions of the israeli government, for the actions of people many of whom would consider me as not only a dangerous liberal, but tantamount to a traitor. all i can say is this: these people do not own judaism, but then again, neither do i. all i can do is to fight my corner and fight for a judaism that i am rightly proud of.
I know all about ben Pantera being much earlier than Jesus Christ of the Gospels. It's additional evidence that Yeishu ben Pantera and Jesus Christ are linked because the time differential gives time for oral legends of Yeishu to expand and magnify with supernatural mythology as well as give time to explain how Christians were in Rome so very early on and how Paul supposedly starting his ministry only a few years after Jesus' death met established Christian church communities in his travels.
christians were in rome so very early on because many of them had previously been jews, albeit probably first or second-generation converts; it was, i think many of these "soft" converts that allowed christianity to take hold so fast as they were already as it were more or less there, but struggling with the stringency of the prohibitions, so when paul wanted to relax the religious requirements, he was, as it were, going with the market. remember, at this time, christianity and judaism were not separate and, indeed, judaism was not awfully unified. on this site:
The Jesus Narrative In The Talmud is an excellent exposition of why jesus and "yeshu ha-notzri" were not the same people and "ben pantera" and "ben stada" were two different people as well. it's pretty convincing as far as i can see.
Of course Jesus Christ wasn't a prophet to Jews. How could a mythical man be such?
who's saying he was mythical? i certainly believe he was a real person. i just don't believe he did the things that were written about him centuries later by his adherents, nor, i am sure, did even those actions qualify him for prophethood, let alone messiahship.
Especially one who opposed the rabbinical route and opposed anyone claiming themselves teachers (rabbis or more correctly, masters)?
well, correct me if i'm wrong, but i thought his disciples called him "rabbi"? i've certainly heard that a lot - particularly from so-called "messianic jews", or "christians" as they should actually be known.
But I'm not mythical and the message I bring is universal which means it applies to Jews as much as anyone else who's prior religious beliefs are no longer appropriate for today and tomorrow's world.
hehe. for you to make such an association you'd have to prove that my religious beliefs are "no longer appropriate". go on, then, clever-pants. what's wrong with my keeping Shabbat?
I get so sick and tired of people slinging mud at me with accusations of craziness because I dare criticize Judaism's foibles.
that's not why people think you're crazy. they think you're crazy because you think you're a prophet. the fact that you have daft ideas about judaism is simply pathological for most of the false messiahs we've had to cope with over the centuries.
Bandit said:
Jesus was a jewish heretic and any jews who follow jesus are jewish heretics.
strictly speaking, they are apostates. heresy is kind of a technicality, seeing as we don't have any agreed standard for systematic theology.
Shabbetai was declared a jewish heretic by jews.
no, he was put in "herem", which means, more or less, excommunicated, which meant that he was no longer eligible to participate in communal activities since he had excluded himself from the community by converting to islam.
Take the last two jews of kabul for example.
yes, that is rather sad, i believe there's only one left now and he does his best to argue with himself.
Then there is this whole nation/mother/tribe/father thing going on and even modern jews still have little tolerance toward other religons or the other people when a child marries outside of the jewish religion or changes religion. Talk about a bias!
on what basis can you claim that i have little tolerance towards other religions? and, yes, of course intermarriage and assimilation have been tragic for us, but surely that is our own fault for not making judaism an attractive enough option when it became an option?
You should look at the codes and legal matters in jewish courts conerning their own heretics.
go on then, let's see a concrete example rather than a generalised slur.
nativeastral said:
“Non-Jewish property belongs to the Jew who uses it first” - (Babba Bathra 54b)
this needs its own thread. i'll start one. however, this is a good place to start:
Theft From Gentiles
It cannot be denied that all wars etc over history etc have involved 'property grabbing' surely?!
well, this is one of the classic ways that jew-haters try and "prove" that we have a "religious duty" to "steal" things that belong to non-jews, which is how they try and turn the israel-palestine thing into a religious conflict, which it really isn't and hopefully won't be.
Avi1223 said:
Actually, I would be interested to learn BB's views on this issue as well ??
britain made a lot of contradictory promises to a lot of contradictory people. as a brit, i feel that much can be laid at the feet of the "empire" due to their habit of drawing a line down the middle, buggering off and leaving the local factions to fight it out, from where we get the intractable conflicts in israel/palestine, cyprus, india/pakistan and ireland. it was a combination of arrogance, realpolitik and incompetence.
b'shalom
bananabrain
