It has been prophesied that all of the religious churches will become apostate and that there will be a world government and a world church as the final judgment nears - looks like the Bible is going to prove itself right even as those who pooh-pooh it help fulfill it...
Judaism has never been simple or clear; being Jewish today in Europe means many things, and with this magazine, we attempt to do justice to this vivid diversity. For example, in this issue we cover a controversy currently raging in Poland. Shoshana Ronen, an Israeli living in Poland for the past seven years, provoked strong reactions to her polemic against the return of Polish Jews to Orthodoxy, which was published in Poland's largest daily newspaper, "Gazia Wyborcza". Konstanty Gebert, editor-in-chief of the Polish-Jewish magazine "Midrasz", responds to Shoshana Ronen by pointing out what we can learn from Israeli intolerance. The fact that Ronen denies the Orthodox Jewish way of life any right to exist shows how wide the gap between secular and orthodox Jews has now become.
http://www.hagalil.com/golem/jewish-identity/editorial-e-99.htm<>
sichlut — foolishness
http://www.familybible.org/Glossary/S.htm
We believe you [i.e., God] are that thing than which nothing greater can be thought. (160)
This is Anselm's famous statement about God. It is either to be understood as a statement of God's essence, or as a statement about an essential property of God from which many other essential properties are to be deduced. The expression "can be thought" is not meant as in the psychological sense, but as a limitation on possibility: God is that for which it is impossible that there be a greater being in any respect.
But when the fool hears me use the phrase
"something than which nothing greater can be thought"
he understands what he hears ... .
So the fool has to agree that
the concept of something than which nothing greater can be thought
exists in his understanding (163, 173)
The word "fool" is not to be understood in its modern sense. Anselm means an atheist by this term. This usage derives from the Bible, in which the Hebrew word translated as "fool" denotes a morally deficient person, rather than someone who is stupid in the intellectual sense.
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology1.html
Einstein, as everyone knows, made everything relative.. . . and I relish it
Yet the conundrum works the other way, too. Did Freud expel enough followers to found all the world's religions? Perhaps he kept trying to preserve a fellowship of words and inquiry, when it was turning rapidly into a doctrine. The narrative of recognition, refusal, and self-acceptance has to be retold every day, or it becomes a lie. As a secular Jew, I can expect that retelling. In the shifting mirror or the eye of another, an identity is born.
http://www.haberarts.com/jew.htm
redmoonrising ... christian aside
sichlut (foolishness)
sikhliyut (rationality)
http://www.heartofisrael.org/languages/hebrew/glossary.htm
While the Western world has consisted of many Christian countries and consists today of many secular countries, only America has called itself Judeo-Christian. America is also unique in that it has always combined secular government with a society based on religious values.But what does "Judeo-Christian" mean?
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0304/prager_2004_03_30_04.php3
Nevertheless, I speak of a deep-set tendency to valorize—to use a favorite word of founding father Mircea Eliade—description over advocacy and object-level argument. But not everyone need be restricted to description and anti-advocacy prejudice. Thus there is irony—and a lesson to be learned—from the ethnocentrism of projecting such descriptivism on a political culture with a different history of relation with religion.The lesson is that the ‘‘religious’’ as marked off by American professionals need not be roped off from responsible and legitimate argument and that ‘‘religious’’ advocacy in politics is not everywhere eo ipso wrong.
There is just nothing similar to the writings of the Hebrew prophets of the Bible in Islamic literature, whether Qur'an, hadiths, or sirah (lives of Muhammad). These demonstrate a very close and affectionate relationship between Israel and its God, God the loving, often chastising parent who nevertheless mourned over His people and promised them redemption. There is nothing like Isaiah's, "When Israel was a child I loved him; out of Egypt I called my son," or "Come now, let us reason together," (which would suggest a level of closeness and intimacy with God that would never be permitted in Islam--Allah would never condescend to reason with His slaves). Instead Allah of the Qur'an simply literally blows away those who refuse His message and goes on to the next people.I've already gone on much too long, but I wish there was some way to get more of that intimacy into the Qur'an and less legalism and threats. I guess in this I am influenced by Christianity, but I don't think it's too much to ask for.
http://www.secularislam.net/archives/000046.html
"FOOL""1. one who is lacking in reason, or the common powers of understanding; an idiot; an imbecile. [Now Rare.] <--------why, then, is this #1, I wonder? :-)
2. a person with little or no judgment, common sense, wisdom, etc.; a silly person; a simpleton."