I'll let vicomete13 expalin my religion to ya. Although he'd pitch a fit If I were to give you my slant on his.
"I'll let vicomete13 expalin my religion to ya. Although he'd pitch a fit If I were to give you my slant on his."
Wanna bet?
I would correct errors.
I never pitch fits about this stuff, because I am not emotionally invested in any academic subject.
Touch my kid, and I will kill you.
Let me try to give a good Jewish description of my religion.
First, there's the business of authority. Jesus repeated a lot of stuff that Hillel said, and tended towards the asceticism of the Essenes, but he lost his mind and started claiming divinity, which is blasphemy. The Torah prescribes the death penalty for blasphemy, and although today we understand that this should be carried out in only the most extreme situations (which essentially never happen), Jesus' blasphemy was that of an essentially good man who needed to be in therapy, not executed. But that was then. So, he was tried and condemned for blasphemy, but the Jews couldn't put anybody to death. The Romans did that, for their own political reasons. Jesus was a rabbi. He had some wisdom. Perhaps he was a prophet. But he went into an eclipsed orbit, lost his bearings, claimed authority that he did not have, claimed divinity, and with that, passed out of all serious consideration by Jews.
So much for Jesus.
As for the Catholic Church, well, Jews don't look at words, they look at deeds. What the Catholic Church, says it believes is all very good and nice, today, and today Jews can work with Catholics in a spirit of cooperation, to a point. But the Catholic Church itself has a long and bloody history of murdering Jews and oppressing them, spreading, reinforcing, and not intervening to stop the Blood Libel against Jewish people.
In recent years, since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has changed its historical policies 180 degrees and is trying to behave differently towards Jews. This is commendable. However, the Catholics can't change their Bible, which is full of the blood libels and half-truths against Judaism, and which remains a perpetual source of animus by Christians towards Jews.
Most Protestant sects just haven't been around long enough to have perpetrated the really murderous deeds against Jews that the Catholic Church has, so they are not as threatening.
Don't get me wrong, the Catholic Church has done some good things. Individual Catholics saved many Jews during the Shoah. But the Catholic Church itself, as an institution, is viewed with suspicion both because of the history, and because Catholics to this day insist on the infallibility of their Church, that the Church can commit no error. From the standpoint of a Jew, this is frankly an obscenity.
Of course, Jews believe in forgiveness, and believe that people can change, and the Catholic Church has tried to do better in recent years, and modern Catholics can be partners in social life and charity.
Still, the theological pretentions of Catholicism to infallibility are obviously as vaporous as the original claim to divinity by Jesus. Jesus wasn't divine, and the Catholic Church has obviously failed. Just the tortures and murders of Jews by the Spanish Inquisition alone are sufficient to reveal that Catholicism is anything but morally infallible.
There's no point in getting into theology, as Christianity is built on a fairy tale about Jesus of Nazareth.
There.
How's that?
Anything you'd add or subtract?
Do feel free to give your slant on my religion.
I just don't take offense at this sort of thing.
God made me a man, in his image, which means that I am capable of reasoning. If God doesn't want me to follow reason wherever it goes, then He shouldn't have made me like this. If He doesn't like what I have done with the gifts He gave me, I am sure I will hear about it in the hereafter. But for now, I intend to use my ears and eyes and reason, and there is nothing anybody can say about my religion or anything else that will turn me into a cringing or screaming ball of nerves.
The exception is menacing my child.
I will kill anybody who threatens my child's safety or life.