Posted on 04/19/2007 7:14:23 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
While the Jewish community is energetic about replying to perceived slurs against Jews or the State of Israel, we are remarkably passive when it comes to answering insults against our religion or our God.
For example, best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins mocks the God of the Hebrew Bible as “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Dawkins’s book, “The God Delusion,” is devoted to excoriating Judaism no less than Christianity. An Oxford University biologist and celebrity evolutionist, Dawkins has now been on The New York Times best-seller list for 28 weeks.
Another aggressively atheist author, Sam Harris, joined Dawkins at the top of Publishers Weekly’s list of “religion best-sellers” last month with his crudely effective polemic “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Despite the title, the crudest caricature he draws is of the Hebrew Bible.
The title of another atheist tract, written by journalist Christopher Hitchens and due out next month, gives you a sense of what view the author will take of the God of Israel: “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” As the entertainingly acidic Hitchens writes, “monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.”
Interestingly, Harris and Hitchens are both Jewish by birth. But Jews are accustomed to confronting other Jews about their objectionable views.
In calling for confrontation, I most certainly do not have in mind demands for retractions or apologies. Instead, consider the popular Christian tradition of “apologetics.”
The term doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. To be an “apologist” means to defend your faith before a general public in a sophisticated literary mode. C.S. Lewis, an Oxford scholar and author of “Mere Christianity,” is perhaps the most beloved modern Christian apologist.
Today, Jews do nothing remotely like that. We once did, however, with gusto. Maimonides’s “The Guide for the Perplexed” is a classic apologetic book, championing Torah against doubts raised by then-modern skeptics.
In fact, the Mishnah makes it every Jew’s obligation to be an effective apologist, an obligation that most of us ignore nowadays: “Know how to answer an unbeliever” (Pirke Avot 2:14) — with the word for unbeliever being apikorus, a follower of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher.
Epicurus is known as a primary exponent of materialism, the belief that material reality is all there is in the universe. And materialism happens to be one of the most serious challenges that religion is up against today.
There are other challenges, like the idea, taught in many university religion departments around the country, that the Torah is in effect a literary fraud. According to more than a few secular scholars, the Five Books of Moses weren’t authored by Moses, as the Torah claims, but rather were stitched together centuries later from works by other writers.
Richard Elliott Friedman’s book “Who Wrote the Bible?” gives a popular-level rendition of this theory. No one in academia that I’m aware of has been bold enough to directly call the Torah a fraud. But surely if we were talking about any nonsacred book, that is what the conclusions of modern biblical criticism would add up to.
The same academic viewpoint designates the Zohar, the Bible of Jewish mysticism, as a cynical medieval hoax masquerading as the more ancient work it purports to be.
That the Zohar was authored not in the second century by Shimon bar Yochai but instead in the 13th by Moses de Leon — who allegedly thought no one would buy his work if it appeared under his own name — is the accepted secular scholarly view and is approved by authorities in the field, such as Gershom Scholem and Isaiah Tishby. If you’ve got a kid in college, just check his Judaic studies syllabi; no class on Kabbalah would be complete without Scholem.
We hardly even consider that these opinions present our faith as nothing better than, to quote Hitchens, “a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.”
Traditional Jews may see the problem, but they do virtually nothing to address it. The Orthodox community, to which I belong, invests generous resources in Torah for consumption by other Orthodox Jews. That’s wonderful. But we don’t see the need when it comes to defending Judaism’s honor before the world — as the future King David did in facing down Goliath, who had “disgraced the battalions of the living God” (I Samuel 17:36).
In the case of David, the other Jews were too timid to face down the blaspheming giant. But at least the young hero had the sponsorship of the king, Saul, and thus the blessing of his fellow citizens. We have no David and no Saul.
Liberal Jews may not initially see the problem. Judaism’s assailants aren’t born-again Christians, after all, and the Jewish community has been conditioned by an irrational prejudice that the primary domestic threat worth worrying about is from born-again Christians.
But the children of liberal and traditional Jews alike will grow up in a world where God is routinely dismissed in academic and media venues as a fiction and a fraud, and where these charges go unanswered in the wider public by any Jew.
We thus teach our children, implicitly, that their religion is either indefensible or not worth defending. For anyone concerned about the future of the Jews, that is an utter disaster.
David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is the author of the forthcoming “Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril” (Doubleday).
Thank you David Klinghoffer!!!
Everyone take several steps away from Mr. Dawkins...
Actually, it's very fortunate for Mr. Dawkins that God is not as Dawkins describes.
Ping.
Ping.
He makes an interesting point about the Zohar. As far as I can tell, the argument against the traditional dating of the Zohar seems to be predicated on three arguments:
(1) No copies of the Zohar appear to have existed before the 1200s.
(2) The Zohar's Aramaic contains certain loan words and constructions that appear to be imported from Romance languages - like the Castilian of Moises de Leon.
(3) The narrative framework of the Zohar is that of a rabbi and his companions journeying to Jerusalem - it has some similarities to the narrative structure of the Gospels, which were popular texts in Moses de Leon's day.
Of course, the earliest copy of the Tanakh we have dates to 1009, but even the most liberal historicocritical analysis agrees it was written at least 1400 years before then.
And, of course, Shimon bar Yochai lived in a Judaea where many people spoke Latin - which would explain loanwords of a Romance nature just as easily.
And, of course, even if the narrative framework of the Zohar was cribbed from the Gospel (the parallels are really very vague, though) Shimon Bar Yochai lived well after the destruction of the Temple.
It's the same shoddy scholarship that's applied to the Scriptures.
Excellent observation. This is a very well-done article.
It’s also amusing that Dawkins, who imagines himself to be the most brilliant mind ever to grace the world, doesn’t understand what the word “jealous” means.
You are a true polymath, wideawake!
Now, now! Charles Darwin is the most brilliant and indeed greatest human being who has ever lived or ever shall live, for he was ordained and chosen by the self-created universe to give morality a rational basis! [/sarcasm]
I would add that when Daniel lived in the Babylonian captivity Greek-speaking Ionians were a well-known presence in the Empire, and had been known in the region for centuries.
The Ionians were known as Yavan in the Torah and were known as Yawani in the Indian Mahabharata - and historical-critical "scholars" more or less unanimously agree that the Mahabharata was written (1) at the same time as the Biblical Daniel lived and (2) a thousand miles further away from Ionia than where Daniel lived.
““Letter to a Christian Nation.” Despite the title, the crudest caricature he draws is of the Hebrew Bible.”
Maybe because the OT portrays God in a less than favorable light. Every atheist and pagan I’ve discussed religion with always, without exception, takes issues with the way God behaves in the OT. Sure they nitpick certain NT passages here and there, but the overwhelmingly bloodthirsty picture of God in the OT makes an effective apology extremely difficult. If you know of any websites or books that present a good apology, not written by Christians (since they can fall back on Jesus), please PM me.
Believe me, you're "preacing to the choir," brother! I've always been by turns frustrated and enraged at the way "philo-Semitic" liberals treat the Jewish Bible while all the time proclaiming disdain for chr*stianity and their great "love" of the Jewish people!
Unless the Jews themselves begin to engage in apologetics (the topic of Klingoffer's article) then I'm afraid there's very little we non-Jews can do, and G-d will remain "the big goy in the sky."
BTW, I've always maintained that J*sus is just an excuse for Jewish liberals to malign Fundamentalist chr*stians; the real reasons Jewish liberals hate these people so much is that the latter, through their familiarity with the TaNa"KH (Hebrew Bible) know that Judaism is not identical with urban, cosmopolitan hyperliberalism. Of course, these same "anti-chr*stian" liberal Jews then demand legislation that sounds like it came right out of the "sermon on the mount!"
I'm a Noachide and not a Jew, but you might find my web site of some interest.
Keep reminding these liberal "lovers of the Jews" that the "old testament" is JEWISH!!! PS: You have no idea how tired I get of evolutionists battling "chr*stianity" by tearing Sefer Bere'shit (Genesis) to shreds!
So, are you Holy Apostolic Catholic Church of the East or Ancient Church of the East?
How do prospects for an independent Assyria look at this time?
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]
----------------------------
Wow . . . a megaping! Thanks!
Thanks.
Thanks Z.C. Nice to make your acquaintance too :)
I’ll try to answer your questions without boring you to tears :)
1) Being Assyrian I was born into the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church of the East. But like I say in my bio, I have Marcionist tendencies because my grandmother was a Marcionist. I’m not a libertarian I just link to Vox Day’s blog cause he has a good habit of annoying atheists.
2) I don’t know who wideawake is.
3) Independent Assyria? LOL not happenin’ anytime soon.
Wow, I notice he left out a mother-raping cannibal.
Actually, this tells anyone far more about Dawkins than anything else. He hates God of the Bible for whatever personal reasons, and ignores all the beauty and wisdom of it. He's got a problem, and he's on a mission. God help him....
The amusing thing about that is that the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures was a being of incredible mercy, kindness and forbearance - even more so when compared to the false deities of other peoples who neighbored the ancient Israelites.
I guess it's a typical trait of human nature that when God shows mercy, even when He has absolutely no need to show mercy for any reason, He is criticized for ever exacting justice at all.
Like children who expect to be rewarded by their parents even when they are misbehaving.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, if one reads with attention, one sees that God is a marvel of lovingkindness.
Amen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.