Heathen Dawn

You are a Jew if you were born to a Jewish mother. No dispute on that. And nothing you do in your life can take you away from being a Jew.

Neither do I, but I at least don't worship a man in whose name our forefathers were constantly butchered (I do mean Jesus).

mbsoccer31

I don't know if this is the cause of the lack of posts from Jews, but I do know that Jews make up one of the most secular groups of people in the world. I read a statistic (though I'm not sure how true it is) that about 70% of people in Israel are atheist, agnostic, etc.

Heathen Dawn

Yep, the statistic is (still) true. And I'm one of them.

mbsoccer31

Heathen Dawn, why do you think that is? Why is such a large percentage of the world's Jewish community secular?

Heathen Dawn

There are two main reasons: intellectualism and the Holocaust.

Judaism, in all its strains, values intellectualism and erudition. Accordingly, Jews were eager to go with the Enlightenment flow. The movement of Hokhmat Yisrael (Wisdom of Israel), a movement of Biblical and theological criticism organised by Jews, caught many Jews in its wake in the 19th and 20th centuries. Zionism arose as a secular, nationalistic replacement for religion and sucked in a great many Jews also (including my grandparents, who left Europe and religion for a new secular life in British Palestine). It was mainly the mystical Jews, the Hasidim, who don't stress intellectualism, that remained religious. They lived primarily in Eastern Europe.

Now the Holocaust had two effects: first, the religious core of Eastern Europe was totally destroyed, so that the only Jews remaining were the secularised Jews in America and Western Europe. Secondly, the Holocaust opened a gaping theological hole that led many Jews further into secularism.

Jews are a much too intellectual, questioning people overall to retreat into blind fundamentalism. Yes, there are Ultra-Orthodox Jews who do just that, and I was one of them for two years, but they are decidedly a minority.

Howard

Also… Judaism doesn’t promise eternal salvation, so if you stop believing you don’t lose anything. That’s probably why you find so few secular Christians and Muslims. Salvation based on belief (at least partly) is a foundational concept of those theologies. It’s not so with Judaism.

//riot of disorder::

I'm a secular Jew. I usually go to synagouge with my family during High Holy days, and I am getting my barmitzvah in a year. I consider myself agnostic, but I still keep Jewish traditions.

Cipher Girl

Hi Magus

I'm confused. You said
But in another thread you referred to yourself as
Do you mean that you are culturally jewish but converted to christianity?

Heathen Dawn

Magus is (probably; I don't know for sure) a Jew by birth, like me, but he practices Christianity. In the eyes of Orthodox and most other Jews, he is still a Jew, but he is called a meshummad - literally, a "destroyed" Jew, as Jews who embrace a different religion are called. Such meshummadim are readily received back into the fold if they leave the foreign religion, and throughout all their lives are still considered Jews, but Jewish law instructs observant Jews not to associate with them in any way.

I'm not called a meshummad, because I haven't embraced a foreign religion, I lack religion altogether. Orthodox Jews still wouldn't want to have much to do with me, but they consider my type less of a fallen Jew than Magus is.

So I consider Magus a fellow Jew, but like most Jews, I regard him, and all other Jews who have embraced Christianity, a great loss for the Jewish nation.