This historic case has inspired hundreds of other Israelis to get divorced from the Jewish religion. Israel is 15-37% atheist, so this comes as no surprise. The less religious people are in the middle east, the greater the chances are for an end the violence. If only more people of “Muslim” countries came out as atheists (or nonreligious), we could be closer that goal.

Kaniuk’s case has been celebrated as a victory for separation of state and religion in Israel. Actually, he may have fought the wrong battle. The court decision gives people more freedom to define themselves, but only according to predetermined categories. The division of Jewish ethnicity and religion is an embarrassingly simple bureaucratic distinction in place of the mixed up identities of real Jewish life—the kind of complications on which a novelist should thrive.

That said, the Kaniuk case has its benefits. It sheds light, for instance, on how Americans and Israelis misunderstand each other when they use the word Jew. And it helps show that the current Israeli government’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state is silly.

I’ve never liked the idea of a “Jewish state” because I don’t like the idea of any religion having it’s own state.

Israel doesn’t need a Palestinian stamp of approval to be a Jewish state. Nor does it need the registration system that Kaniuk used to voice his anger. It needs only a majority that considers itself Jewish in one not-quite-consistent way or another and that has the freedom to conduct a roiling, constant argument about Jewish culture. If Kaniuk’s suit reminds the rest of the tribe of how messy the issue of Jewish identity is, how unsuited it is for sharp delineations, he will have performed a service. [Read More.]

I wonder if this will, in fact, mix up any political happenings in regards to Judaism as an ethnicity rather than a religion.

For an atheist, Maxim Schrogin talks about God a lot.

Over lunch at a Jewish deli, he ponders the impulse to believe — does it come from within or without? Why does God permit suffering? Finally, he pulls out a flowchart he made showing degrees of belief, which ranges from unquestioning faith to absolute atheism. He stabs the paper with his pen.

“This is where I fall,” he said. “Zero.”

This is religion without god. It still unnecessarily labels children.

Still, Schrogin, 64, is a dues-paying member of Congregation Beth El, a Reform synagogue here in Berkeley. He is among its most active members, attending Torah study, and, for a time, heading its social action committee. He organizes its community service projects and works with leaders of other congregations to help the poor.

His two children were bar and bat mitzvahed. On Friday nights, he and his wife light Shabbat candles and recite Hebrew prayers. There is one song, sung by the congregation in Hebrew, that can bring him to tears.

Schrogin isn’t alone. [Read More.]

It’s becoming more common for Jews not to believe the stories of the old testament but still choose to be involved in their local Jewish community. I get why someone would go to a holiday family/friends gathering but I don’t personally understand that much devotion to a single place of worship (synagogue).

Harris sits down with Pinker for a discussion about the history of violence.

Sam Harris asks, “Need I remind you that the ‘atheist regimes’ of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people?”

Steven Pinker has a great response.

This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.
First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.

Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.

Third, according to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.

Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe.

When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between theistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. I present data from the political scientist Rudolph Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less murderous than alternatives forms of government. [Read More.]

While us atheists realize that Hitler’s world philosophy was shaped from Christianity and the bible, some people still like to say he was an atheist. He considered Jews to be atheists because they did not accept Jesus as the messiah. He hated Jews. He hated atheists. He hated a lot of people. As an atheist Jew, I take much offense to allegations that Hitler was an atheist. As far as the others go, I don’t have nearly as much personal angst. In any case, it wasn’t so-called atheist philosophies that shaped their policies.

The book: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

With regard to a young American Jew named Harald Fuller-Bennett, the Taglit-Birthright project to some extent achieved its goal. The project brings young Jews from around the world for a trip in Israel “in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” to quote its own words. And indeed, about two years after coming on a Taglit-Birthright tour, Fuller-Bennett intended to visit Israel again.

…

But this time, the people working to diminish the distance between him and Israel were two Tel Aviv lawyers, Omer Shatz and Iftach Cohen, and Jerusalem District Court Judge Yoram Noam. Together, they overturned a bizarre attempt by the Shin Bet security service to accuse him of having connections with terrorists and intending to convert to Islam – for which reasons it barred him from entering Israel for 10 years.

Read the entire story here.

Despite the fact that many in the culture drink, smoke and eat fatty foods; experts are now hoping to crack the code. In New York, Cornell scientists will study the stem cells of almost a dozen Ashkenazi Jews who came from a heavily persecuted group with origins from Russia.

Experts believe that years of intermarriage – and the sharing of genetic traits – might have helped the group live for so long.

Usually intermarriage has the stereotype for less “attractive” traits. In general, human beings became better looking after we started travelling far and inter-mingling. Usually, the rich mated with the rich. Then said rich person would get a portrait painted, being apart of a family who can afford it. We look at the features of people from old paintings and they are different from the typical ideals of today. I’m not even talking about weight; more like the roundness of faces, distance between eyes, etc. Microevolution is noticeable from these easy to understand tidbits. How anyone could deny micro- or macroevolution by natural selection is beyond me! (It’s so blatant; one must really not want to know the truth.)

But I digress. Getting back to the genes of Ashkenazi Jews, take Lilly Port for example.

Lilly Port, who turned 98 last week, is one of the Ashkenazi Jews who will be taking part in the study, claims that she has never been ill.

‘I always had good genes,’ she said.

And even though she doesn’t smoke, she does eat bratwurst and chocolate daily and drinks white wine ‘when I want to relax’.

She told the New York Post: ‘I limit my food intake, because I want to be able to fit into my clothes, but I’m in perfect health.’

It will be some time before the results have been carefully dissected and conclusions drawn, but this survey should go some way to unlocking the code to a long life. [Read more.]

Boy, do I envy a woman who says she’s never been ill! Moreover, I wonder what the study will reveal.

Are you a religious man?

I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish and I’m fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He’s learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my son about my atheism when the time is right. But there’s a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews (laughs).

That happens to be a popular perception, in my experience as well.

Source

Nearly 50 years ago, Time magazine, in a report about Jewish opposition to “religious practices” in public schools, described a rise in Jewish secularism that disturbed some leaders of the American Jewish community.

Jewish support for a secular agenda added “fuel to the flames of anti-Semitism,” Time quoted Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue as warning. “The danger” to American Jewry, said Michael Wyschogrod, assistant professor of philosophy at Hunter College, is not the threat of conversion to Christianity, but “secularism, the disappearance of the word ‘God’ from the minds and tongues of millions of Jews.”

In 2011, the emerging strength of Jewish secularism (or secular Jews, not necessarily the same) that Time wrote about has grown into a presence that represents about four in 10 of the country’s self-identified Jews, according to studies, and which is subject to less criticism from Jewish and outside circles.

Today, secular Jews don’t feel compelled to defend their beliefs — or non-beliefs.“There are hundreds of millions of people who are non-religious,” and Jews are a disproportionate part of this group, said Phil Zuckerman, a “culturally Jewish” sociologist of religion at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., and director of the small liberal arts institution’s newly announced department of secular studies.

The times. They are changing.  Similar to the way atheism in general is slowly gaining societal acceptance. Humanist Judaism is more about the heritage and a lot less about faith. I suppose, that to any Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, Jews are atheists no matter how much faith they have. Though, that can work in all ways. In any case, Jews are known for not believing in an afterlife (at least not in the sense that those of other religions do).

“We’re more secular than Americans in general,” with roots in the waves of immigrants from Europe who came here more than a century ago, partly as a “move against rabbinic [authority],” Kosmin said.

So what’s the purpose?

A secular studies department is a natural home for students with a secular bent, said Phil Zuckerman, the department’s director. At most universities, he says, courses about secular subjects are taught in religious studies departments. At Pitzer College, he said, courses about secular subjects will be outside of a religious influence. “It’s exactly where we want to be.”

Read more.

“I don’t see us competing, because there’s so many options around here,” said Epstein, a dapper, charismatic, 34-year-old with a shaved head and stubble. “But I think this provides an option that is sorely needed. It provides additional bandwidth on the spectrum, a set of ideas that I think people are going to find very powerful.”

The core idea of humanism might be best summed up in the preface of Epstein’s book: that people can “lead good and moral lives without super-naturalism, without higher powers, without God.”

He continues:

“I think people are very hungry for community — one based not on material acquisition or consumption — that builds more on the contribution one gives outside the self,” Gregory said.

He added that he believes there’s a fundamental compatibility between humanism and Judaism. “Jews don’t believe in heaven or hell. We don’t know what comes after this world,” he said. “The Jewish tenet is, we make heaven a place on earth by helping each other. I see this center as taking that tenet and running with it.” [Read more]

Well, I can’t argue with helping each other. Here’s where a huge semantics war has a chance to come into play. It seems as though – to some – Judaism is evolving more into something like Buddhism or Universal Unitarianism, both of which do not require belief in a higher power. But, they are still religions, or at least ways of life. Where does the line get drawn? Does it matter? I personally am not a fan of religion, in most cases. I see the harm it causes. I see the wars that are carried out in the name of god or religion. Generally speaking, I see the enablers allowing this to go on because there were once elements of reason embedded into the fight that they can’t let go.

That stated, I certainly understand the need for neighbors and friends to get together, find a sense of community. There are many ways for people to get together. A wide range of Meetups and other gathering opportunities, where people can get together on the basis of just about anything. In any case, I don’t see how faded religious ties are necessary to build that community. But if they start there and travel to become something different, ending up doing good and spreading rational thought- eh-I can’t argue much. ;)