Whoa. Got carried away there for a moment. See what weird stuff surfaces when we let the emotional wolf off the leash. Not good. Never mind.
Asherman, You're the analytical type, and you don't get emotional - if I recall correctly. c.i.
LOL. Only human, m'lad. Only human
I obviously haven't imbibed enough to be comfortable in this acid trip of a media universe we're currently residing. The volume is off, but CNN is on with the Larry King repeat. On the left of the screen I see "TERROR ALERT HIGH." In the center, I see "LACI'S DUE DATE TODAY."
And I have this strange feeling that making a Jonestown Kool-Aid reference is going to lead to a certain someone accusing me of religious bigotry...
I can understand how offensive it would be to a believer to have his beliefs ridiculed by a non-believer. As one of those non-believers who has to work hard at being polite to a believer who lays a religious trip on me, I can understand the offense working in both directions. You, believer, think I'm going to hell; I, non-believer, think you are unevolved! You think you are making an earnest effort to save my soul; I react as though you'd flashed particularly virulent porn in front of me. Doesn't this convince you, as it convinces me, that beliefs relating to religion are best kept private? Doesn't it make you understand the horror with which non-believers greet the intense barrage of religiosity from our government? Can you imagine how many of us react to Bush's insistence on belief and his contrary behavior? I have great respect for religious people who quietly live out their religious beliefs; I hope you have equal respect for those of us who live our different beliefs in a quite different way. We live in a country which was founded on tolerance and which chose the secular state as a more viable form of governance, a secularism which holds sacred the rights of each citizen to his beliefs and to freedom from the imposition in his life of the religious beliefs of others. The important thing to remember is that we meet, by agreement, on secular ground. That ground must remain secular if we are to remain America.
Tartarin - Good points. I agree that I find those who look down on others either for being religious, or for not sharing a given religious viewpoint, equally out of line.
Your comments also reminded me of a portion of Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" (emphasis mine):
Quote:Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the Pope, armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the Pope selling or granting indulgences. The former is church and state, and the latter is church and traffic.
But toleration may be viewed in a much stronger light. Man worships not himself, but his Maker: and the liberty of conscience which he claims, is not for the service of himself, but of his God. In this case, therefore, we must necessarily have the associated idea of two beings; the mortal who renders the worship, and the immortal being who is worshipped.
Toleration therefore, places itself not between man and man, nor between church and church, nor between one denomination of religion and another, but between God and man; between the being who worships, and the being who is worshipped; and by the same act of assumed authority by which it tolerates man to pay his worship, it presumptuously and blasphemously sets up itself to tolerate the Almighty to receive it.
Were a bill brought into Parliament, entitled, "An act to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship of a Jew or a Turk," or "to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it," all men would startle, and call it blasphemy. There would be an uproar. The presumption of toleration in religious matters would then, present itself unmasked; but the presumption is not the less because the name of "Man" only appears to those laws, for the associated idea of the worshipper and the worshipped cannot be separated.
Who, then, art thou, vain dust and ashes! by whatever name thou art called, whether a king, a bishop, a church or a state, a parliament or any thing else, that obtrudest thine insignificance between the soul of man and his Maker? Mind thine own concerns. If he believes not as thou believest, it is a proof that thou believest not as he believeth, and there is no earthly power can determine between you.
Asherman, Israel is not a theocracy. We have influential religious parties there, but the only thing they want is a share of the state budget for their laymen and army service exemptions for the same public. It bugs me and many people (therefore, the anti-clerical party "Shinui" became the third in number of the parliamentary seats), but this does not make Israel a theocracy.
Palestinian society is not totally religious either. They lack any ideology to justify their xenophobia toward Jews (Palestinians object not only to occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, they consider the very existence of Israel being undesired), and they use Koran for this purpose. Koran includes both philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic statements (I mean in reference to the Jews, and not to all the Semitic nations), and the leaders of the PA deliberately skip over the first and accentuate the latter. This is an excellent example of abuse of religion in favor of the particular politicians' private agenda. By the way, I would not call the PA a theocratic regime either. It is a tyrannical and corrupt entity, but not a model of Islamic Republic.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a religious war. Two different folks claim the same territory, that is the essence of the contradiction. Unfortunately, the Arab side of the conflict repeatedly (in 1947 and in 2000) rejected a proposal of compromise solution made by the Jewish side. When they finally realize that Israel cannot be forcefully eliminated (like the Egyptian President Sadat realized this in mid-'70s), then Israel will have a serious partner for negotiations, a partner than means peace. And the future of settlements may be solved in course of negotiations. I want to remind that the right-wing Likud government led by a former terrorist Menachem Begin (the one responsible for explosion of the King David hotel in Jerusalem in 1946) dismantled all the settlements in the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace. The current Israeli Prime-Minister Gen. Sharon was a defense secretary of Mr. Begin's government.
Until the Palestinians really start craving for peace and not for elimination of Israel, there is nobody to negotiate with.
steissd, I beg to differ. It is a religious war. We are all decendents of the same forefathers. Religions are man made segregationist organizations. Without religions of Jews and Muslims, all would be one and the same. c.i.
Jews are not a religious group, they constitute an ethnos. The same refers to the Arabs (there are Christian Arabs as well). They would be Jews and Arabs in absence of any religion as well. They are Judaists and Muslims due to existence of religions. But religion is not something that makes a person being a Jew or an Arab. Poles and French are Catholics, but they do not pertain to the same ethnos.
Arab leaders employ Islamic phraseology in their propaganda, but this does not make an Israeli-Arab conflict a religious one. One of the most belligerent foes of Israel, the late Egyptian president Nasser led an absolutely secular and anti-clerical regime.
I don't believe one can characterize a political force as being motivated by any one factor. Religion, yes, but also greed for land and resources are factors. Harvard Business School's basic dogma is often interpreted as greed for money and power and how to sell out one's principals without looking like an opportunist. Many governments today which don't overtly look like theocracies are theocracies in disguise.
One more thing: Islamic phraseology replaced the Marxist one in the terrorists' propaganda, since Marxism proved its inability to destroy the Western societies. The former French Communist Roger Garaudy transformed himself into an Islamist for the above reason, combined with his own anti-Semitic feelings.
It's always been my understanding that "Jew" meant they were believers of Judaism - a religion. c.i.
Well, majority of the religious people among Jews really confess Judaism. But the religious people per se are minority among the Jews, as among any other ethnos. Judaism is a religion, but Jews are ethnic group. You were misinformed by the Arab hoax that they employ to prove that the Jews have no rights for the land of Israel: they claim that the Jews are merely confessing the same religion the ancient Hebrews did, but they are rather Slavs than Semites themselves. Unfortunately, Hitler did not share their ideas; if he did, there would be no Holocaust.
Genetic researches conducted in Israel showed that the all the Jews belong to the same ethnos, and this ethnos is close in genome type to the Arabs; but not to the Palestinian Arabs that are heirs of migrants that arrived into Turkish Palestine from all the giant Ottoman Empire due to economic development caused by the Zionists' investments, but to the genuine Arabs, namely to Bedouins. Palestinian Arabs appeared in the area in sufficient quantities inthe beginning of 20th century, and majority of them are of Turkish, Bosnian and Albanian descent; they were assimilated by the local Arab population that was not numerous, but was influential 100-120 years ago.
steissd, How is it that there are Jews in China and Japan if they are an ethnic group? c.i.
In Japan there is a religious denomination that confesses Judaism; ethnically, they are Japanese, but they have right to immigrate to Israel in accordance with the Returning Law that grants such rights not only to ethnic Jews, but to all the Judaists; such a permission was added under pressure of the religious establishment, and it has nothing in common with definition of Jews as an ethnos. Part of the Chinese Jews are White Russian Jews that lived in the Far East of the Russian Empire and left the country after the Communist revolution. There is a small number of the Asian Judaists in China, but they are not Jews; they are Chinese that confess Judaism. There were rumors that the late PM of China (being in office in '60s-'70s in the administration of the PRC Chairman Mao Zedong) Chou En Li originated from one of such Chinese Judaists' families.
C.I
Many of the ethnic Jews in Japan and China, those that are not converts, came out of Eastern Europe. There are ethnic Jews throughout the world who due to circumstances beyond their control were forced to emigrate. That is why Israel is so important. Jews are tired of being strangers in a strange land. You were subjected to internment during WW2 and I am sure have the scars {physiological] to prove it. Consider than the scars of the Jewish people after hundreds of years of discrimination, massacres and expulsion culminating in the final solution {Holocaust].
All Han supposedly carry one of 100 names and are regarded as being distant relatives of others with the same name. My Chinese professor's name reflected the brief Islamic influence in Northern China. I doubt that anyone would have guessed he wasn't "Han".
I'm not sure any of that has relevance here.
There is still a Muslim influence in both China and Japan.
