Name an instance of religious hypocrisy

ah

the old bi-millenium porcine conundrum

God knows

Setanta
We would have to go hungry on Sunday evenings. Anyway that is why God created the Chinese.

Note. Sunday is my day for Chinese. Jewish american princesses do not cook on Sunday. It's a law. My wife told me.

I have a Jewish one.

Some conservative Jews will get very upset when food is brought into the synagogue that does not have a strict heksher (laber certifying kosher status), which is not required by the conservative movement if the food has been investigated beforehand to check if any of the ingredients render it traif (not kosher.) But they will have no issue walking around the shul flipping lights on and off on Shabbat (which is an issue.)

Also, there are other Jews who will pay to send their children to a Jewish day school and Jewish camps, but have not strong commitments to Judaism themselves besides bringing their children up Jewish.

I can't think of anything other than that. The biblical injunctions for the death penalty get taken care of in Judaism first by the laws set in Deuteronomy for the way the death penalty is supposed to be tried and carried out, and then second by all of the further explanation given in the Talmud. And I don't think any of it can be carried out without a Sanhedrin existing. And the ways to get a new Sanhedrin are next to impossible.

I can't think of any widespread moral hypcrisy among the Jewish people, but if there's anything widespread and immoral it probably violates Jewish law, regardless of what sphere of life it is in.

Religion

Come on dauer...let's admit it. The Jewish god, which I can only spell out as Yahweh, is a hypocrite. Let's take the whole Red Sea crossing scenario. He liberated the supposed 'chosen people', and then drowned the Egyptians. The chosen ones celebrated, and god said "My people die, and you celebrate?" Since when were the Egyptians Yahweh's people? I think he was hedging his bets. Thank god for Mu Shu Pork. He did a good job with the Chinese.

I disagree respectfully.....I'm not trying to steer the conversation but still think my example is a shining one......for reasons I will not and cetainly do not need to go into on this thread.....

Cav, in Judaism HaShem is the God of all people, not just the Jews. Adam was not a Jew. Enoch was not a Jew. Noah was not a Jew. Abram wasn't a Jew until the covenant was made. All people are God's people. Jews were chosen to recieve the Torah.

There are even 7 laws in Judaism for nonJews. These laws were the basis for the legal code for resident aliens in ancient Israel. They are the 7 laws of Noah. God has no single people, just people He chose to fulfill some extra obligations.

I won't be online in a few hours until Saturday night, so if you respond to me I may not be able to respond to you right away.

And when I say Abraham was a Jew after the covenant was made, i don't mean it in the sense that he was a Judean or anything like that, but in a looser sense.

To quickly back up Bear I'll just say three words:

God Bless America


*runs out of thread*

Cool dauer. I look forward to the conversation. L'Shana Tova! I was a **** disturbor way back in religious school, just so you know. However, I always welcome your knowledge and insight.

First of all, cav, there is no "w" sound in hebrew, so your spelling of God's name is wrong. It's actually closer to Y'hovah, which the christians translated into Jehovah. And Jews are not allowed to say "Y'hovah" out loud because the name of God is too holy to throw around, so most will say either "HaShem" which means "the name" or "Adonai" which means "lord" when they want to specify the Jewish God.

Anyway, about the topic, the whole thing about christians and slavery actually comes from the torah, so it works for Jews too. And Islam comes from the arabic word salam which means peace, thus Islam is a peaceful religion by its name. That means all the terrorists trying to use the koran to justify their actions are religious hipocrites.

And my (Jewish) family really only gets chinese on christmas and just randomly throughout the year. And I don't even really like chinese...does that make me a bad Jew? Oh, and according to the torah, the Jewish people havent been around for 6000 years, the world was created 5765 years ago, then the Jews came around about 900ish years later, so it was only about 865 years that the Jews went without chinese. I think they could handle it. I mean, we survived 2000 years without a homeland, didn't we?

Thanks for the insight Otis. Transliteration is often difficult, especially when it comes from untranslatable words. My family tends to use Christmas as 'go out to the movies' night, as the theatres are practically deserted.

Setanta, having just celebrated Rosh Hashanah, Otis is correct. According to our people's calender, this year is indeed 5765. During those 865 years, one thing we invented was foie gras. Well actually, it was during the time of the Roman Empire. As Jews were forbidden to eat pork, they started force feeding geese with figs to enlarge the livers which became what we now know of as 'foie gras', which of course was a huge improvement over pig meat, but still gave that fatty mouth feel so prized by most folks, both then and now. The Romans adapted the practice, always looking for something different than the average dish of flamingo tongues, and so a world reknowned product was born, until the French tried to claim it for themselves. It's just another example of the French trying to keep a brother down.

That was a seriously awesome post there Otis. One question regarding the Old Testament, were the holy wars described there really any less hypocritical than the holy wars being fought today? All are masked by a philosophy of 'persecution'. Haven't most religious groups been persecuted at some point in history, and used it as an excuse to wage war? In terms of hypocrisy, wherein lies the difference?

Well, in believing that the wars described in the Old Testament actually went down how they were described, then you would have to belive that God told the people to do what they did. If you belive that the Jews really tried to kill all the Amalakites, you would have trouble arguing that God didn't really tell them to. So if God truely tells you to kill someone, I think that justifies it. The problem now is that these "extremists" are twisting their bible to make it fit what they want to do. None of them have claimed that Allah spoke to them and said "kill the Americans". And even if they did, I wouldn't believe them, and I'm sure the Amalakites didn't believe the Jews.

EDIT: Yeah, and the French keep taking everything from us Jews. They took our liver, they took our accent, and they took our hats, then they just changed a small part of each and called it their own. They stole our latkes and called them fries! They stole our manichewitz and called it...wine! They even copied us when we were taken over by the Nazis in WWII!!!

I agree with you there. The practice of religion is far different than the politicization of religion. As far as the idea of god truly telling you to kill someone, I think that is probably a false god, or a human delusion.

Otis, all of the scholars I have spoken to believe the name would be pronounced with a W sound. Something you may wish to note is that the vav can make an oo sound or an oh sound. I believe the v sound was due to the tendencies of later speakers. There have been many changes to the pronunciation of Hebrew since it was originally a language. Have you ever wondered why an aleph and ayin are both treated the same way? Het and Khaf sound practically alike as well, often they do sound alike. I have been told that the Yemenite Jews have very good pronunciation that is far more authentic than that of the rest of us.

Cav, we go to the movies too, but for us it is Heeb Central. It is hard to find parking up front.

As far as wars in the Tanakh, there are a few things that need to be considered.

First, there was no difference between political and religious Israel and everything they did would be for their god. This does not mean this is okay. I see the early raids on par with the acts of Crusaders.

I can't agree with you that they used persecution as an excuse for war. War suggests to me that they went out and started trouble. In this case, they were defending their land and their right to live as they saw fit. Nor was anything looking to be gained but the right to be left alone. Alien practices were being forced onto them. If these things happened today, I may approach them differently. The stakes change with the passing of time. There's also not many places in the world where people are not allowed to practice their religions freely, which in this case was combined with the fact they had lost their land.

The raids however, I do see as hypocritical. Luckily, we have records of such things and can be reminded so that it doesn't happen again.

When written with vowels the vav in yud-hay-vav-hay has a kamatz under it. A vav can only make an oo or oh sound when it is used as a vowel itself, in which case it wouldn't have a vowel assigned to it. This means it must be a v sound. Then again, the vowels were not originally there, so they could have been added wrong.

I highly doubt that the vav was originally only an oh or oo. That would make the language very slow and awkward to speak. Just try saying something in hebrew with all the vavs as oh or oo. There's this guy I know who has a doctorate in linguistics, speaks 5 languages, and knows as much about judaism as any rabbi I know, so if it's true, he'll know. I'll ask him...

Of course, it doesn't really matter since I don't have any reason to say either of those out loud.

I find that analysis more than a little disingenuous. According to their own lore, the Hebrews basically took Canaan from the indiginous tribes, because their god told them they could. From a more rationally based historical view, they were a small and at the time insignificant tribal confederation, illiterate and relatively poor. Their "Kings" got a small protection racket going for trade caravans between the head of the Red Sea and the Lebanon. They were sitting in a natural battleground. Any warfare which took place between Philistia and the Akkadians, between the Akkadians or Assyrians and Egypt, rolled right over them. There is every possibility that hero legends about wars with Philistia are of the same quality as Roman tales about Mucius Scaevola or Coriolanus--fairy tales to cover the constant humiliation of being military second class citizens in their own land.

The Babylonian captivity was a common enough event in ancient history. There are abundant recorded instances of massive levies of populations for specific projects, or to fill newly acquired territory. It is emminently reasonable to say that Tiglath Pilaser carried them off, and put them in a place which was literate and sophisticated, with a more strigent regard for a distinction between hearsay and well-kept records. There is no verifiable evidence that i've ever heard of that would support a claim that the Hebrews were literate before the return from the captivity.

The comment abou Yemenis is interesting. After the monotheistic influence of Zoroastrianism swept over the middle east (while the Hebrews were in Babylon, by the way), the next large wave of proselytizing came from the Jews. Judaism, the religion, as opposed to a racial origin, became very wide-spread. The Arameans, whose semitic language of Aramaic became for many centuries the lingua franca of the middle east, adopted the religion and carried it very far indeed (being the principle merchants of the region, which is likely were the Hebrew learned sharp trading practices). One of the strongest and most successful efforts was in the Arabian penninsula, and in particular in Yemen. Mohammed was likely of Yemeni descent, as were many of the residents of Mecca and Medina in the 6th and 7th century, more than a thousand years after the wave of Judaic conversion had passed over the region, and settled in Yemen quite well. From the life story of Mohammed and Abu Bekr, it seems very likely that the "Arabs" of the towns, like Mecca and Medina, were descended from Yemeni "Jews" who had settled in those towns to exploit trade, and in the case of Mecca, the many centuries-old pilgrim trade to see the Kabaa. They were not so much religiously fervent as dedicated to personal gain, and their beef against Mohammed was that his diatribes against paganism seemed to them to threaten the lucrative pilgrimage trade.

At the time of the foundation of the modern Israel, there were still a great many Yemenis who identified themselves as Jews.

I was told this in an Ulpan course. The instructor said that in reality, proper Hebrew would sound much more similar to Arabic, but because of the drop of most of the gutteral letters among other things, this is not the case today. The Yemenite Jews, however, they pronounce the gutteral letters. I guess originally when Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, more of these sounds were used, but gradually with the influx of Jews from all over the world, more and more of these sounds were lost.

I find it difficult to pronounce a decent ayin because it's in the throat. The same is true for het.

My guess would be that language mechanism like gutterals, clicks, glottal stops, etc., would require learning the language from infancy. If you get a great influx of those who will speak the local language, but who were not raised to it, you would probably lose a lot of that.

I've met people trying to pass themselves off as native speakers of French before, but the "r" usually reveals the deceit. The pronunciation of the "r" can be learned, but no one ever pronounces it as smoothly and casually as the native speaker.

Dauer:
touche

I emailed Dr. Joel M. Hoffman who works at HUC in NY about it and got this reply:





So you were basically right. And to top it all off, what a coincidence, he wrote a book that touches on the subect of God's name using only the vowel letters and stuff. If your interested it's at http://www.NewJewishBooks.org/ITB