Posts by CalebInFloroda

16

Who was Jesus?

by Coded Logic in

who/what do you think jesus was?

and how did you arrive at that conclusion?

While some believe there is no historical reason for believing that Jesus of Nazareth exists, I believe that his historicity is irrelevant to my rejecting him as the promised Messiah that my people, the Jews, have been waiting for.

A good man? Likely? A rabbi who gained a following and someone who might have even performed miracles. Even if he resurrected as Christians believe, the fact that Jesus didn't operate in the open like Moses did, did not want his miracles to be widely known in contrast to the way Moses performed his wonders so that all could see, and that Jesus did not lead his people into the Promised Messianic Age as Moses led his people to the Promised Land are just some of the reasons I don't believe he is the Messiah.

The fact that Biblical scholars from Catholic and Protestant circles are now in agreement that an anti-Jewish polemic tainted much of the New Testament writings with the intent to compete with traditional Judaism for recognition by Rome and legitimacy in the eyes of potential converts is another reason that I keep my stand. This polemic in Christian Scripture has traditionally been interpreted as historical over the past 2000 years to the detriment of the Jews and much of the rest of the world that did not agree with the movement.

Christians now offer apologies for their actions and inactions during the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the pogroms, and the part they played in the Holocaust revealing a legacy of repeatedly being on the wrong side of history again and again. Today there are many of them that currently persecute and oppose the LGBT community, some demonize women who side with pro-choice political movements, others insult law-abiding Muslims by holding events to draw cartoons of Muhammad, and many go about viewing Jews as blind, lost and in need of proselytizing to the teachings of Jesus lest they end up in Hell for remaining Jews.

I see another 2000 years of apologizing for being on the wrong side of history by Christians the way they are going. Such does not make a Messianic Age nor composes anything hoped by the Jews from antiquity. We did not hope for 2000 years of violent persecution, hatred, bigotry, and genocide but that is what the world got with Jesus.

So again, let Jesus be as real as you me. It matters not what the final truth is on that. Do I believe he was the Messiah? No.

27

My proposal for Mankind to end all doubts...

by James Mixon in

just watch the movie "contact" and it gave me an idea.. our population on earth today 8-9 billion, a day where all of mankind pray, beseech,.

plead for god to show us a sign that he is still up there.

one day all around the world.

CalebInFloroda

Never a JW,

While many of your questions might seem to imply something in the Christian paradigm of Western Society...why G-d wants people to know him, why not end all doubts, debates, etc., why play Hide and Seek, etc...they aren't specific to the Jewish concept of life, duty to humanity and the world, and don't take into account that some Jews don't believe that God exists.

Unlike Christianity and especially the JWs, Jews don't claim to have all the answers or even see having definite replies for everyone to accept as a good thing. After all if everything were spoon-fed to you, could you ever really learn to grow and understand things for yourself? We all have to learn to read, write, do math problems for ourselves. We are born in a world where we have to find or even make the answers we constantly have to seek.

And why does G-d have to exist anyway? Can't you be a good person without there being a G-d?

Want the debates to stop, then stop engaging in them. You may not stop others from doing so, but who are you to tell others what they can or cannot debate about.

And who said G-d was hiding? Is the concept of the G-d of Abraham limited to reality? If the stories are just myths, do they not have any moral value or point to them? Many people are suffering, many searching for hope and direction, etc. If you notice such needs then why are you not doing something about it? Does a deity need to exist for these people to have hope and direction? If people in our world are lost, is it not our responsibility as members of a community to let them know we are here for them?

Instead of worrying about whether G-d is real, Judaism says you should fix what you see needs fixing in the world. If there is a G-d, then you have done good, but if it not you have still fixed things. Stop acting like a bitching and moaning Christian and do something on you own initiative. Like G-d asked Job, "So you think you know so much that you think you should have answers? Then you supply them to me!"

Not all facets of Christianity are anti-Semitic, and not all individuals within a given Christian sect can be charged with being anti-Semitic. And yes, I've read the New Testament and Christian writings...in Greek. I'm a philologist. Bible translators and teachers of all denominations call on me for help in their work. It's not all anti-Semitic.

And the history...yeah, I know it well. I'm Jewish, remember? There's this thing called the Diaspora, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust, and they happened in Europe. They were anti-Semitic, but a lot of history was not too.

And lastly, I added that part you mentioned because what I write might sound like a challenge to some atheists, because some here have told me so themselves. That was where my brain was at, to counter that before someone brought it up and misread my comments as a challenge to an ideology I have no problems with.

Good questions, though, even if you didn't mean them to be literal.

27

My proposal for Mankind to end all doubts...

by James Mixon in

just watch the movie "contact" and it gave me an idea.. our population on earth today 8-9 billion, a day where all of mankind pray, beseech,.

plead for god to show us a sign that he is still up there.

one day all around the world.

CalebInFloroda

Yep.

Except for Orthodox Jews, all branches of Judaism accept lesbian and gay members. Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish branch in the United States and the one to which I subscribe is very accepting of the LGBT community. It was even at the forefront of the fight for marriage equality here in the United States.

52

Try Other Religions

by Sofia Lose in

sometimes i get a strong curiosity to start dabbling into other religions, other faiths, you know?

really different ones such as islam, judaism, hinduism, etc.. has anyone here looked into something else?

has your spirituality been satisfied by any other than christianity?.

CalebInFloroda

Post script:

I don't want to give the wrong impression either. We Jews can be stubborn jerks, intolerant, rude, argumentive, and just as mistaken as anyone else. Jewry is definitely not Julie Andrews twirling around on a mountaintop signing all day! We have the ability to be just as evil and mean and disappointing as anyone.

There isn't much difference between Jews and others. It may be that we take life differently, however, much like we read from right to left instead of left to right. If anything I hope that my experience shows that any of you can do just as well in whatever paths you choose to make the world we share a better place for yourself and us all. Find your own tribe, make it up if up you have to. Just realize that spirituality isn't something that fills you as much as something that you fill up with yourself.

52

Try Other Religions

by Sofia Lose in

sometimes i get a strong curiosity to start dabbling into other religions, other faiths, you know?

really different ones such as islam, judaism, hinduism, etc.. has anyone here looked into something else?

has your spirituality been satisfied by any other than christianity?.

CalebInFloroda

One thing I can add about Judaism is that though you can technically convert, it is not a religion per se. It is the religious practice of a people.

Normally you have to be Jewish itself, of Hebrew stock. All those "rules" are really cultural conventions that come natural in Jewish society. Judaism is also not based on the Bible. Instead the Scriptures are a product of the religion, not its basis.

My case is probably not a fair comparison, therefore. I did not convert to Judaism. My family abandoned it when I was a child and left me among the JWs, and when I was old enough I reverted back to my people and my culture. Many Jews are atheist, some agnostic. So Jewry is not of itself an adoption or entry into a new religion. It's actually entry into a new ( for me, my old) tribe, a new culture, a new people. Jews don't have to be religious, even to take advantage of the Law of Return and move to Israel.

So I have to admit after reading the experiences of others that it isn't the same thing. Heck, there are Jewish Buddhists even! Being a Jew is not about beliefs like in Christianity. It's about living life and doing something with it as part of a heritage you adopt and leave behind as a legacy. It's not about believing that G-d exists. It's about acting as if there is no G-d and doing for humankind what loving things G-d would do if he were real. It's not about debating that if G-d were real that there would be no suffering. It's realizing that suffering is our repsonsibilty to bring a solution to ourselves. It's not about converting others so they believe like you before you can accept them. It's about converting yourself so you can learn to accept others just as they are.

27

My proposal for Mankind to end all doubts...

by James Mixon in

just watch the movie "contact" and it gave me an idea.. our population on earth today 8-9 billion, a day where all of mankind pray, beseech,.

plead for god to show us a sign that he is still up there.

one day all around the world.

CalebInFloroda

It is, but not impossible.

I was just a teen when it happened to me, but partly because I was lied to by the elders who studied with me.

You see I had relatives who tried hard to keep me away from it all. My parents were of no use, but I should have listened to what I learned from aunts, uncles, and cousins who kept telling me I was a "Mexican Jew," as they put it.

At 17 I didn't know what this meant, and I asked the elders who studied with me about it as they were preparing me for baptism. "My family tells me I can't get baptized because we are Mexican Jews."

The elders laughed. "There is no such thing," they assured me. "This is all that attack from Satan we warned you about that would happen."

A few years later I learned that it was no such Satanic attack. My family was trying to tell me I was from a group known as the "Mexican Jews of Monterrey." Monterrey, Mexico was settled and founded by some of the Jews who were expelled from Spain due to the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition followed them to Mexico, hunted them down, and chased them into Texas where my family settled.

Being uneducated is the worse thing you can be. The elders made a stupid assumption and told me there was no such thing as the "Mexican Jews" because they are religiously and historically ignorant. I was stupid enough to believe them because I was just a kid and didn't know my own ancestral history or its significance well enough.

Many Jews who convert to Christianity do it merely because of this lack of education in their own history. You are right that it is an enormous leap to make to become a JW. Catholicism is the only thing similar to Judaism in Christianity. Everything else is pretty much foreign and Gentile in nature. JWs are dripping in pagan practices and don't even know it. So for a Jew to make that leap is to be willing to assimilate into a culture that is foreign and anti-Semitic, something Jews can smell miles away unless they just don't know anything. There is nothing more evil in the eyes of Jews than assimilation...well, maybe genocide. So for an educated Jew to become a Witness would require embracing the principles that inspired Hitler.

I will tell you this. I learned of and verified my ancestral history while still a Witness. It did not take long after before I went rushing out. I didn't wait or fade either. I was giving a talk one day and gone the very next.

I look back at all those brochures and publications with illustrations of Paradise, and now I wonder how I could be so blind. Do you know what is missing from all those people dressed in different garb of different nationalities in the JWs pictures? Do you know what type of dress you never, ever see anyone wearing at one of those international conventions of Jehovah's Witnesses? You never see Jews.

You never see men wearing traditional head coverings known as kippah or yarmulke. You never see Jews in prayer shawls or women in Jewish dress. You never see Jewish men with full beards. You see none of this. The Watchtower is anti-Semitic. There are no Jews in their paradise, no Jewish culture left. No one from Israel is seen in traditional clothing at their conventions either. I'll bet your Jewish friend never got to wear his head covering in a Kingdom Hall or wear a beard or prayer shawl, am I right? They likely made him do what they made me do, assimilate from Jewish culture to pagan Western culture.

God's organization? Yeah, right!

14

Why isn't Jeehoober more like Jesus???

by DATA-DOG in

this just struck me as odd.

if the bible is really god's word, and it's all real, why doesn't jeehoober act more like jesus?

jesus perfectly imitated jeehobo, right?

CalebInFloroda

Yep, Data-Dog, the marvelous invention of "Original Sin" by Christians would make any deity look like a failure.

Why would a Messiah perform miracles of healing for a few people, then swear them to secrecy but expect everyone to believe in him? Why not tell or heal everybody? If you are really of G-d then surely you know of our need for proof! If you want to save the world, why not show the world?

When YHWH appeared to Moses, YHWH gave Moses signs to show everybody. Then Adonai told Moses that what he experienced on a small scale with the burning bush, the entire nation of Israel would experience on a large scale when G-d would bring them back to the same mountain and appear in a similar fashion for all to see as proof that it was YHWH who appeared to Moses. Miracles were not hidden. The nation as a whole was offered oracles and miracles publicly.

But the Jesus Story is all about something that happens on the outskirts of Jewish society, of miracles and transfigurations only a few see, of a raising from the dead and ascension to Heaven that the Jewish public never witnesses. How is this the Prophet like Moses? Secret visions and non-public resurrections of Jesus in the New Testament sounds like Mormonism and the many cults where each and every preacher claims G-d spoke to them and no other, like the men who claimed they saw the gold plates of the Book of Mormon while no one else did. This is not enlightenment or a more loving deity than One who Proves Himself publicly.

Even if you believe that the G-d of the Hebrew Bible is a myth, surely you can see that a G-d who gives everyone the opportunity to believe is far different from a secret club when you have to believe things that only a few select witnesses claim happened and then follow their direction or be condemned to hell because you want to use your mind and logic and prefer letting evidence speak for itself.

It's like someone is trying to pass off the New Testament as a badly produced sequel to the Jewish Scriptures, where the promised protagonist never matches what is expected in the first volume and there is no real continuity between the two.

14

Why isn't Jeehoober more like Jesus???

by DATA-DOG in

this just struck me as odd.

if the bible is really god's word, and it's all real, why doesn't jeehoober act more like jesus?

jesus perfectly imitated jeehobo, right?

CalebInFloroda

That would make sense, Island Man, except it is the Gentile Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures that makes G-d look bad. We Jews know that a lot of what is written and ascribed to G-d was really our own doing. If we saw a need to reinvent G-d we could have done so in the Talmud or Mishnah.

Also it was the Jesus followers who did what you are saying, not the Jews in general. I for one don't see how the Jesus Story is more enlightened. A Messiah who is born of a virgin and get identified as the world's savior by heathen Magi astrologers? A Messiah who tells people to keep his identity secret, who encourages Jewish people to stop eating kosher? A Messiah who claims all Jewish expectations about the Messiah are wrong, that G-d didn't teach his people what to expect in the correct way, and that the promised Messianic age he was supposed to bring is merely symbolic of life in Heaven? A Messiah that dies and resurrects from the dead but appears only to a select few? Why not appear to the whole Jewish nation that was promised the Messiah by G-d in the first place? A Messiah that would eventually lead his followers to persecute the Jews with pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazi Holocaust? That's a weird enlightenment and odd God of Love, if you ask me.

Now back to this Watchtower illustration of Jesus coming down from heaven on a horse. He's wearing all white, so I suppose Armageddon occurs prior to Labor Day? If he wore such garb after that date it would be a fashion faux pas, and that can't be since Jesus is perfect, right? So the End of the World occurs before Labor Day, that's what I get that the JWs are trying to tell us from this picture.

14

Why isn't Jeehoober more like Jesus???

by DATA-DOG in

this just struck me as odd.

if the bible is really god's word, and it's all real, why doesn't jeehoober act more like jesus?

jesus perfectly imitated jeehobo, right?

CalebInFloroda

Why can't G-d have both good and evil qualities? Does he have to be all-loving? I mean some of the movies that came out recently are so dirivative and lack depth of feeling and poor art direction and acting....Does G-d have to love these too?

And why does Jesus get a horse? How often do you hear of Jews riding around on horses? Jews don't like horses. We Jews like cars. Wouldn't it make more sense for the Messiah to ride in comfort in a new car? Or are there horses in heaven? That's probably why they say Jews won't be going to heaven. We Jews don't like horses.

14

Why isn't Jeehoober more like Jesus???

by DATA-DOG in

this just struck me as odd.

if the bible is really god's word, and it's all real, why doesn't jeehoober act more like jesus?

jesus perfectly imitated jeehobo, right?

CalebInFloroda

As a Jew I wonder about this all the time because of Christianity's claim that Jesus is merely the Incarnation of G-d, or even as JWs believe that Jesus is at least the perfect example of G-d in the flesh. They don't seem to be on the same level in Hebrew culture. The so-called "vengeful, warrior G-d of the Hebrews" is actually an exegetical invention of the Christian heretic Marcion of Sinope that still lives in the doctrines of many current Christian sects today. Jews recognize that they often wrongly applied their own vicious efforts as recorded in the Tanakh to G-d when in reality G-d had nothing to do with many of those things, but Christians tend to interpret these same verses as literal acts of G-d.

Because Marcion despised the Jews, he created a philosophy that Jesus was a more superior god to the one the Hebrews worshipped. Jesus, Marcion claimed, was thus the loving G-d the Jews and the world needed. In his efforts to prove this Marcion developed the first Bible canon, one that dismissed the entire collection of Jewish books and included only a heavily edited version of Luke and epistles of Paul he claimed supported Gnostic notions.

You might also blame Christianity for the debate: "If G-d is all-powerful then why do the innocent suffer?" Jewish tradition doesn't ask this. In fact, as I just mentioned on another thread, Jews see that some denial of God's existence can be a good thing, even raising the atheist up as a good and beneficial facet of the world we live in unlike most theists do.

A great Hasidic teacher once stated that if someone comes to you and asks for help that it would be wrong to send him off with a pious message to have faith in G-d, that G-d would take care of all his troubles. Jews find this useless. In fact the Jew is to act as if there is no G-d, to take care of the needy themselves as if we are the ones responsible to make sure they get through their time of trouble.

People spend a lot of time debating the "why" of suffering, arguing over whether this means G-d exists or not. Jews feel this is time better spent finding practical ways to actually do something about suffering and leave the debate about G-d's existence to others. What good is proving that G-d exists by winning a debate on the subject if during the time you spent arguing you could have done something to help others?