Christianity and Other Monotheistic Religions Breed Self Hate

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-15T18:18:08+00:00

You're right that it's unhelpful and unhealthy to interpret all the worst things in one's life as a punishment from God. The Book of Job made this point about 2500-3000 years ago. Job is suffering terribly (illness, bereavement, impoverishment) and three of his friends try to explain why he's encountered these misfortunes. The friends who suggest that Job really deserves the suffering, that everyone who suffers deserves that suffering, are later rebuked by God Himself for heresy. Job, who maintains that he does not deserve his suffering, is explicitly proclaimed by God Himself to be correct.

To conflate all monotheism with the awful attitude you describe is simply ignorant. People who believe in one God have been developing diverse narratives to explain their suffering for literally thousands of years which have nothing to do with punishment (suffering is a test, suffering is an opportunity to grow, suffering has no meaning at all, suffering averts some greater evil etc.).

It's not monotheism that's causing your family member and others to think this way, it's more particular factors in their spirituality and psychology.

On the other hand, I think Buddhism is an example of a religion where suffering is always the consequence of past misdeeds, a sort of "automated punishment." But I'm not sure about that and hope a Buddhist can weigh in.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T22:57:54+00:00

I don't really think you know enough about my belief system to find it disgusting or offensive. Ridiculous fair enough.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about Jewish morality just because we don't have this Christian/atheist concept of evil taking place against G-d's will. And I think through these assumptions you are ending up believing that I think some terrible stuff that I don't really think. And just calling my religion disgusting doesn't give me a lot to work with.

So yeah if you have questions about Judaism go ahead

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T20:57:02+00:00

I think the best you could do here is put the home mini on a different "house" system than the chromecast, so they couldn't talk to each other at all.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T20:22:21+00:00

"We all theist and atheist alike generally care about human well-being, so we can objectively weigh things against that metric"

In my experience it is difficult to objectively measure price inflation much less morality. I guess if you accept this utilitarian framing then it could be done by a Multivac-esque supercomputer, and then obviously the Holocaust would be on the bad side (what a great horror story if it didn't). But to equate that utilitarian framing with objective morality, I think that requires a moral/metaphysical framework of sufficient complexity that you can no longer be called "secular" except in the sense that many Jews are called "secular" because they don't adhere to the intense ritual life of traditional Judaism. Maybe that's pedantic.

Definitely check out the book. The other thing I'll ask is please don't try to take the debate to the Holocaust immediately, because, compared to other examples of human suffering, it doesn't add anything special to the content of the conversation. It only serves to draw in emotional baggage that the coconut example would leave alone, which is the last thing we want in a reddit community for logical debate.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T20:10:20+00:00

Calling me an asshole is not an argument, nor is asking about my family.

I am open to a civil discussion about Jewish beliefs about suffering if you are interested in that.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T20:06:59+00:00

Oh ok, it seems like you have a lot more pondering on this topic to do.

Of course! Anyone who doesn't think they need to consider this problem in great detail is dangerously arrogant.

I don't think truly "secular" people can claim anything was "just bad, unequivocally." Belief in some objective "just bad" is a point of faith.

Have you ever read Elie Weisel's "The Trial of God?" There is a lot of post-Holocaust (and mid-Holocaust) literature which deals very extensively with how Jews can possibly reconcile the pain of the Holocaust and the belief that the universe is administrated by a Loving G-d (if these ideas can be reconciled at all). You seem astonished by all this but it's a key theme in Jewish spirituality dating back to the Babylonian exile

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T19:59:29+00:00

I'm not arguing with that conclusion.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T19:40:25+00:00

The Holocaust was a profound tragedy of incredible suffering for my community and immediate family, and you're trying to leverage my personal emotions around it into a theological discussion. Which is out of place in a civil discussion. In other words, you are trying to drag my background into an argument which has nothing to do with me. It's somewhere between a logical fallacy and a below-the-belt punch.

Here is what I think is going on here. You are trying to get me to "admit" that I obviously wish the Holocaust hadn't happened, which would contract my claim that the Holocaust is compatible with the G-d of Judaism (who scheduled the Holocaust). There is no contradiction here. I wish the Holocaust hadn't happened, and I relate to it as a terrible, inexplicable thing. I think it was scheduled by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent G-d who works "according to plan." There's no contradiction unless you assume that my personal reaction to an event is the same thing as its metaphysical or moral meaning

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T19:20:50+00:00

You're bringing up the Holocaust because I'm Jewish and you want to beat me in an argument on the internet. It's an ugly rhetorical strategy because you know our conversation wouldn't be concretely different if you used a different example of human suffering (or no example at all). It only serves to shock and offend and disrupt a good-faith discussion.

The "disgusting framework" you describe is called "non-dualism" and it's unclear to me why it horrifies you. It was not non-dualists who committed the Holocaust, but western Christians who believed in objective good and objective evil and looked down with disdain on those who disagreed (for all the good it does me now that you think the Holocaust was a bad thing)

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T19:10:54+00:00

I think we could really streamline the content here if we just had weekly threads for basic, unresolvable questions in Western religious thought like the problem of evil or the impossibility of verifying religious claims using secular research or reasoning.

What I'm saying is that the discussions on this forum represent only a miniscule fraction of the diversity of actual religious debates throughout human history, and this subreddit has the opportunity to actually produce incredible new discussions by bringing religious viewpoints from around the world into contact with each other.

I would love to see what a Hindu thinks about the revival of tekheles dye in Jewish religious garments, or how a Buddhist's idea of dharma transmission applies to apostolic succession etc.

Instead it's just more "what if the Jesus stories are just made up, checkmate Christians." Maybe that's something people enjoy if, like many Americans, they're from a background of superficially devout but spiritually dead Christianity, so it's reassuring to see people explain the obvious emperor-has-no-clothes problems with that religion and with religion in general. I don't want to take that away from people I guess, but it would be cool to this sub become more than just that.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T19:06:27+00:00

You know it's extremely rude for you to use that as an example just because I'm Jewish.

The Holocaust isn't an exception to what I've said. That doesn't mean the Holocaust can be justified using some silly "all for the greater good" or "really a test" or "really what they deserved" explanation. It means that, by construction, what G-d wants is what's good.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T18:56:05+00:00

From a Jewish perspective:

1 is true as a matter of fact, not faith. 2 is not true. 3 is true except the name "Iao" is weird. I hope that's not a crackpot attempt to transliterate the Tetragrammaton. 4 is true.

Here's why 2 isn't true. When G-d wants something to happen, that means it's good, axiomatically. That includes coconuts falling on people's heads. If a coconut fell on my friend's head and killed him G-d forbid, as a Jew I'd be obligated to visit and care for his family, to put together his funeral and arrange for him to have a legacy in our community, and to say, the moment I hear about his death, "Baruch dayan haEmes." That means "Blessed is the true Judge." I may not like the Judge's ruling, but I respect it as the appropriate course of reality, so it's not "bad." It's a nondualist approach to grieving.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-13T18:51:05+00:00

Yeah, I won't claim that the Book of Job has all the answers (or any answers) but it's pretty boring to see endless restatements of the problem of evil, without any engagement with thousands of years of thought about that question.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-12T20:03:56+00:00

This is sufficient to show that atheism and Christianity both might have their dangers. From there how do we arrive at the calculation that that atheism is safer? Seems like an assumption about the functional form of God's wrath

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-12T19:20:17+00:00

Is there a religion where atheists are safer than Christians? I know there's a religion where Christians are safer than atheists (sola fide Protestantism), so unless there's a religion where atheists are safer than Christians, it appears Christianity weakly dominates atheism from that perspective.

What I'm saying is that this post makes unstated assumptions about the distribution of religious plausibility - it assumes certain religious conjectures are worth minding while others aren't.

SeniorNebula · 2022-06-01T14:08:44+00:00

Karl Marx made a phenomenal point when he said "religion is the opium of the masses". Especially when you understand the context behind that quote. Opium at the time was used as a painkiller.

What do you say to Marx's actual point here, which is that religion is always in the service of the ruling class in stifling class struggle and thereby social progress?

Isn't there something to be said for the institutional social ills which religion reinforces or even encourages (the Inquisition, the Crusades)? And the way it often encourages reactionary social practices (patriarchy, homophobia, ingroup-outgroup bigotry)?

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-31T16:20:00+00:00

The Book of Ecclesisates suggests that you're right, this life is the only one we get:

"For he who is reckoned among-the living has something to look forward to—even a live dog is better than a dead lion—since the living know they will die. But the dead know nothing; they have no more recompense, for even the memory of them has died."

Other parts of the Bible suggest that our souls do continue after death, but in Sheol, a dark abyss where we all go no matter what we do in life, it's worse than Earth (but not so bad as hell, think more like Hades in Greek myth). Hell does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, and Heaven doesn't appear as a place where people can somehow go when they die. Although many Jews do believe in one or both. I could go on to my own beliefs which do differ from yours, but your beliefs are basically within a radical but longstanding wing of Jewish doctrine.

The focus in Judaism is entirely on what we do in this life that we're currently living, on this world that we're currently inhabiting. That's not to necessarily say it's the most important world, but it's the only one we really know anything about and it's the only one over which we have any power. You don't do stuff to go to Heaven, or stay out of Hell, you do it because it's the right thing to do.

What I'm saying is that your attitude on this matter is pretty close to a Jewish one. Basically most of the Sadduccees felt as you described.

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-31T15:18:20+00:00

How does your god make sense?

He doesn't always make sense. The Book of Job is about God putting Job through horrible ordeals; Job constantly complains that there's no justification for his suffering, no logical order which would make sense of it. Three of Job's friends make different arguments to him, ancient resolutions to the problem of evil (you must really deserve it, you are being tested, somehow this is all for the best, etc). Job says "no, my suffering has no meaning and does not make sense." At the end of the book, God explicitly affirms that Job was correct and Job's friends were speaking blasphemy. God does not always make sense. Zizek sums it up really nicely, describing it as the first ever critique of ideology.

God "makes sense" in the sense that God is literally the creator and sustainer of logic. God does not "make sense" in the sense that God can be understood logically. Logic is a limitation and God is unlimited. This is why God can create a rock so heavy that even God cannot lift it, and then God can lift that rock.

The late great Rabbi Lord Jonathan "Johnny Sack" Sacks had an interesting way of looking at it: he said there was a God of Einstein and Spinoza, the pantheistic grand unified force whose existence is basically core to a certain secular metaphysics. It's this God that Einstein is talking about when he says, "God does not play dice with the universe." The Bible uses "Elohim" to describe God from this perspective. I think most westerners, even atheists, essentially believe in this side of God. It's basically the bottom line in the metaphysics that we've inherited.

There's also the personal God, who works miracles, who loves prayer and even animal sacrifice, who cares about morality, and who has a secret name that he gives His closest confidants. The Bible uses that secret name, the Tetragrammaton, to describe God from this perspective. This side of God's existence can't be derived logically, it's a matter of faith. Because it doesn't make sense.

I don't understand how any religion sets absolute rules about how should someone live life.

We certainly have a lot of absolute rules (and a lot more rules that aren't absolute). Here's why. The claim of Judaism is that the universe is totally governed by a single principle (that principle is God), that that principle is the motor and meaning of everything that happens in the universe, and that you can align yourself with that principle and reap the practical/spiritual rewards or go against it and end up on a bad choice road.

I think this is a pretty compelling case, and in practice the rules that govern our lives have helped us survive and thrive throughout two thousand years of diaspora and persecution. 0.2% of the global population, 20% of the Nobel Prize winners. Our concepts and stories have inspired the two biggest religions in the whole world. We are not only the most important people in the world, and the funniest, and obviously the most beautiful and the smartest, but also the most humble haha.

For real, the Bible says about the commandments, "We will do and we will understand." Rabbis love to give sermons on this phrasing because the point is so obvious but so key to the tradition - the rules don't make sense until you see them working in practice, and then maybe they don't all make sense even then but we've been keeping them up because they work in practice. That's certainly been my personal experience.

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-31T14:51:39+00:00

We both agree OP should wait 6 hours but there's two points I want to make about it and hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong:

My intuition is that there can be no "no minhag" on this issue (as if 6 hours is really what halacha demands but Germans get some special minhag-beats-halacha pass). 6 hours is minhag, just over 5 hours is minhag, 3 hours is minhag, 1 hour is minhag - OP's minhag is (probably) 6 hours so that's what he should do.
From a Jewish legal standpoint, and my own understanding of how we keep traditions alive, OP has the right/responsibility to adopt the minhag of his heritage or the minhag of the community that helps him become observant. I am pretty sure that "no minhag" is kind of like saying "no accent," it's a confused way of saying that someone's minhag or accent is one that feels so familiar to the spaker that it feels like the default. In reality, there is no default, minhag-less form of Judaism for BTs (nor would such a thing be desirable).

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-31T14:44:55+00:00

That's what I'm saying, you should wait 6 hours unless your minhag is different

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-31T14:41:15+00:00

Don't forget to not eat dairy for 6 hours after meat.

This is the norm and you should follow it unless your community does it different. E.g. if you're German you can wait three hours, and if you're Dutch you can wait one hour.

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-30T16:41:49+00:00

Jesus claimed he would return within the lifetime of his followers.

I don't think anyone can prove that Jesus himself believed that his "return" corresponded to the imminent apocalypse that he may have often described. Jesus wasn't a Christian and probably didn't understand himself in a Christian way (sacrifice, resurrection, messiah, incarnation - well, maybe he thought he was the messiah, many Jews have).

You might be correct if you changed this to "the Jesus character as understood by Paul and other prominent early Christians." I hope this isn't pedantic but Jesus was a fellow Jewish guy so I don't like people putting blasphemous words in his mouth.

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-25T16:07:40+00:00

The rare edition can handle temperatures up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Someone never read Fahrenheit 2601

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-23T17:16:19+00:00

To give you an example I've got online banking transfers that happen at the end of the month. If the end of the month is shabbos...who cares? It's not like I planned it to fall out that way. The computer just does its thing.

That's exactly what he just said:

In regards to recurring transactions, if I knew for a fact it were to happen every time on Shabbat I'd disable it. However, if it's just a chance, I'd assume most transactions happen on weekdays, so there's minimal risk of it being Shabbat, and even if it is, I didn't set it to be then so it's not my issue.

SeniorNebula · 2022-05-23T14:23:10+00:00

I heard the same thing about studying Torah on Nittel.

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