When everything is genocide to you, just response to an attack feels egregious. I suppose the US committed genocide in Iraq. Or in Afghanistan. Innoce...
Yes, I do deeply hate and blame the organization that murders LGBTQ and tortures its own dissidents and indoctrinates its population with virulent ant...
Yet when this happens, as it does repeatedly to victims of islamic terror, you put yourself in a bind: Innocents will die when a country responds mili...
Alter is indeed brilliant. One of the top in the field. I have not read Spinoza but I'm sure I could gain something from it. I'm not partial to panthe...
The Gaza Health ministry only has data -- names, ages, etc. on 22k of the 33k claimed. Israel claims to have killed 13k hamas. Palestinians are not th...
Did you hear about the 14 year Israeli shepherd boy abducted and murdered in the West Bank yesterday? Righteous palestinian rage, am I right? Those Je...
Congo, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan. Gaza Health ministry has revised the death tolls downwards to ~22k with 13k of those being Hamas accord...
What I mean by "universalism" is, imo, revealed in Jesus's dialogues/arguments with the Pharisees. I found that Jesus's views were often (but not alwa...
I'm Jewish (because my mom is) and raised conservative and reform. Now I'm drawn towards reconstructionism but it's a small movement and not particula...
If you can condemn 10/7 as an atrocity it then presumably follows that Israel is justified in striking back at Hamas. So you're ok with Israel using m...
Yes, the simplistic nickelodeon morality crew that condemns those who breach a neighbor's fence, enters his home, murders a family and sets fire to a ...
I don't think it's our biggest problem it's just pervasive. It's more than discourse. Church and synagogue services get interrupted here frequently by...
I agree that self-criticism is good. You know the analogy of the frog in hot water? If you throw a frog into hot water he'll quickly escape, but if yo...
Today a 10 month old Israeli boy, Shalhevet Pass, was shot in the head by a Palestinian terrorist. The secular Palestinian Authority will of course be...
When was the last time you saw a crowd of angry Jews surrounding and protesting in front of a mosque and disrupting their services? Where are the Cana...
Ok -- I'll add some more context. Moses likely stutters. He is "slow of speech" so it's a reasonable inference to make (and one made by religious trad...
I quite enjoyed this story! The lesson is that most disabilities can be accommodated by society and that the disabled can serve a role in realistic pr...
I don't understand how God communicating through dreams "flies in the face" of his nature or "runs into empirical problems." The Bible is our primary ...
On the contrary, Scripture (Genesis for sure, possibly Exodus?) does very clearly describe God as communicating through dreams. It is characteristic o...
How do we differentiate between hallucination or spontaneous mystical experience and God? Could God not speak through those means? He's described as c...
I'm not talking about abstract impersonal questions. I'm talking about questions like, say, how do we understand/frame disability? Such content is rev...
Because such truths lead to life and self-actualization while others lead to death. The question is beyond rationality, but an approach must be chosen...
Despite the evidence? I don't see where evidence factors into it. Did God speak to Moses? Are we to consider the evidence for and against such a claim...
It is a personal issue. If I'm looking for an answer to a major life question about my being I don't want to be told e.g. "well it could be A, or mayb...
There's surely a historical aspect, but it's also just my honest conclusion. I'll break from my religious roots in some ways, but not in this one. It'...
The gods could be quite vicious to each other, but there was always a number of them and no one had a monopoly on truth. Polytheism allows the freedom...
Yes certain things are absolute in the Bible, such as man being made in the divine image and that God's creation is good. There is no 'do not kill', b...
Before the Isaac episode, God tells Abram that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars above and that "he trusted in the Lord, and reckoned it ...
I remember reading Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception & Perennial Philosophy years ago and he comes to a similar conclusions regarding our inherent c...
I found that the rational inquiry for ethics and values didn't help me understand my own place in the world at all. Even if I did get attached to a ne...
The Bible is not an ideological monolith. Different works present different takes on the subject. Why would we expect ideological uniformity from over...
Good post. I have a few, minor comments. There are poems and fragments of older texts dating back centuries earlier perhaps as early as the 11th centu...
I love the Bible but I don't often engage organized religion in person. When I was younger I was deeply concerned with morality and ethics and trying ...
In which man stealing is unequivocally prohibited which should have been enough to shut down the institution of American slavery, yet somehow I notice...
Personally, I want some things to be absolute, for example the dignity/essential goodness of human life and the way that disability is understood. I t...
Yes, the earliest sources generally dating to the 50s. If we're being generous the late 40s in the case of James. So roughly 15 years between the deat...
Such a meeting did happen and canon was debated, but we now understand that Jewish canon formation was a process rather than a single fixed event. Cer...
No, I was a philosophy major. We thought about big ideas. Like how dumb it is to try to draw a definitive line in this conflict where "everything begi...
Tell me, O wise one, when does it all begin? Who threw the first stone to injure the other? Who destroyed the kingdoms of the other without just cause...
He does have more popular works, but he is a serious scholar. I browse /academicbiblical from time to time and here's what one PhD in the New Testamen...
Ehrman is one of the top biblical scholars (biblical historians?) and he tows pretty mainline, well-researched positions so I don't think his views ar...
Like you mentioned earlier, there's a difference between how you treat the individual in the moment versus our philosophical ruminations about a certa...
In the Hebrew Bible, they use a few different terms for "man" or "male." The word zachar means male. The word gever means man - it's root g-v-r, ties ...
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