Mon 13 Dec 2010
We Are Devo (id of any sense)
Posted by anaglyph under Atheism, Religion, Skeptical Thinking, Strange Lands, WooWoo
[13] Comments
The area where I’m staying in Los Angeles has a large Orthodox Jewish population. I’m quite fond of experiencing diversity in my surroundings but I have to say that I find being among strong religious communities rather off-putting. It emphasises for me the way that religion is a kind of mass delusion that encourages people to do very silly things.
For example: the Talmud states that, as a devout Jew you should ‘Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you’ and Jewish men are strongly recommended not to walk more than four cubits with their head uncovered. To this end, I see many local men in this neighbourhood wearing the small skull cap called a kippah (or yarmulke) as they go about their business.
Yesterday while I was in the supermarket, I noticed a guy wearing a kippah which must have been pretty much the most minimal thing you could put on your head and get away with calling a ‘head covering’. It was not much more than the size of a Ritz cracker, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that he bent down to take something off a lower shelf, I doubt I would have seen it at all.
The problem I have with this kind of thing is the way that humans have decided to interpret an edict from the Holy Scripture to suit their own, human, purposes. Followers of many religions propose that something is The Word of God and then seem comfortable with adding as many human caveats and qualifications as they see fit. They act like disobedient children, who, when asked to do something they don’t like, interpret it to suit their own agendas. Where is there any kind of rigor in this way of thinking? It is yet another example of the countless double-standards that riddle religious doctrine. ((Not that I’m advocating fundamentalism, you understand, but at least the logic of it is coherent.))
I’m betting that the original intention of the Talmud was that you should wear a proper head covering like a hat or a scarf. ((Which, even in itself, is a berserk religious instruction that makes little rational sense.)) It’s obviously a pain in the ass to wear a hat all the time, so someone, somewhere got the idea that they could interpret the ruling a little more loosely, and a generous head covering became a cap, and a cap became the kippah we usually see today. The ridiculous little cheese cracker that I saw yesterday seems to me to be the most grudging acceptance of religious commitment. It prompted me to wonder why, instead of wearing the daft thing at all, the guy didn’t just go bare-headed and pretend that the supermarket was less than four cubits from his house. As far as I can see, it’s exactly the same kind of logic.
It does actually make sense, especially in a sunny deserty place like the middle east, to wear a hat. But a sensible hat, not a ridiculous apologetic formality of a hat. Actual real things on high, like the sun, command a certain amount of respect; it’s just that substituting an angry, beardy man that you’ve just invented, for a physical object that can actually kill you, is beyond me.
Yes – at least the Ancient Egyptian pantheon was understandable.
JR: You have to watch those beardy men.
That Ritz-wearing Jew above sure looks like an atheist to me.
He certainly looks slightly crackers.
To follow me you must wear a bondage outfits, so say Malach
You know, I think there is something wrong with your keyboard Malach. Did you take the keys off to clean them and put them back in the wrong order?
Haha. No, Queen Willy – if he’d done that his comments would make more sense.
A great many of my Jewish friends eat bacon, in fact an ex girlfriend and I used to have cooked breakfasts every weekend for years. Never in front of the parents of course, as even at the age of 40 or so they were still naughty children…
It’s a bit like vegetarians wearing leather shoes.
It’s important to realise a difference between a culture and a religion though, and in the Jewish community it is a rather blurred line. Many Jews are in fact atheists but when you’re having Shabbas with them it is not readily apparent! The guy was probably just worried he’d bump into his parents at the supermarket.
As for religion it’s always bent to the needs of man, after all who else invented it? Where else is ‘God’ described apart from in the works of mankind? Look at the line “God created man in his own image.” A more honest interpretation would be: “Man created God in his own image.”
It must have been an important turning point when man stopped worshipping the Sun and began worshipping himself. Needless to say this approach has proven somewhat popular, and without it a few secular institutions like Hollywood wouldn’t exist either.
The King
P.s. Royalty is different btw, we have a right to rule, God given or otherwise.
I’m not sure I buy the concept of a secular Jew. I know several people who propose to be such a thing, but they aren’t at all. They’re just what I’d call ‘part time’ religious. In fact, I have never met an atheist Jew that I know of. I’m sure there are such beings, but I’d be curious if they still identify as being ‘Jewish’.
I worked a couple of years ago with an Israeli woman who came from three generations of atheists. Her grandparents moved from Russia to Israel, I think to avoid being persecuted for holding religious beliefs they didn’t actually share.
They moved to Israel to avoid pressure to hold religious beliefs? Interesting choice of venue!
Did the woman you worked with identify as ‘Jewish’ though, or simply as an Israeli? In my mind they appear as two different things (although I guess they might not for most Israelis).
What I’m interested in here is finding a person who was born Jewish and who still calls themselves Jewish who is a complete atheist (and therefore does not practise any kind of Jewish religious ritual)
Cary Grant was a lot darker than I ever imagined.