I liked the answer that these are fairy tales and not part of a religion for adults. But there is more to it than that.

These are simply not Jewish beliefs. Some Jews believe in heaven but it is not a central tenet in Judaism as it is in Christianity. Jews don’t believe in hell either.

“Because there are Jewish scientist and doctors Jews do not oppose free inquiry. (Really, well maybe so and maybe not, but it certainly does not follow.)”

This doesn’t make sense if I am a Jew and a scientist why doesn’t it follow that Judaism doesn’t limit scientific inquiry?

Again, and here I’ll repeat what moderate said above:

“Everybody knows that many American Jews identify so strongly with the state of Israel that they have managed to further corrupt our political system with their influence.” Posted by RacerX, on September 28th, 2008 at 4:27 pm EDT

Say what you will this is antisemitism in its purest form. David Duke could have written this and has.

I know that you think you have a “higher consciousness” which means you have your own private mystical religion.

You attack other religions because they are different from your own. It’s a case of pot calling the kettle black with you.

btw: try reading more than one book. Ferguson isn’t the only writer worth reading.

It’s all just propaganda with you Toby: like your book reviews. Two significant works (Bondage of the Mind by Gold and The War of the World by Ferguson)–significant in the sense that they have the potential to free up some bondage of misunderstanding and harmful beliefs that afflict many of our species–in a way that is actually accessible to the average intelligent person. If someone went entirely by what you wrote, they probably wouldn’t even bother to take a look at these works. Of course if they bothered to take the slightest look-see they would see hundreds of positive reviews by a diverse number of sources, which quite contradict your hierarchical judgement, and misrepresentation of both their content and significance.

I say look for yourself, you may benefit. I have enriched my own historic understanding greatly by these two books. (The Toby I have come to know will respond to this by some meaningless smart-alec remark that actually means nothing. Something that has the same relationship to real meaning as insult sitcoms have to real humor.)

I will agree with you that comparing miseries is in most senses quite lame. I emphasis the genocidal attack on the Armenians because it has never really be acknowledged by the Turks (to my knowledge) in any official sense. One really doesn’t know how to feel about this issue because certainly none of the present-day Turks are responsible. And in a sense the recognition of the nature of these atrocities will have a not exactly salubrious effect on the dynamism of Turkish culture. I guess the real question is, “Is Turkey capable of similar actions presently?” With the advanced in world scrutiny I have hopes that Turkey will not be willing to display such a bestial aspect of itself to the civilized world. Perhaps the prospect of being a member of club-Europe will be enough to stifle any future crimes of this sort.

There is no doubt that persons as well as nations lose a certain dynamism when they begin to see clearly though the lies they have been telling themselves. They tend to get depressed. Is it really a case, as Cox said that, “The examined life is not worth living”? (Of course he meant this in a truly esoteric sense entirely relative to the possibility of attaining not just knew knowledge by of actually enhancing or extending one’s conscious awareness through insight (or as some may think of it–the movement of a previously untapped energy into new neural territory.) Or rather, is it just such a realization and expansion that allows the lies to come to an end, without stress or neurotic knee-jerk defensive reactions–without the fear and clinging to the identity provided to one automatically by the circumstances of one’s life.

This will be my last post on this thread, the people I wanted to read it have or are, and this is all I have to say in public for now. I wish you well and hope that you are soon unexpectedly delighted.

More racer nonsense.

Who cares what they thought? Does racerx think he is wrong? Of course, yet he is wrong.

What people think about themselves is besides the point.

There is nice Hebrew proverb on the subject:

“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.” King James translation

Proverb 21:2

Try reading baout the way the tortures the Romanian fascists inflicted on the Jews before they killed them.

It’s pretty lame comparing degrees of agony.

The point again is that human beings are killers and they will use whatever ideology they have if and when they have a mind to kill. Their excuse can be religon, reason, science or the creation of a better world. It doesn’t matter.

The truth or falsity of its premises not withstanding, religion is hardly ever the primary cause of murder and in many cases religious priniciples can be the antidote.

RacerX responds:

You need to look it up in the EOD, the full version, and read the whole definition of the word.

It most certainly applies exactly as I used it.

Who cares what the New York Times review is, read the book and decide for yourself.

I am not so much concerned with the themes and conclusions Ferguson comes to as the facts he brings to light concerning the ongoing pogroms in Eastern Europe and the decimation of the Ukrainians by the Bolsheviks. Also I was amazed to find the true terror experienced by the Armenians at the hands of the Turks. To me, this was the most horrible instance of genocide in history–because of what I must imagine was the subjective experience of the women who were dumped in the Syrian desert at the end of the railroad, after the men and boys had been murdered before their eyes and the pretty girls sold off to harems and pimps. What happened to these hundreds of thousands of women? Did some survive by eating rotting corpses? Did they all just die of exposure and attack by beasts? I guess no one really knows, but I can’t imagine it was any kind of quick death.

I remember reading somewhere a statement by some Nazi official adulating the high moral character of the men in those death brigades that followed the Wehrmacht into Russia. Now I may have some factors wrong here but I am just attempting to point you at something that is not so easy to see, and it has very little to do with the actual specifics of the situation I describe. Anyhow these death brigades basically spent their days killing unarmed prisoners. Apparently they were commanded by men who had been doctors and professors and what not. This Nazi official was lauding the fact that men, men like these could spend all day in such an occupation then retire to their home and hearth where they where the most civilized and caring folk. He was extolling this virtue–these men had such faith in their own goodness and rightness–such purity–that they could commit any form of atrocity and remain a pure uncontaminated citizen of the Reich or whatever they were called.

This is like a microcosm of the whole problem.

Do you think the Nazis thought they were evil?

I’m going to appear to change the subject for a moment:
Recently I heard a radiolab recording about self-deceit. Toward the end of it is this little bit about these psychologists who developed a test to measure the degree to which one deceives oneself. This test is apparently made of questions that are true for everyone but somewhat embarrassing to acknowledge. Now I don’t know how they determined who was lying and who wasn’t but, disregarding that for the moment–because this is really not what we are talking about anyway–there seemed to be a direct correlation between the degree to which a person deceives themselves and their success in life and their happiness. That is: the more adept the individual at self-deception the more successful and happy they were.

Now I am going to take a leap here (irony) and say that this is the same mechanism at work as the Nazi official was lauding as the proof of the unassailable virtue of these mass murderers.

And how about this for far-out (more irony) it was exactly that he was very bad at self-deception that caused Freud to poison himself with negativity in his final days–even before the cancer of the jaw.

Because not lying to oneself causes depression.
Unless you have direct experience of a higher reality.
Which Freud most certainly did not have.

What can we say would characterize this higher reality, so you can tell it is the real thing? Obligatory compassion. You will, (along with a quantum leap in consciousness, and probably the inability to speak or think in words, be filled with a vast compassion for all mankind, including yourself up to the moment of your illumination–because you will be able to see directly the truly impoverish nature of your conscious awareness until that moment. Because in the real world all the little imaginary and trite distinctions you make between you and the other desolve in this compassion, and in this real world people are still to this day taken up alive into heaven–sort of shown around, and after that it’s too late–you won’t ever be able to take this life and death fear based paranoid us against them struggle crap seriously anymore. Which is not to say that for instance, some Roman aristocrat won’t decide to have you village burned because they fear you may someday attack Rome again.

This is the only way I know of to be able to stop lying to yourself and not fall into negativity, and oddly enough, institutions that profess to have the same type of interest at heart, like religious organizations, and psychological, or pharmacological, or even codified spiritual movements, provide the opposite of access to these realms. If you want to enter the high security area of the prison your consciousness is already in just sign up for Zen, or Yoga, or Tantra, or Sufism or Kaballah or any organized pretenders to consciousness.

Now how about a little more character assassination from the peanut gallery (this is how they always respond to this type of info–sure am glad I’m RacerX and not some guy named HeyZeus.) Do a little web search and come up with irrelevant data that has similar keywords, like you did with the word nostrificate. You guys who have made it their duty to respond to me do know that I am not writing for you don’t you?

I am with Moderate on this one.

It’s funny that Racer who is scapegoating Jews thinks that he is being scapgoated.

Also the idea of Freud being a failed human being is another ridiculous Racer notion.

He wishes he would have accomplished one hundreth of what Freud accomplished.

Methinks Racer is a terminally ill with jealousy. He is jealous of Jews, jealous of Freud and probably jealous of his own father and siblings if he has any.

What a loser!

From now on all wars will be more catastrophic than in the past because the weapons used are more potent but that doesn’t change anything.

Communism and Nazism both none religious ideologies had the idea that in order to build a society based on “scientific principles” they could destroy any and all people who stood in the way.

Islamicism is deeply influenced by these ideologies.

“My argument is not bogus at all, and has not resorted to personal aspersions as yours is forced to do.
You reply is either ignorant or obfuscatory. You are a Jew hating bigot either that or unable to understand the drivel you compose.

“I know you would love to think that I hate Jews, because it would serve to perpetuate you delusions. Well rather than nostrificating your errors I leave you to them.”
Nostrificating is a term that doesn’t apply. In any case it isn’t much in the US which tells me you are either a Brit or a Canadian.
Doesn’t matter it’s you writing that shows you to be a Jew hater, not I.

I am familiar with War of the World by Ferguson and he doesn’t support your argument.

Fergusson writes counterfactual history, sometime it is good and sometime is pretty farfetched.

Here is what the New Yorker Review said about his book:

“Ferguson’s eight-hundred-page reevaluation of the Second World War presents itself as a grand theory about ethnic conflict, the end of empire, and the postwar triumph of the East. The exact contours of the theory, however, remain unclear. Ferguson argues that the central story of the twentieth century is “the descent of the West,” but he never really clarifies what “the West” means – Russia sometimes qualifies, sometimes not, depending upon what point Ferguson is trying to make. Ferguson is a skilled storyteller, and he offers many striking reflections on the bloodiest years of the past century, including a compelling analysis of appeasement. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is marred by sweeping judgments and jarring contradictions. A number of odd moves – such as the grouping of Hoovervilles with Soviet labor and German concentration camps – point up another conspicuous shortcoming: Ferguson’s failure to make sense of America’s power.

His book on the history of Banking in Europe, on the other hand, is quote good.
“Ferguson, Niall (1999). The house of Rothschild: the world’s banker, 1849-1999. New York, N.Y: Viking.”

Finally you wrote, especially the bile, about Jewish history makes me think that you anything but a hideous bigot.

Jews have been here for thousands of years and they will be here as long as there is a human species. Get used to it. You will sleep better.

“I said that the Nazis and Communists and other like them were not religious ideologies and were responsible for many more murders than all the religious wars combined.”

RacerX responds:

The idea that a combined tally is anything other than a quantitative difference is childish and misleading. Not to mention that the final chapter may well not have been written in the case of deaths caused by “religiously” motivated wars.

Only the outer form of the lies changed, the dynamics of motivating a person to slay another with which they have no personal grievance remain constant whether cloaked in the numinous or mundane. The first thing necessary is to distinguish them as the other, then as less than really human (in the sense that they the real humans {the chosen ones} are human.) Had they the population and the means I expect the same would have happened in religious wars in the past. The thing that separates them is the means to do so. For instance, the Jews could have been said to be a relatively peace-loving people while they had no other capability. Now–not so much, (turning a young American girl into dog food with a bulldozer because she was protesting their Palestinian policies, tsk tsk) Oh, but then you will just claim this never happened, or maybe the driver didn’t see her–right.)

I may have played a little loose with the numbers of persons murdered last century but if you bother to do the research you will find the rest of what I wrote pretty sound.

I also know that to respond to the accusations you made will only serve to lend validity to them to the bigoted mind–this is just a fact. Bigotry flow in all directions.

My argument is not bogus at all, and has not resorted to personal aspersions as yours is forced to do.

I was not sure about the scapegoat thing that’s why I used the word believe–meaning to guess–which is what beliefs are–guesses (mostly stupid guesses based on nonsense if you are talking about religion.) However my guess was not entirely incorrect– the scapegoat ritual was largely a middle easten thing, but so what, you chose the most irrelevant part of my expression because everything else is accurate–with the possible exception of the Kazars having been Turks which I noted I was not sure of but which was correct, everything else I have written can be verified.

I know you would love to think that I hate Jews, because it would serve to perpetuate you delusions. Well rather than nostrificating your errors I leave you to them.

I suggest you read War of the World by Ferguson for a little history lesson of your own, regarding what occurred in the past century.

No, you don’t see, and you don’t know much, racerx.

No one said you supported the Nazis or the Communists (not just Hitler and Stalin –that would be too easy), I said that the Nazis and Communists and other like them were not religious ideologies and were responsible for many more murders than all the religious wars combined.

However, since you don’t know much about history this will be lost on you.

Your argument is bogus and based on nothing but your own Jew hatred.

btw: the Jews did not invent the scapegoat, but like all ancient societies used it.

Read “The Golden Baugh: A Study Of Magic And Religion” by J G Frazer

Your are a hopeless malcontent, racer.

Everything you said above is a bunch of malarkey.

Freud was (despite his muddy insights) a failed human being. And if I am not mistaken the whole idea of a scapegoat is a Jewish concept. Some of you have even attempted to make a scapegoat of me. It’s funny. I know Jews always harken back to the Nazi attempt to murder European Jews by industrial methods to attack anyone finding real fault with their fantasies. They have no other resort since their beliefs are so ridiculous and untrue (along with all of the other established religions.) This slaughter differs from what the Jews themselves claimed they did in ancient times only in that they utilized industrial methods. I believe the old Israelites took pride in murdering not only all the people, man woman and child of some they conquered but also their animals. These were probably only dreams of revenge, though most believers now take them as historical fact.

In fact, and you are certainly welcome to check this, The first industrial scale death camps came about when one Mr. Frankel reported to Mr. Stalin that it would be a simple matter to turn the work camps he was in charge of into death camps by working the inmates to death and beating them and exposing them to the elements. A wonderful development for disposing of some 25 million human beings. Frankel was a Jew. Does that matter? I say it doesn’t because being a Jew is a fantasy. Every primitive religion claims that it is of the chosen people, even the only real human beings. Divide and conquer. You can argue the relative merits and faults of any subset of human being you care to–it will always be relative and always infinitely fungible, and no doubt you will feel that the side you happen to be on is right. It’s time to wake up from this childish and toxic fantasy. It was not the lack of Judaism that caused the murder of the 60 million or so in the 20ith century, and it wasn’t science that caused it either.

The actual fact is that Jews are Arabs, except for those who converted like the Kazars (who I think were Turks) this can be traced through their mitochondria DNA. The fact is that the Jews are descendents of Cannites just like the Palestinians. Of course most Jews are of “mixed blood” (in itself a misnomer since the whole concept of race is dubious at best) much like the American blacks. I know the Jews think they are special–so does everyone else–that’s one of the things that makes everyone common as dirt–they’re special.

There was a time in the Eastern Europe when there were many little German enclaves that lived amongst the different nations there. They largely retained German as a language and kept themselves mostly distinct and separate from the Latvians or whoever inhabited the country they were in. They held themselves as special and separate and as I understand it dealt differently with their own in business and socially than they did with the native populations. Guess what? From time to time the native populations rose up and slaughtered the Germans that lived separately among them. Even though they existed peacefully and worked industriously, and prospered economically perhaps more than the nationals. These are the people you see in those old war films who are weeping with joy as the Nazis marched in. Time to end the cycle even if it means some giving up their soothing fantasies of being special and having a partisan idiot for a god. In my opinion one of the worst things that ever happened to the “West” was the adoption of the Old Testament as gospel. They should have stuck with “Don’t do things to others you wouldn’t want to happen to you, and “God is Love.” At least then humans wouldn’t have to travel a hundred billion light years and enact the labors of Hercules just in order to get to the place where they would have started as far as enlightenment is concerned on any sane planet.

I think you’re defining “intermarriage” rather oddly. Either that or your statistics are wrong.

About 50% of Jews marry non-Jews. I’d be VERY surprised in anything approaching 50% of Christians marry non-Christians. And I don’t think that a Presbyterian, say, marrying a Methodist, would be considered an “intermarriage” by most people.

Racer is doing what Jew haters have done for centuries, they pick on the weak and vulnerable Jews because the can’t go after the more powerful forces that is oppressing them.

Any way, Mark, tell me how racerx’s comment is not antisemitic?

“Everybody knows that many American Jews identify so strongly with the state of Israel that they have managed to further corrupt our political system with their influence.” Posted by RacerX, on September 28th, 2008 at 4:27 pm EDT

All the classic antisemitic ideas are here.

I don’t know what he believes. All I have to go on are his words.

He says that reason without defining it is opposed to religion, and that religion leads to hatred of other people.

He evidently doesn’t know how much non religious people have used reason to justify their hatreds.

He should read Freud on this issue. He too hated religion but didn’t fool himself that reason will save us from out darker forces.

- Mark

Firstly, you are not Jewish and have no first hand acquaintance with Jewish culture.

Secondly, The Hebrew Bible is not the same as the Christian Bible and especially not the Koran and for any one to insist that they are is already saying something fanciful.

Christianity puts its emphasis on the Gospels and the Koran reject the Torah as an untrue version of the “true revelation found in the Koran.”

Finally, the kind of reason you are trying to peddle has been responsible for more murders in the 20th century than all the killings in the religious wars since antiquity.

Marxists alone killed more than a hundred million people and the Nazis also people who rejected the “Old Testament” killed between twenty five and thirty million including the systematic murder using “rational means of execution” through the assistance of modern methods of technology between five and six million Jews.

Moreover the Muslim Jihadists have been as influenced by Nazi Jew hatred as by the Koran. The whole Middle East has been infected by Nazi and Communist doctrine going back to the 1920’s.

Trying doing some research on the topic before you start spouting nonsense. Religion may be fanciful, but it less deadly than modern totalitarian systems based on “reason.”

The rational utopian fairy tales they are trying to impose on the world are just as imaginary as the religious ones except that they make on room for individual conscience and are ready to use murder as a means to achieving their goals.

In the Jihadists are more like the secular totalitarians than like traditional Muslims.

As for your idea that “there are no Jews” this is really offensive. I suppose the millions of Jews killed by Hitler were not Jews they were just dressed in Jewish costumes.

You are indeed a bigot and a stupid one at that.

Now go away.