Judaism, Xtianity and a new age principle
Having tried to understand the Buddhist connection to the Holocaust, let me also emphasize an important critique of Jewish religion, culture, related to the exclusionist ideology depicted (in the previous post). Judaism, like Hinduism, is a religion based on birth. This is a very dubious and ultimately destructive way to do religion.
It leaves the suspicion you are not doing religion at all, but something else. The principle is that only those born of a Jewish mother are Jewish. What a ghastly way to do religion. Made worse by the myth that God created a special covenant out of this. This is bullshit in motion for over two millennia. And it generated some powerful enemies, so powerful that we end up with the near ultra in hate violence generated against Jews. It is probable that this eerie malevolence actually made the problem worse: Jews have rejected assimilation and even made their own state, in which non-Jews have problem status.
Christians have a little more breathing room, but I think at this poinnt they should consider the nature of modernity and create a religion of passage into a new age.
The issue of Islam may be the same, but that is not clear. Islam, btw, tried to correct the idiocies of Judaism, and Xtianity, but the result is itself strange. We should defer the question of Islam on the grounds that its history contains mysteries till misunderstood. In any case, it is a job for Muslims.
If we study the era just after the Enlightenment we see a flood of Jews assimilating into Gentile culture, the case of Marx being one good example.
It is almost futile to propose this now, but I think the pendulum will swing back again: I think Jews and Christians both are at risk from the epochal tide that is moving beyond Axial Age religions. I fear the buddhists were roped into the Axial Age religious garbage disposal process in motion since the Reformation’s aftermath. I didn’t invent/propose this, so I can’t say in what way it is true, or whether you can defy it for another millennium.
I wouldn’t bother: see the handwriting on the wall: it is like saying spring shouldn’t come. Jews and Christians should study the ways they can enter into remade secular form of religion, if not no religion at all.
Please note the difference between Jews and Christians: the latter can drop a set of beliefs, while the formed must drop a form of social identity. Let me hasten to note that I am ignorant here, guessing. But I suspect that Jews, pace the Holocaust are marked men. If you are a Finkelstein, take twenty four hours to become a Findlay on the way ato becoming a… and skulk away into the new age of new men. Argue all you want, but delay of centuries will get still more people killed.
You have powerful enemies, deal with it. And help idiots stuck in the whole Old Testament which is slowing moving from sacred text to Axial Age rubbish.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 