Judaism

My Jewish Atheism

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As with Emile Durkheim, for me, divinity is manifested in community and we are a holy community, as all good communities are. I am religious because I belong to a religious community, which I love, not because I believe in supernatural beings. There is only one God, as our tradition suggests, and we atheists don’t believe in it (how strange that people typically genderize God as male, as if God could also have a race or nationality). Even without God, I am a proud, practicing, affiliated, and active Jew and congregational member, having had a bar mitzvah and a Jewish wedding, regularly attending services and serving on committees, as well as engaging in Torah and Talmud study, and my son having had a bar mitzvah and hopefully, sometime in the future, a Jewish wedding.

Christianity

Inherit the Earth: Stay in the City

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Christian community has an urgent role in this history. On the one hand, no church can magically separate itself from the spiritual disease of the wider society. If we could, we would be a cult; we would not be God’s love for a whole world, but against it. Jesus saw this. Stay here in the city, he told his disciples. Here in the church we already have the laboratory set up to help with civilization’s great test.

Rethinking Religion

Term Limits for Popes and Queens of England?

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And if the office, the function, is indeed important, as arguably both the papacy and the British crown and the Venezuelan state are, then surely they need office holders in good health? Should not term limits apply to all? So thank you, Benedict, for freeing all your successors from this chain of office, for offering them and yourself an honourable rest. Long may the world benefit from the prayers that you have promised to offer from your retirement.

Islam

Neocons Try, And Fail, To Crush Lead Organization Fighting Against War With Iran

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The war over war with Iran has many battlefronts. Inside Washington, the battle line is between a small coalition of peace and security, non-proliferation and religious groups opposing war and favoring a peaceful solution to the stand off with Iran, and a well-funded war machine comprising neoconservative organizations who believe war with Iran should have started years ago.

Judaism

Torah Commentary- Perashat Behar: Learning to Let Go

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Thus, one can say that keeping the sabbatical shemitta serves to realign our relationship to the world, to sever our relationships from mere instrumentality; it demands from us recognition of the Other as an independent self, even if we think we are acting in that Other’s best interest.

Interfaith

American Muslims Are Moderate and Peaceful… Who Knew?

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It’s no surprise to interfaith activists such as me that interfaith dialogue and relationship building between groups can pave the way towards peace and prosperity. Americans of all faiths would do well to remember this important fact: ignorance breeds hate, and who wants to be ignorant?

Culture

Unwilling to Listen, Unable to Hear

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The cruelty of U.S. policy and actions toward these Muslims is beyond reckoning. Clearly the U.S. is not listening to any sort of moral voice in its execution of such policy and action. Clearly the U.S. is not heeding the misery of these prisoners.

Politics & Society

Sitting Shiva After the Boston Marathon Bombing

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Why does this shit keep happening? It seems like it’s every week now, another tragedy. Bombings, shootings, hurricanes. A paralyzed Congress, unable to do anything to stop it, swept under by the tide of what sometimes feels like a malevolent force. A force that targets schoolchildren; that preys on the poor and the sick and the elderly; that ravages our ecosystems and decimates wild species; that literally cuts the legs out from under people. Why does this shit keep happening? Is it God? A cruel and sadistic God? Or is that too anthropomorphic? Is it just collective human failure combined with what Albert Camus called “the gentle indifference of the universe?” Or are those two ultimately the same thing? Maybe the ultimate cruelty is the gentle indifference of a God who sits back, the ice clinking in its glass, and allows us to fail.

Interfaith

The Price of a State Religion

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The benefits of a separation of church and state are innumerable and undeniable. What Americans have never experienced firsthand is perhaps the most dangerous impact of establishing a state religion: persecution of religious minorities. Muslim countries unfortunately have fallen into this trap all too well. From Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and virtually every Muslim nation in between, so-called Islamic laws have crushed the rights of non-Muslims to the extent that those laws no longer resemble true Quranic teachings. The reality is that when one religion is preferred by the government over another, and preferential treatment is meted out to that religious group in terms of even school prayer or invocations, the result can be dangerous and terrifying.