Secret Jewish Superpowers?
Posted: September 29, 2011 Filed under: Religion | Tags: evil, jew, political Leave a commentSo, I do a search on Jewish Thinking, and what I come up with is a large number of anti-Semitic sites. I can sum up these sites for you:
1. Jews are evil
2. Jews are inbred
3. The world is pretty much controlled by Jews. We have Obama in our pocket (if you didn’t know).
4. We’re murderers, thieves, powerful & corrupt politicians
5. All of our political organizations are whiny, crying people that are seeking attention / complaining whining enough to finally be heard by people in power who are listening to these political groups (which confuses me, I thought we WERE the ones in power according to #3).
So, here’s the deal. I have no idea where this is coming from. I would like to be enlightened. The only Jews I know are good people that just go to synagogue and pray for their country and for the rest of the world to live in peace. I can’t lie and say that I understand what is happening in Israel, but my experience with Jews is not what I read about online. Far from it, it’s the opposite. Now, that said, I’m sure some Jews are bad. Some <insert any group name here> are bad too. That doesn’t make the entire group bad.
I would like it if someone could list off a few Jewish Terrorist organizations. I’m actually curious if there are any. Take this as a challenge. Can you list any? Don’t say Israel. Terrorist organizations, I define, by not being a military. Military organizations attack military targets. Terrorist organizations kill civilians, basically for political reasons, or just to get their name in the news. Feel free to correct me.
Sorry for bringing up such a *touchy* topic, I just don’t understand where these views come from. I’d like more info.
THanks.
So I ate a Frisco today
Posted: September 27, 2011 Filed under: Religion | Tags: beef, cheese, eat, frisco, jew Leave a commentI’ve decided it must have been some kind of test, and probably I failed it. I always fail these kinds of tests. Let’s go over the entire story. It starts off easy enough. It starts with me, forgetting to bring my lunch. Fairly harmless. So, after working late, 2pm rolls around, and I’m fairly hungry. I decide…surely I’ve earned eating out. I rarely ever eat out, so today is the day! Spicy chicken from Wendy’s! Woohoo! Sure, it’s not Kosher meat, but it doesn’t have cheese on it, and ..well…I like Spicy Chicken and it falls into my current religious diet. I haven’t specifically sworn off of meat, or onto Kosher meat, I just don’t eat pork, and I don’t eat meat and cheese together. So, spicky chicken is just fine!
Now, I start on my way and as soon as I turn onto the main street….completely backed up. We’re not going anywhere! No problem! I know where another Wendy’s is (every good Wendy’s addict does)!!!! So I make a turnaround and head the opposite direction! Now, only slightly irritated, I’m back on track. Until I look in my rear view mirror and see….you guessed it..a police officer. Not that I have anything against police officers, I just don’t care for them driving directly behind me! Keeping in mind that I NEVER speed intentionally, the only time really that I’m ever above the speed-limit, is by complete accident.
The Atheism religion
Posted: September 26, 2011 Filed under: Religion | Tags: atheist, religion 6 CommentsIt’s a religion, right? THey believe in evolution, millions of years old chimp bones that they know nothing about really. Isn’t that faith? Isn’t it true that they have to have God in order to denounce him? I mean, without God, there is no Atheism, because..who are you saying doesn’t exist? Why even waste time talking about it at all? And, how much exactly does an atheist think about or spend talking about God? Reading religious books in order to be able to refute them?
AT first, I thought that I couldn’t refute most of Atheism, or evolutionism, because I’m just not an expert in that field. But the truth is, isn’t there a problem with founding your religious beliefs on science? Science doesn’t actually prove anything, per se. It is about coming up with a theory and trying to disprove that theory. Over time, you decide that it must be some percentage of truthful if noone has been able to disprove it after all this time, but does that really PROVE anything? Or is it that everything you believe in may have simply not been disproven yet? Let’s go ahead and talk about neutrinos. I’m not one to use a single solitary thing to prove a point. Understand that this is only one bit of information and in no way proves anything. In most cases, you need multiple pieces of ‘proof’ to really prove something.
Can God create a rock he cannot lift?
Posted: September 24, 2011 Filed under: Religion | Tags: god, lift, rock 1 CommentSo, if you’ve read my other posts, you know I went to a debate recently where an atheist was involved. To be honest, this question didn’t come up, and I’m rather surprised by that. There was a section of the debate where the audience was able to send in questions for any of the speakers, and it seemed like the atheist speaker had a small following of atheists with him that had pre-decided upon questions to send in. That’s the way it felt at least as there seemed to be an unusual number of questions for the atheist speaker that led to him going on for lengths at a time about his basic thoughts on various topics that had nothing to do with the debate at all. In fact, many of the questions really just didn’t sound like questions that a christian or a Jew would have put forth.
Anyway, back on topic. the question of ‘Can God create a rock that he cannot lift’ never came up. And this was surprising. I’ve always viewed this question as a trivial nuisance that didn’t even deserve real serious, actual, thought. Now that I’ve spent some time thinking about it, I’ve discovered that this little question has some surprising depth and insight into the nature of God and can be quite a thought provoking question when taken seriously.
99.9% certain?
Posted: September 16, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: atheism, atheist, certainty, god, jew, jewish, religion, truth Leave a commentSo, recently I attended a debate between a minister, a rabbi, and an atheist. One thing that the atheist said struck me as odd. He seemed to allude (elude?) to the fact that he was 99.9% sure of himself. But in science, there’s always a 0.01% chance for error. I couldn’t help but think….really? I never would have expected the percentage to be so high. Some background about me. I’m a software engineer (soon to be a software consultant, but that’s another post). I grew up christian, became atheist for about 3 years during / preceeding college. Maybe a little longer. Then after lots of thinking and seaching, have settled on Judaism. I don’t ask anyone to believe anything that I say at this point, because with all these changes, I must seem wishy-washy. I wouldn’t believe me.
But, understand this. When I was an atheist, I never would’ve considered myself more than 60% certain. Honestly, I don’t rate anything that I think I know that highly. Here’s an adage from the software world, You can only prove the existence of bugs in software, not the absence of them. No matter how hard we test, we can’t prove that software is bug free. Ever. Why? Because bugs are an unknown. You can’t come up with evidence. Religion is similar. You can’t come up with evidence to prove there is a God. You can’t come up with evidence to prove there isn’t one either though. We have things that SUGGEST an existence or nonexistence, but nothing that proves. When you don’t have sufficient evidence, I can’t say I understand being able to claim 99.9% accuracy.
Basically, after that statement, he lost all credibility with me. I was, in fact, interested in his ideas and beliefs. Not because I’m looking to become atheist, but I’m interested in how they may shape and reform some of my own beliefs.
Until next time.
Antisemitism…the only good side?
Posted: September 13, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: god, Jews, religion Leave a commentI was thinking today about how it seems, how it appears, that the Jewish people are unjustly rallied against. Unjustly hated. Lies spread and our people murdered, and for what reason? Because we have different beliefs than they do? Perhaps someone can enlighten me. Perhaps someone can explain to me what we’ve done wrong. Did Jews do something wrong at some point and everyone is still angry about it? Even if some small extremist group did something wrong, is that any reason to aim your hatred at the entire Jewish population? I don’t hate all Muslims just because of a few extremist groups. I hate the extremist groups. Perhaps some would say that I should love them, not hate them, but I’m not sure what to tell you. I cannot love someone that murders others without just cause.
So, I did some more thinking. Do the other groups receive this kind of hate as well. Do people rally against Muslims and Christians this way? Is there anti-Christian /anti-Muslim manifestos? Fabricated documents? I’ll do some more research, as I’m currently unaware of any, and update this post with any information that I find. But my current answer is no. Especially, not on the same scale. Would such a large group be an even bigger target though? Isn’t it illogical that this one group, this Jewish group, is such a large target given its size?
I can only think that this is meant to show us something. To teach us something. Maybe this is some form of indirect proof that Jews have it correct. Why else would these things happen, only to the Jewish people? It seems there must be evidence to refute my conclusion, and that evidence would be readily available. I’ll update this post myself when I find or, or when someone else presents it to me. But for now, I think there is something important here in this unusual persecution of the Jewish people throughout the ages.
Religion vs. School Sports
Posted: September 10, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cheerleading, conflict, god, religion, school, secular, sports Leave a commentHow am I ever to balance my children’s school activities with our personal religious goals? I really want to attend services Friday night / Saturday morning. However, these directly conflict with most typical school activities that our children are going to be enrolled in. Fortunately I haven’t had too much difficulty here as the two children that live with me are too young, but my daughter (who doesn’t live with me) is in Cheer and cheers at games saturday mornings. During services of course. How are we to attend services and attend all of these school events? Is the only option to move to Israel where these events (I would assume) would be held on Sunday? Surely there must be another answer.
The only thing that I can come up with right now though, is that saturday morning services are simply going to fall to the wayside as our children get more and more involved in school activities. I dislike this, but I’m not sure what to do about it. As a child, I never had the opportunity to attend extra-cirricular activities, or parents who were interested in pressing me to do so. So, it’s important for me that my children do..something……I don’t care what it is, but they will most definitely be involved in something. This was a decision that I made long before I started looking back into religion and before I decided to become a Jew.
Maybe one of my non-existent readers has an answer for me, until then, I’ll just continue struggling to come up with a better answer all on my own.
So many blessings!
Posted: September 10, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blessings, hebrew, jew, jewish, religion Leave a commentThere seem to be too many blessings to learn. Or maybe, the problem is that I seem to want to learn them all at the same time, so I end up not learning any of them. It’s been very confusing for me, trying to figure out which blessings to learn when. So, I’m going to maybe help someone else out, and just say which blessings I’ve learned, and in which order. Also, something that has been difficult for me, is figuring out what blessings are said on a typical day, so that will be covered as well.
A typical day of blessings:
1. Say Shema when waking. There is actually another prayer you’re suppose to say, but I don’t know that one yet.
2. Say Hand Washing blessing
3. Say Torah Reading blessing
4. Read Torah
5. Say After-Torah Reading blessing
6. Go to work
7. Say hand washing blessing (at lunch)
8. Say Hamatzi (bread blessing) (at lunch)
9. Say hand washing blessing (at dinner)
10. Say Hamatzi (bread blessing) (at dinner)
11. Say Shema (before bed)
These are the ones that I know, there’s more that I don’t know, and I’ll fill these in as I learn them. Also, I’ll edit this to include the transliterations for the blessings and I might as well throw in the hebrew text also.
Stay Tuned!
Why I picked Judaism
Posted: September 9, 2011 Filed under: Religion | Tags: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, religion Leave a commentSo, there are three major monotheistic religions that I’m aware of: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. I’ve listed them by how I understand them to be ordered by size (Islam having the most members). I’m not interested in dissecting each religion and airing its dirty laundry in front of everyone. I’m not interested in telling Muslims or Christians that they’re wrong and I’m right. See my previous post on this, as I understand that I’m human, and I might be wrong. You need to decide for yourself which is the most appropriate religion for you. I’m simply going to explain why I chose Judaism.
Let’s start was some basic things that I believe in….
There’s a God, now what?
Posted: September 8, 2011 Filed under: Religion | Tags: god, religion Leave a commentSo you/we have decided that there’s a God. Now where do we go? Well chances are you want to pick a religion, but let’s just slow things down a bit. Let’s think about a few things first.
1. Does God Still Exist?
I like to think that God still exists. Although I recognize that it’s possible that God could have set everything up to keep going in his absence, I like to believe that he’s still around. Is this wishful thinking? Not really. I can’t prove it, but I feel that he is. Now, I’m not one to just go off of feeling something, and just expecting everyone to just go with it, but when it comes to this most basic question, it’s difficult to come up with proof. It’s easier to logically decide that God existed at one time, but it’s more difficult to logically decide that he’s still around.
Jewish Thinking 