I have gathered from your posts that you are Jewish by race, if not by faith.
My paternal grandfather's parents were Jewish by DNA and culture (which includes certain aspects of Judaism since it is a religion of laws rather than doctrines). When they landed at Ellis Island they said, "We're Americans now," joined an Episcopal church, and endeavored to speak only English. My grandfather was raised Episcopalian and only knew a few words of Yiddish. Both of my parents were atheists and I was raised that way. I never heard of "religion" until I was seven. Since I was born during WWII with enough "Jewish blood" to have been classified as Jewish under Hitler's rules, they never spoke of the Jewish side of our family until I was in college. I got more Jewish culture from my second wife than I did from my family.
So you are Jewish by nature . . . .
No I'm not. I didn't even know what Jewish "nature" was until my late teens--at a university with a high percentage of Jewish undergraduates.
Even though you are agnostic or atheistic, I don't imagine you go out of your way to eat pork.
I love pork. Of course so did my second wife.
If you find yourself at Jewish wedding or funeral, I am sure you know how to behave.
The only Jewish ritual I have attended was a bar mitzvah, and I had no idea how to behave. Fortunately it was a Reform service so that wasn't a problem. As an amateur linguist I had learned the Hebrew abjad (an alphabet with no vowels) so I helped the Jewish lady next to me follow along in the text during the recitations.
I am also fairly certain you don't knock the hats off Hasids when you meet them and bully or threaten them or ask what the hell they're doing in this country anyway, am I right?
I lived in Hollywood for ten years and encountered Chassidim every day, but they never stopped to talk to me.
But no, out in the everyday world I don't pick fights with religionists. As evil as religion is, it does not appear to be an insurmountable handicap and the majority of religious people are quite decent--although in some eras that seems like a rather slim majority.
So the only difference between you, the non-theist and me, the theist is that I still profess the religion of my birth and upbringing.
So do I. The "religion" of my birth is atheism.
When I was seven a little boy started telling me about this guy named "God" who lives up in the clouds and can see everything we do. I assumed that it was just one of those wonderful little stories that kids make up, and I laughed honestly and appreciatively. I was shocked when he seemed to resent my laughter. When I told my mother about it she turned very sad, and had to confess to me that a lot of people believe in that silly story. I reminded her that she had told me the truth about Santa Claus after the previous Christmas, so why weren't these parents telling their children the truth about God?
She almost cried when she had to tell me that many
grownups believe in this nonsense. That was the day I became a cynic.
The reason I am saying all this, and being so frank, is so that you'll believe me when I say that when I read stuff like your [diatribe] . . . . no one has ever told me I have to believe in The Flood or anything else in The Bible especially, especially, if I found it irrational or beyond the bounds of my credulity.
You're lucky. I found myself inundated by the Religious Redneck Retard Revival that began in the late 1970s as a counter-Counterculture. People were telling me that lions used to eat flowers and grass. When I said they must have looked much different from modern lions because herbivores have to have an enormous gut full of a bacteria culture to digest their food, all I got was a blank stare.
I know it may seem that way to you, my friend, but it's not like that at all! How can I possibly explain? You're right! Religion is that, but it's so much more. You haven't scratched the surface. You haven't seen the forest for the trees.
I read about religion every day in the newspaper. It encourages people to kill each other, even children. I'm not saying that
only religion does this. But religion does do it, and does it on a horrifyingly large scale every few generations. So as far as I'm concerned it's nothing more than evil bullshit. Did I mention that I was born during the Holocaust? And now the Jews are punishing the Palestinians for it because nobody let them nuke Europe after WWII?
Say we went to Steelers' game . . . .
Sorry, I know even less about sports than religion. At least religion is interesting.
Do you see? There's no reason to think of religion vs. science as a dichotomy. They're not merely different schools of thought. One's religion is one's way of life - how you marry and how you live and die and are buried.. One's science is what makes one's car run and removes plaque from one's teeth and gives us amazing photos of Saturn. One is not better or worse than the other. They are just different.
This was absolutely
not true at the beginning of the Religious Redneck Retard Revival. The fundamentalist Christian sects, that were attracting the hippies who were feeling guilty about all the sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, stood staunchly against science. This is, after all, when so-called "creation science" sprang up.
Christianity in America in the Post-Industrial Era is on a course similar to Christianity in Europe in the Dark Ages. The Muslims are playing the role of the Jews.
The scientists are forever wanting evidence of God.
People are free to believe any bullshit they like. But when they start insisting that public policy be based on it, then yes, we invoke the Rule of Laplace.
The communists took merely
one line out of the Book of Acts (I don't recall the original verbatim but Marx elaborated it into "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities") and turned a major portion of the planet into a living hell. So yes, I will fight valiantly against any campaign to inject fairytales into reality. (The fairytale being that a civilization can survive if what one takes from it need not correlate with what one gives back, and the reality being that this kind of an economy produces a
negative surplus. One member, perhaps you, pointed out that I was misinterpreting the slogan, but so were the Communists.)
But there are so many other things you have no evidence of. Is there evidence of marital devotion, loyalty between friends, honesty in all small things, freedom, dignity?
Huh? What kind of people do you hang out with? I know a great many devoted spouses, loyal friends, and people who are so honest that they put back the Equal packets they don't use in the cafeteria instead of taking them home.
As for freedom and dignity, those are both rather subjective. As Oscar Mandel so wonderfully put it in the Gobble-Up Stories, "Freedom is merely that particular form of slavery which we happen to enjoy."
How to prove any abstract concept is real?
I'm not sure how you got to this question. Are you admitting that God is nothing more than an abstract concept? I'm OK with that.