Some Reflections

Ok so recently I left a post on Vashty's blog telling her that as an atheist socialist, traditional jews are going to consider her a meshumad (apostate) due to her not being shomer shabbat as per the gemarah (apologists please spare me it's on the OU website).

It left me feeling bad actually. On one hand I intellectually think that traditional jews should drop the act (political correctness) that yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay jews are one big happy family. However it just didn't uuuuuuuuuuuuuum, feel good. In retrospect, telling someone jewish that the traditional jews are going to consider her a meshumad just didn't feel good it's not something I am going to be bragging about in the future; despite its trueness.

The jews in the time of the talmud were honest and called most deviations from their faith meshumadut but in 2011 the jews have a political correctness that causes them to not call atheism meshumadut while they call Christianity meshumadut.

Christianity perhaps is meshumadut from the perspective of rabbinic judaism but atheism is an even bigger rejection of Jewish scripture than Christianity is. Yet the jewish community takes the intellectually dishonest position of calling only Christianity meshumadut but not really atheism so much. How does the Jewish establishment (I use this as a vague ambiguous term) feel more threatened by Christianity than by atheism?

Atheism is as much as an ideological alternative to Judaism as Christianity is. I mean when I was a little SJ, before I was SJ, Judaism believe it or not, was my first love. Then I started having questions that weren't being answered as I got older, prayers weren't being answered really, and I was learning that the jewish community is muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch more sectarian than the establishment would have you believe.

I just decided to drop the whole thing. Before I started this blog, I was a regular commenter on another blog, and even before that I wrote a post on the internet criticizing someone I knew at one point who was religious, and that was it. The cat was let out of the bag. SJ was let of the bag.