Jewish Religions and The Prospect of Dissent
By Gilad Atzmon
"The Jewish religion is a religion of Mitzvoth (commandments) and without this religious idiom, the Jewish religion doesn’t exist at all." Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz
While Islam and Christianity can be easily understood as belief systems, Judaism actually defies the notion of belief all together. Judaism is an obedience regulative system. The Judaic universe is ruled by ‘mitzvoth’ (commandment), a set of 613 precepts and directives ordered by God. In opposition to Christianity and Islam that build from spiritual and heavenly precepts in worship to a transcendental God, the Judaic subject subscribes to strict earthly and material observance. While the Islamo-Christian is wrapped in God’s loving and the spirituality of the sublime and divinity, the follower of Judaism is judged by his or her ability to adhere to hundreds of rigorous earthly orders.
A brief look at the Judaic Sabbath common prayer reveals the nature of Judaism as an obedience regulatory system. As we can see below, in Judaism, even God-loving is not an involuntary act:
“You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your might.
Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day.
…Thus you shall remember to observe all My commandments
and to be holy to your God.
I am Adonai, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God:
I am Adonai your God.”
(Common Prayers for Shabbat Evening From Deuteronomy and Numbers)
For the Jew, belief and God-loving are not subject to either rational discretion or spiritual impulse. God loving, as we read above, is a strict “charge”, an order. But if Judaism is not a belief system, what kind of system is it? Does the Judaic subject believe in anything at all?
The answer is yes: the Jew believes in ‘The Jews’ and the Jews believe in ‘The Jew.’ This mode of mutual affirmation establishes a solid and forceful tribal continuum that serves the collective as well as the singular subject. Accordingly, the subject adheres to the collective and vice versa. In pragmatic terms, the Jew sticks to the ‘chosen people’ and, together the ‘chosenites’ uphold a collective sense of choseness.
In Judaism, ‘choseness’ is the belief that the Jewish people were singularly chosen to enter into a covenant with God. For religious Jews, being chosen is realised as a duty. According to Judaic belief, the Jews have been placed on earth to fulfill a certain purpose. This purpose is bestowed upon the Jews and they pass it from father to son.[1]
In reality, the first Jews invented a God who chose them over all other people. For some reason this God is occasionally cruel, often non-ethical and as if this were not enough, not exactly a nice father. The Jewish God doesn’t even allow his people to call him by name. One may wonder what led the first Jews to invent such a horrid father figure. One may further question what led the Jews to sustain their ‘relationship’ with such an obnoxious father. The answer is surprisingly simple. They don’t.
The Jews don’t believe in God, they are observant of God. They believe in themselves- the Jews believe in ‘The Jew’ and vice versa. Within this peculiar troubled family affair, the Jew is free to dump God, as an author can freely re-write or at least re-shape his or her own narrative. But the Jew can never dump the Jews as much as the Jews can’t allow ‘The Jew’ to go free. And what about God, can he be emancipated, can he choose another people? Certainly not. Unlike the Jew who is free to dump God while clinging to a Jewish identity, the Jewish God is merely a Jewish protagonist, he can’t go anywhere, he is stuck with ‘his’ chosen people forever.
Choseness, so it seems, is hardly a heavenly gift, it is in fact a curse. It confines the Jew in a realm of self-imposed commandment and materiality. Instead of beauty, holiness and the pursuit of the divine and the sublime, the rabbinical Jew is left with an earthly obedience scheme that is sustained by a rigid tribal setting. ‘The Jew’ and ‘The Jews’ are bound in a set of mutual affirmations in which God serves an instrumental role.
Some may rightly argue that this spectacular bond between the Jews and ‘The Jew’ is essential for an understanding of the dichotomy between Judaic tribalism and the universal appeal of Islamo-Christian beliefs.
The Judaic crude intolerance towards dissent serves as an example of the above. Throughout their history, Jews have proven themselves hostile toward their nonconformists; now we are ready to grasp why. For the Islamo-Christian, secularization, for instance, entails a rejection of a transcendental affair. But for the rabbinical Judaic subject, failure to conform constitutes a rejection of the Jews. It interferes crudely with the fragile relationship between ‘The Jew’ and the Jews. It shatters the self-affirmation mechanism. While in the case of Christianity and Islam dumping God suggests turning one’s back on a remote supernatural entity, in the case of Judaism, such an act is interpreted as a disbelief in the tribe.
This interpretation may help illuminate Jesus’ plight. It may explain the reasoning behind the brutal Rabbinical Herem (excommunication) against Spinoza and Uriel Da Costa. And it also explains why the secular and the so-called ‘progressive’ Jew is equally obnoxious towards dissent or any form of criticism from within. If Judaism is not a belief system but rather a system of obedience regulation, then Jewish identity politics is merely an extension of the above regulatory philosophy.
Jews often drop their God, simply to invent a different God who ‘facilitates’ subscription to a new regulatory system. The new system, like the old outlines a new set of strict commandments, a manner of speech and rigorous boundaries of ‘kosher’ conduct.
In the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, Bolshevism appealed to many Eastern European Jews. It provided a sense of self-righteousness in addition to regulating a strict form of obedience. As we know, it didn’t take long for Bolshevism to mature into a genocidal doctrine that made Old Testament barbarism look like a juvenile fairytale. The Holocaust, that seems to be the most popular Jewish religion at present, may be the ultimate and final stage in Jewish historical development. According to the Holocaust religion, ‘God died in Auschwitz.’ Within the context of the Holocaust religion, ‘The Jew’ is the new Jewish God. The Holocaust religion has finally united ‘The Jew’ and the Jews into a self-sufficient comprehensive and independent ‘God-less’ religious narrative. Both were about to be eradicated. But, not only were they both saved: they have prevailed and each did so independently. In the Holocaust religion, Jews are both victims and oppressors - they have transformed slavery into empowerment and they did it all alone, in spite of being dumped by their treacherous God. The Holocaust religion, like Judaism, prescribes a manner of speech and a strict set of commandments. Most crucially, like more traditional Judaism, it is totally and disgracefully intolerant toward dissent.
Due to the lack of a divine transcendental entity, Jewish religions have always regarded criticism as rejection of the tribe. Jewish religions, whether Judaism, Bolshevism or Holocaust, are equally intolerant towards criticism and dissent. Jewish religions treat opposition as a vile attempt at ‘delegitimization’ on the verge of genocidal inclination.
Jewish religions can be defined as different templates that facilitate a sense of choseness. They affirm a bond between an imaginary marginal ‘collective’ and a phantasmal ‘archetype’: the Bolshevists and ‘The Bolshevik’, the Survivours and ‘The Survivour’, the Jews and ‘The Jew,’ and so on. The bond between the collective and the idea of an archetypical singularity is always maintained by a set of rigid commandments, a correct manner of speech, some strict regulatory guidelines for behavior and vile opposition to dissent.
Tragically enough, intolerance of dissent has become a universal Western political symptom. Incidentally, Christianity, Islam, religion and divinity in general are also under attack within the context of contemporary Western discourse. Is this a symptom of the Jerusalemification of our Western universe? Is the emergence of the tyranny of political correctness a coincidence? And if we are becoming Jews, is there any room for the hope that our universe may, at some stage, embrace a universal ethos once again? Can we once again believe in something? Or do we have to wait for a new Jesus figure to resurrect our trust in the human spirit and humanity in general? Or have we been re-designed to self-destruct as soon as we come close to such a lucid awareness?
[1] As God himself suggests in the Book of Genesis: "And I (God) will establish My covenant between Me and you (the Jews) and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you." (Book of Genesis, Chapter 17).
_____________________________________________________________________________
The 2 Percent
Lucky are those who believe — yet are not misled — for they keep hope alive
Those of us Don Quixotes who have convinced ourselves that we quest after some sort of objective truth often talk among ourselves about what percentage of the world's population it would take to wrench control of society out of the hands of the pathological outlaws who control it now and reset the course of the human history toward a healthier and more practical destination.
I know this kind of talk often popped up late at night among 9/11 skeptics as we discussed the ever-growing body of evidence that the tragedy was an inside job, conceived and executed with the full knowledge of the highest authorities in our own government.
As we compared notes we would inevitably speculate on what percentage of the population it would take to convince enough people to arrest our leaders, who are really members of a criminal elite aiming to turn the world into a prison camp run by themselves and their Jewish banker handlers who basically control — with their bribes and their missiles — the entire political operation of the whole world.
In these discussions the actual number for criticality would always vary. One person would say, "If we had just had 10 percent of the population on our side, we could impeach the judges, arrest the president and the Congress, and get to the bottom of the real story of 9/11, which was surely done by the Mossad, the CIA, and the superrich Jewish bankers who have controlled the White House throughout the 20th century."
Sometimes the number would be 20 percent, sometimes it would be 2.
But whatever number we agreed upon, it always seemed to be not enough to overcome the media mindlock that had convinced the public that it was Arab terrorists "who hated our freedoms" who knocked down the Twin Towers as a kind of "blowback" to repay the U.S. for its depredations in service to Israel.
Of course we of that certain percentage know now that "blowback" and hijackers were not involved, and neither were Iraq or Afghanistan. That percentage of us — maybe it's as high as 12 or as low as 5 — knows for sure that every member of Congress today knows that 9/11 was an inside job engineered by Israel, their puppetized politicians in Washington, and the richest Jewish bankers in the world.
So the question that always concluded these conversations always seemed to be, whatever the magic number actually is, we have yet to achieve it, or the real perps would already be in jail, or better yet, lying in their graves after being convicted of treason, mass murder and obstruction of justice, and then executed.
Still, there was and is a magic number — a certain number of high-integrity people — who will never be persuaded by this cynical media blitz that created the empty-headed hysteria that precipitated the needless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and a bunch of other brown-skinned countries, and I'm thinking that's the number we may safely call the 2 percent.
And no, it's not enough to change the course of human history, but it is enough to keep a sufficient number of conscientious humans who still believe in things like honor, justice and honesty to keep fighting to unbury the truth about 9/11, the phony wars and even the secret sexual depravity that lurks behind the behavior of those who the media tell us are the most important people in the world.
Those of us in the 2 percent know what kind of danger we're in. And it's not only the rigged legal system that will take us down in a heartbeat if we achieve too much success in convincing the public of the crimes our government is committing, there is also something more dangerous, something that can best be described as what happens to you professionally if you say something negative (and true) about the Jewish control of America.
Or even worse, if you're a doctor genuinely trying to help the health of your patients and you discover something that will significantly cut into the profits of the Jewish pharmaceutical giants, well, then you're more than likely to lose your life, as was demonstrated recently by the rash of murders of holistic doctors who were curing people of cancer that the Jewish pharmaceutical industry simply could not abide.
We in the 2 percent know all too well that the history of the planet and our species clearly shows that the greatest heroes and the greatest leaders have also been the greatest killers.
We also know that in a population where 98 percent of the people are controlled by cynical media lies and are willing to kill those who point out the faults in their perceptions, we are in grave danger trying to insist upon the truth when most of the rest of the world is perfectly happy to accept the lies they are being told.
And no matter how hard we try to tell them that they are in grave danger, the valid warnings simply cannot override the programming they have received from mass media, and especially from the worst mass media in the world, which is the education they receive in government funded public schools, who are still saying Arab terrorists knocked down the Twin Towers and Obama bin Laden was killed by Seal Team 6 (ten years after he actually died!).
There is one main reason the vast majority of the population is so easily swayed by disingenuous media reports, and it's very difficult to talk about because it cuts right to the core of what people believe. And of what people are very afraid to lose — the very things they have believed that have shaped their lives.
Indeed, the vast majority of Americans have refused to accept the notion that their own government was willing to murder 3,000 of its own citizens merely to allow the government to make war on the Arab world as a form of vengeance for these contrived atrocities falsely blamed on fictitious patsies. This is Jewish perfidy of the highest order, getting the United States to do its killing for these cowardly Jews who slaughter Palestinians like so many pestiferous cockroaches.
All people are entrained to accept authoritarian pronouncements of their belief systems. From the Sermon on the Mount to the declarations of Muhammad, people are prepared to kill those who question their most cherished beliefs.
The worst habit they have developed is to accept the pronouncements of authority figures without exercising any critical thinking about what they are being told. For instance, how can one disgusting group of people declare that they are the only real humans on Earth who must rob and kill everybody else without any penalty?
This is why this essay is titled "The 2 percent" rather than "The 15 percent" or "The 25 percent". The cohort of people who believe in the absolute miracle of life yet are not trapped in the fascist behaviorism of a religious belief system is vanishingly small.
Think about it. Do you owe your allegiance to a Jew-controlled Pope who tells you that you no longer have to believe in Jesus but you must accept homosexuality as psychologically healthy human behavior? Are you totally committed to your National Council of Churches spokespeople who check their nonprofit tax status before making politically correct statements about anything?
Or are you one of those Zionized evangelicals who believes in the supernatural sanctity of the divine state of Israel? Even worse, perhaps you are one of those Christian Identity zealots who want to be the new Jews and insist their wrathful god Yahweh is a great humanitarian as he orders the destruction of foreign cities and the rape of captured women?
And shit, I won't even mention the Muslims who kill people if you defame their imaginary God and rape women if they dress normally, or the Buddhists who insist you have an infinite number of chances to get things right, so don't worry about doing wrong in this life.
All of these so-called divine disciplines render their adherents helpless in the face of authoritarianism, so when each one of these dupes preaches for peace, they really are advocating for their own brand of exclusive supremacism, and their own figmented version of eternal life.
And when their governments command them to murder the infidel, they don't hesitate, they just start shooting without really caring who they kill.
It predisposes each one of these delusional people into not challenging psychopathological authoritarianism, into accepting the inevitability of unfathomable evil, and putting up with the never-ending reign of criminals who never tell the truth about why they are always lying and why they must kill so many innocent people to maintain their evil hold on planetary society.
But with all that said about organized religion, it's a fool's error to not believe that life is a miracle that has yet to be explained in rational, empirical terms.
Excluding all the supernatural myths that have been propagated since the dawn of time, the closest anyone has come to pinning down how life perpetuates itself involves the study of DNA, which has maintained life since long before humans uttered their first words. Everything else is just a malicious fairy tale stolen from cultures that have preceded ours that everybody has forgotten about.
That we know so little about the subject tells us how little we actually know about the world. The pride we have in our knowledge base is best reflected by the number of species we kill every hour.
But some of us realize that just because we don't know everything, we don't have to accept lamebrained versions of what bogus pitchmen think life and history should be.
All those religions that promise eternal life in some imaginary off planet heaven are simply political manipulations constructed to control people, and on the same order as Americans boasting about the so-called freedoms they have because they follow a magical Constitution or Communists insisting that having workers control the world is a system worth dying for.
It has always appalled me that humans could be so supercilious as to promise their eternal soul to some organization that bribes them to accept a phony truth — no thing in nature, except DNA, lives forever. To believe you can live forever by believing in a mythological story someone has told you is to believe in a lie by someone who can't accept his own death.
Whether it's the bravado of futurist Ray Kurzweil or the psychological trickery of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the belief in eternal life is a nasty joke played by those who want to dominate others.
The best thing you can hope for in your final moments is to be able to say I did my best at being honest and compassionate, I loved and was loved, and I have left the world a better place for my actions. In this state of sublime comfort, you may rest on the hope that nothing that follows your life will be anything worse than the true garden of earthly delights that it was your privilege to experience in this life.
What you receive after your final breath will be exactly equal to the effort you made for peace on Earth, and for this reward, you may only offer your eternal thanks, and be overjoyed in expressing it.
This is what characterizes the 2 percent, so you can see why there are so few of us, undeterred by the bribes and enticements that cause so much misery for so many. We will know no peace until we realize there is only one life that we all share, and to kill any part of it is to kill a part of ourselves.
One day soon, if we keep doing what we are doing now, there will be nothing left to kill. This is the primary item on the minds of the 2 percent.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise. Solely dependent on contributions from readers, please support his work by mail: 6871 Willow Creek Circle #103, North Port FL 34287 USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment