Category: Religion

Looks Like Someone Was Bankrolling the Christofascist Terrorist in Norway

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I would note that the source is not the most reliable, Justin Raimondo has a a truly peculiar history, he’s an antiwar activist who is gay and who endorsed Pat Buchanan, but he has followed the money on Anders Behring Breivik, and it indicates that Mr. Behring Breivik:

  • Accumulated well over 100 Grand in savings.
  • Never held down a real job that would imply that level of savings.
  • Lived a lavish lifestyle.
  • Had his money in opaque offshore accounts.

Assuming that Raimondo’s thesis bears up to scrutiny, and it did to my 10 minutes of Goggling, then there are really just two possibilities here, either he was a relatively successful professional criminal, or he was being bankrolled by the Christofascist right in the same way that Scott Roeder was by Operation Rescue and their ilk.

Needless to say there was some fairly explicit support of these fanatics on our side of the pond, Pam “I Would Be in Jail If I Were Muslim” Geller, for instance, published a letter from Norway that sounds suspiciously like Breivik’s manifesto, while scrupulously preserving the author’s anonymity a few years back.

One hopes that the Norwegian authorities are more diligent in their pursuit of right wing terrorists than Barack Obama and Eric “Place” Holder have been, because the ties between Operation Rescue and the Tiller assassination have at this point elicited nothing by way of a credible investigation.

Yiddish It’s Not for Blithering Idiots…

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So not a Yid!

It is pronounced “Hoot” (same vowel sound as book) “Spah”.

It’s not pronounced chute-spa!

I don’t expect her to get the guttural “h”, she is, after all a gentile, a Minnesotan, and a Lutheran,* so she has at best limited experience in that consonant, but seriously, don’t speak Yiddish unless you understand Yiddish.

I’d call her a schmuck, but a schmuck has a head.

*Specifically, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is arguably the most antisemitic and anti-Catholic Lutheran sect in the united states.

A Shanda Before the Goyim*

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A prominent Orthodox rabbi has endorsed self-mutilation as a means to modesty:

What should a girl do if she wishes to dress modestly but her parents won’t let her? According to Rabbi Yitzchok Zilberstein she can injure herself in order to use it as an excuse for dressing modestly.

Three weeks ago, Rabbi Zilberstein, the the son-in-law of prominent Rabbi Yosef Elyashiv, received an inquiry from a women’s religious seminary (Midrasha) about a student who is growing increasingly religious. The student said she wanted to dress modestly but her parents were preventing her from doing so, because they were not religious.

…………

“The young woman thought that if she inflicted wounds on her legs she could tell her parents that she is wearing a long skirt to cover the wounds,” the letter said.

Rabbi Zilberstein’s reply came shortly after, with an unequivocal answer: “She is allowed to inflict wounds on her legs in order to dress modestly and evade sin.”

In his reply, the rabbi commended the student’s initiative, saying “the blood from the self-inflicted wound will atone for the people of Israel,” adding that the coordinator [of the woman’s seminary] should allow the student to commit the act.

This “Rabbi” is suggesting that self mutilation akin animal sacrifices last presented at the Temple more than 2000 years ago.

There is a word for people who believe that self inflicted injury is somehow holy, and that word is “nut-case.”

Additionally, he, and the seminary coordinator, are being played as fools.  This girl is not being forced by her parents to dress in hot pants, but rather she is profoundly troubled, and looking for a “get out of jail free card” for cutting herself, a pathological behavior rather common among adolescent girls.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

H/t Failed Messiah dot Com.

*An embarrassment before the rest of the world.

Another Shanda Before the Goyim

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Click for full size


The original


Der Tzitung


De Voch

Not one but two Heredim (black hat ultra Orthodox) publications, Der Tzitung and De Voch photoshopped Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and and White House aide Audrey Tomason out of the iconic picture of staff watching the progress of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

It appears that they consider even a photograph of a woman to be too sexually salacious.

It just proves that medieval hyper-religious nut-jobs are not limited to al Qaeda, or the talibaptist whack jobs, but includes fellow Jews.

As my brother is wont to say, “Schwer zu Sein a Yid.”  (It ain’t easy being a Jew.)

H/t Failed Messiah.

Schnorers

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Do you want to guess?

Is it in Missippi, or Alabama, or maybe Arkansas?

Nope, it’s in New York State, just an hour from Times Square. It’s Kiryas Joel, which has a mind boggling 70% poverty rate: (number 2 only has a 56% rate)

The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Normally, I am not inclined to tell people that they need to get off their asses, and get a real job, but in this case, I’m going to say get off your asses and get a job.

Kiryas Joel is a hole in the map created by cynical New York politicians in order to pander, and since then it has been used to suck up various welfare payments, so that able bodied residents could game local government for handouts.

Judaism is very clear about this:  Studying is good, but there is also an obligation to work and support a family.

Biblical Plagues, We Haz Them!

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So, Passover starts tonight, and so there is a lot of preparation.

Our house is supposed to be Chometz* free, so think of Spring cleaning run by a Jewish woman on the edge of madness.

Well, we get back from an SCA event on Saturday night, ready to start cleaning, and the power was out, and remained out for the next 18 hours.

But, as the saying goes, wait, there’s more.

Marilyn, my mother-in-law, was coming to visit us, and took the bus down the New York City area, only the ticketing agent pointed her to the bus that was headed to Boston.†

So, instead of arriving at 5pm on Sunday, she arrived at 6am today.

You know, I’m not a superstitious person,‡ but I am expecting problems with blood, frogs, and cattle disease at our Seder tonight.

Light posting the next few days, because of the holidays.

*Leavened bread, and related products, which include things like beans if you are a Jew of Eastern European extraction.
†Major props to my brother Daniel, who lives about 40 minutes outside of Boston, who picked up Marilyn and took her to dinner before taking her back to the bus station.
‡Which I guess is a mealy mouthed way of saying that I am a superstitious person under these circumstances.

Barack Obama Just Came Out Against the Separation of Church and State

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In Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, the Supreme Court ruled that a taxpayer had no standing to sue when a state provided tax credits that were directed towards supporting religious schools.

I was appalled, but viewed this as a result of decades of ‘Phant vote court stacking.

What I missed was the fact that the Obama administration, despite the fact that there was no need to because there was no equivalent federal law, filed a brief in support of tearing down the wall between church and state:

The Obama administration’s brief supporting an Arizona law which creates a tax credit system which substantially benefits religious schools is inexplicable and deeply disappointing. Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn (Nos. 09-857 and 09-991), to be argued on Wednesday, November 3, does not involve a federal law and did not require any participation by the Obama administration. Yet, the Solicitor General’s office filed a brief for the United States which argues that taxpayers lack standing to challenge a state tax program which subsidizes religious schools and that this does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It is exactly the brief that would have been expected from the Bush administration, but disturbing to have come from the Obama Justice Department.

A state statute allows Arizona taxpayers to receive a tax credit of up to $500 on a dollar-for-dollar basis for donating to a student tuition organization (“STO”). Arizona’s largest STOs (as measured by the amount of contributions) each limit scholarships to certain religious schools. The largest restricted scholarships are to students attending Catholic schools in the Phoenix diocese; the second largest restricts scholarships to students who attend evangelical Christian schools. Although the statute required that STOs not discriminate on the basis of race, color, handicap, familial status or national origin,” it did not specify eligibility requirements. Thus, individuals would receive a tax credit if they made a contribution to an STO and they could designate their money for an STO that supported only schools of a particular faith.

………

Since the Reagan administration, conservatives have sought to eliminate the notion of a wall separating church and state. It is sad and very troubling to see the Obama administration lending its support for this effort.

One of the things that you hear in liberal circles frequently is that Ronald Reagan would be too much of a flaming liberal for today’s Republican party.

Looking at Barack Obama, I’m beginning to think that my assessment of him as a Reagan Democrat is too charitable: He is a Reagan Republican.

The irony here is that Ronald Reagan was easily the least religious president of the past 50 years, of course.

What Digby Calls, “Another Isolated Incident”

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Nothing to see here, move along:

Roger Stockham, a 63-year-old Army veteran from California who was reportedly angry at the U.S. government, was arrested by police in Michigan and charged with allegedly threatening to blow up a Mosque in Dearborn.

Dearborn police allegedly found Stockham inside his vehicle outside the Islamic Center of America with a load of M-80s in his trunk and other explosives, the Detroit News reported.

If you read the rest of the article, it’s pretty clear that this guy is a head case, but even a head case has his actions shaped to a degree by external influences.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Is Right…

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He asks the question, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?” (See here)

My answer is “yes”, and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) Alabama, who, while declaring that he was colorblind, said that, “So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister,” though to be fair, he Robert Bentley has since apologized, though with the classic, “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” apology, which actually puts the onus on those who object.

There are people who use religion to fulfill a basic spiritual need, but I think that there are a lot more people who find it useful way to feel better than other people.

If Jews Run the Media,They Are Not Competent

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Specifically, they report the story of an Agunah (Literally “Chained Woman) and the resulting protests directed at the ex-husband of a woman who refuses to grant here a religious divorce, a “Get”, which under Jewish law means that they are still married:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

What a surprise, a Republican is being a selfish asshole.

While I do understand that he has issues with the custody arrangement, using the get as a way to extract concessions is beneath contempt.

That being said, I am aware of a number of these cases, and while I strongly object to these enforcement of these medieval (actually pre-medieval) religious statutes, I am aware that this happens dozens, if not hundreds of times a year.

What got to me was this paragraph:

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

(emphasis mine)

If the Jews run the New York Times, they are incompetent, because it misses two points:

  • First, if Mr. Reiedman gets civilly remarried, and has a child, a likely thing for a 34 year old Orthodox Jew, the child will not be a mamzer, who would be forbidden from marrying other Jews, while any child that Ms. Epstein has will be a mamzer. (3500 year old religious law is such a joy, huh?)
  • Second, it is possible for Mr. Friedman to get a rabbinical ruling allowing him to take a 2nd wife, while Ms. Epstein cannot.
    • This has been done in some cases where a wife is in a persistent vegetative state, or completely delusional, since a get cannot be granted under those conditions, it requires the knowing receipt of the get by the wife, so permission for a “2nd” wife has been given with the the “1st” wife continue to be financially supported by the husband.
    • In this case though, a rabbi approving a 2nd marriage is basically zero.

This makes the conditions of the Agunah unjust and unfair to the woman in the conflict. It is not, nor has it ever been, an equal imposition on both spouses, and a small amount of research should have made this unfortunate state of affairs quite clear.

Clearly, I need to contact the local president of my ZOG chapter and pass my complaint up the chain.

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Have you heard the latest thing that conservatives are seizing on to accuse Barack Obama of being a godless secret-Muslim socialist Negro?

Well it appears that Barack Obama’s speaking positively of the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, on the seal of the United States since 1792, has given them a new reason to be shrill:

The culture wars have a new battlefield, thanks to a letter this week from the Congressional Prayer Caucus to President Obama. To the religious right, the motto “E Pluribus Unum,” which has been part of the fabric of American democracy since it was emblazened on the national seal in 1782, has become a controversial, anti-God statement. See the Congressional Prayer Caucus letter:

http://forbes.house.gov/UploadedFiles/National_Motto_Letter_to_President.pdf

Obama referred, innocently enough, to the motto “E Pluribus Unum” in a recent speech, pointing out that the Latin phrase, first adopted by the Founders, means “out of many, one.” This beautiful motto perfectly captures the spirit of pluralistic America, where one country is formed out of many states, and where one people – the American people – are formed from a melting pot of immigrants from all around the world.

Out of many, one. Indeed, the wisdom of the Founders, in enscribing “E Pluribus Unum” on the Great Seal of the United States, can’t be questioned.

Or maybe it can. As the above letter shows, to Rep. Michele Bachmann and others on the Congressional Prayer Caucus, Obama’s reference to “E Pluribus Unum” borders on unpatriotic. They say he should instead be promoting the motto “In God We Trust,” which was adopted as the official national motto at the urging of religious conservatives in 1956, during the McCarthy era and at the height of the Cold War Red Scare.

Well, I get why they object to the phrase E Pluribus Unum. First, it’s another hammer to use against a figure that they clearly see as an uppity (*insert epithet here*), and second, the basic idea of E Pluribus Unum is the acceptance is that people who are different from them, either in philosophy, theology, or pigmentation, are legitimate Americans, which fulfills them with horror.

They are really deeply repulsive human beings.

About Damn Time!

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We are finally starting to see public questioning of the extensive subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox Heredim in Israel:

Chaim Amsellem was certainly not the first Parliament member to suggest that most ultra-Orthodox men should work rather than receive welfare subsidies for full-time Torah study. But when he did so last month, the nation took notice: He is a rabbi, ultra-Orthodox himself, whose outspokenness ignited a fresh, and fierce, debate about the rapid growth of the ultra-religious in Israel.

“Torah is the most important thing in the world,” Rabbi Amsellem said in an interview. But now more than 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work, compared with 15 percent in the general population, and he argued that full-time, state-financed study should be reserved for great scholars destined to become rabbis or religious judges.

“Those who are not that way inclined,” he said, “should go out and earn a living.”

In reaction, he was ousted from his own ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, whose leaders vilified him with such venom that he was assigned a bodyguard. The party newspaper printed a special supplement describing Rabbi Amsellem as “Amalek,” the biblical embodiment of all evil.

Actually, “Amelek” means more than the embodiment of evil.

The Torah says that they are to be killed, the men, women, children, their animals, etc.  There is an affirmative requirement that they and their families be murdered, and that their works be destroyed.

This is what happens when you f%$# with somone’s welfare check, I guess.

As an aside, one of the towering figures of Judaism in the past 500 years, the Baal Shem Tov, worked digging lime, as a kosher butcher, and later running an inn, and it is ludicrous to suggest, as the Heredim do, that there are tens of thousands of people whose scholarship is so valuable that they cannot be allowed to do productive work.

Here’s a Shocker…

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It turns out that all those studies showing Americans to be the most church going and religious people in the industrialized world, don’t show this.

They just show that Americans are the most likely to lie to pollsters about their religiosity:

Two in five Americans say they regularly attend religious services. Upward of 90 percent of all Americans believe in God, pollsters report, and more than 70 percent have absolutely no doubt that God exists. The patron saint of Christmas, Americans insist, is the emaciated hero on the Cross, not the obese fellow in the overstuffed costume.

There is only one conclusion to draw from these numbers: Americans are significantly more religious than the citizens of other industrialized nations.

Except they are not.

Beyond the polls, social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.

If this is true, then the only surprise is that I am apparently more religiously observant than the average America, which buggers the mind.

David Brooks is the Victim of a Botched Brit Milah

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 I don’t mean that there is physical damage to his penis.  I mean that the Brit Milah, the first mitzvah that a Jewish boy experiences, is supposed to, you know, make you Jewish, and Brooks’ biography states that he is a Jew did not work.  This guy is about as Jewish as Ann Murray.

Somehow or other he manages to express dumbfounded amazement at his experience at having a discussion with a Jewish theologian where she makes points that are so mainstream in Judaism that you can’t hear a Rabbi’s sermon without hearing at least one of them twice:

In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities. “We live in a relativistic culture,” she told me. Many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking. They find it hard to give a straight yes or no answer to tough moral questions. When they go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety.

[Dr. Erica] Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle. “I try to make people uncomfortable.”

Shocking, here is a Jew who asks a question in response to a question.  What do you think of that?

Brown seems to poke people with concepts that sit uncomfortably with the modern mind-set — submission and sin. She writes about disorienting situations: vengeance, scandal, group shame. During our coffee, she criticized the way some observers bury moral teaching under legal casuistry and the way some moderns try to explain away the unfashionable things the Torah clearly says.

Sorry, but I’ve heard this from Reform Rabbis through black hat Orthodox.

I don’t mean to imply that she  is not a rigorous thinker, or that she might not be an engaging teacher.  What I am saying is that this is completely mainstream Jewish thought, and that any Jew who expresses surprise and wonderment at what is standard boiler plate for a B’nei Mitzvah speech given by a 13 year old.

I have seen such expressions of surprise from Christians that I’ve dealt with, I recall a Pentecostal woman in college who was stunned when I noted that the afterlife was simply not particularly important in Judaism, for example (It’s orthogonal to Tikkun Olam), which blew her mind.

It’s one of the reasons that I object to the term “Judeo Christian,” because there are real and deep differences in ethics and philosophy.  I would argue that existentialism, with its focus on personal responsibility, is actually closer to Judaism than many of the strands of Christian theology.

As Ioz observes, “This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.”

I am not sure if he’s really stupid, or if his hanging out with right wingers, who either are evangelicals, or who find evangelicals “useful idiots,” but he really needs to spend some time listing to the rabbi’s sermons, as opposed to playing on his Blackberry.

H/t Brad Delong.

This is a Fascinating Analysis of the Koran

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Essentially, the speaker notes that the Koran is a far more nuanced document than either the fundamentalists or the islamophobes would imply, and that you really cannot understand it in translation.

Certainly that is my experience with the study of Torah, where I really don’t think that I can claim to have ever even read it, since with my pathetic grasp of Hebrew, I do not know more than a smattering of words and a few greetings.

In any case, listening to Lesley Hazelton is a good way to spend 9 minutes.

H/t Yves Smith.