Are you embarrassed about being Jewish?

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Watch this and you'll be embarrassed to be ANY religion!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHRkMcVrt2w[/youtube]

To answer your question, most certainly not. I've met many other Jewish people who have been kind and understanding of me. I am proud of my cultural heritage, and I find your stereotyping to be rather insulting. Who cares if you're the only one in your class to not celebrate Christmas? Never bothered me all that much. We have our own holidays and traditions.

Then again, the jewish people speak against the christians having so many denominations. The fact is that the jewish have at LEAST 5 major "denominations"....

1. Ultra orthodoxed
2. orthodoxed
3. conservative
4. reformed
5. cultural

Granted they aren't SUPPOSED to be denominations(Cultural may not even be religious, and is more properly called hebrew), but some don't honor ones below them without a conversion or test of some sort. And the differences can be striking. The ultra orthodoxed compares to orthodoxed much like catholic might compare to lutheran and, ironically, is probably the most conservative and accepting of REAL fundamental Christians(REAL Fundamental Christians are conservative, and wouldn't think of commiting any hate crimes).

Maybe the OP thinks that reluctance to advertise/associate is embarassment. The two are quite different.

I vote off base. Not Jewish, me.

1. I have heard the same expressed here about AS, being a teen, other, and it runs deep.

2. Religion, ethical rules to be a good person, come from a general shame about being Human, so it goes deep and way back.

3. All people see life from where they are, hopelessly self centered. Black and grew up in a Black neighborhood, or Danish, or Texan, and everything gets put on what they know. It is not so, it is the whole world.

4. Suddenly cured of AS, being Jewish, you would have the same problem, and it is universal. Let me point out that the closer you get to mainstream perfection, the higher the rate of cosmetic surgery.

5. What is with him? Jewish. Oh. It beats trying to explain AS.

6. Black person in New Orleans upon hearing of the Native American side of my family, "Oh, that explains it!" It beats trying to explain AS.

7. I lived in NYC for five years. Same problem, different accent. I was told I was lying about being from New Orleans, I did not have a southern accent. AS monotone, formal, precise. When asked what a southern accent sounded like, they did a fair impression of West Virginia, and spoke of me being from far back in the mountains of south Louisiana. Their world map ended in New Jersey.

Their world view was all the smartest people lived in NYC, people outside the city lived in caves and grunted. Just like New Orleans. Returning to New Orleans I was told I had a New York accent. Different + NYC= everyone in NYC speaks like an Aspie.

We did get along, New Orleans, most European American city, NYC, a European Colony in America.

In the 1960s kids dropped out, grew long hair and beards, Hasidic kids got a shave and a crew cut.

You should be embarrassed about being a human.

If only you were an inch taller, or had better hair, or bought a new Jeep! It is always something.

You are a silly little hairless ground ape that smells bad. Who are you going to blame? Deal with it!

I just want to tell the OP that I know the feeling and understand perfectly well what he means. I felt the same way, so I made aliyah. I then thought, for 23 years, that it had all been in my head, and that there was no reason, really, to make aliyah if I had just had a different attitude.

Last month my work sent me for a month to work in another continent. Boy, did all the bad feelings come back immediately! The feeling like the odd one out, the having to defend my community, all the same blah blah. I understood, to my surprise, that I can never go back to live in the golah. That feeling is not for me.

Israelis are unbearably rude, arrogant, superficial, aggressive. But I much rather be here than feel cut in two in another country.

Kalister, you're so right! And thank you so much for posting that video!

Kalister,

I watched it as a liberal adherent and felt no embarrassment for my religious affiliation. Fundamentalism is a universal disease that afflicts not only the members of religions.

Your right, there are fundamental Marxists, fundamental National Socialists, etc.
Point is, religious people are PROUD of their fundamentalism (as are Marxists, etc), and parade it like its a virtue. They try their best not to look past their fundamentalism, and use it as a sort of rosy hued glasses to see the world through. Scientists try their best not to have fundamental beliefs, where as religious people thrive on it.

"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah Nietzsche! Your quotes are appropriate in this situation to the extreme.

That film is *****HEAVILY***** biased! All the peoples it speaks of as having vanished exist today! MOST of the languages, even a couple "dead" ones STILL exist, much of the culture exists! SO, it is WRONG about them disappearing. HECK, the NAZIs took control because of the jews, and when they were there, and after they left, the NAZIs ended up going into hiding, etc... To equate the jews with the NAZIs(as far as mortality) would be like equating todays IRAN with the latest president.

As for the immortality of the jewish people/culture? That has changed a LOT. The culture illustrated in the old testament is GONE! It exists today as much as the roman culture in the new testament still exists.

I am not disputing that the jewish people exist, left a mark, have a culture, etc... The FACT is that the same can be said of the germans and even ancient rome, as well as many other cultures. HECK, most of the people here have an easier time reading/writing/typing thanks to the latin alphabet.

BTW The Hebrew language was apparently once more dead than latin ever was. Who even knows. In the sh'ma there is a line that says (as I recall, and forgive grammar/spelling) "Adonai echad." The JEWS read that as "The Lord is ONE."! The CHRISTIANS often read that as "The Lord is ONE COLLECTION."! So WHICH is it? Could the Christians be right? Even current unbiased hebrew scholars apparently can't be SURE. Maybe it was clearer BEFORE Hebrew died out. Who knows? BTW The idea is that echad is a PLURALITY of one. The Christians cling to that as support for the trinity(3 but one). The jewish people use that to deny the trinity. The Sh'ma, for those that don't know, is basically a declaration of God and the basic precepts to the jews. It starts out with something like "Hear Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is one.". Some biased jewish scholars even say the word is used like the royal we(Where kings/queens would say WE when it really meant I, as they were speaking for their kingdom)

"I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations … They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more and more happily than any other nation, ancient or modern."

- John Adams, Second President of the United States
(From a letter to F. A. Van der Kemp [Feb. 16, 1808] Pennsylvania Historical Society)

Arguing over religion is like arguing over the emperor's new wardrobe. when he is in fact, naked.

Kal,

As a religious person who is not a fundamentalist, I think what you said is accurate, but not of religious folks in general, only of religious fundamentalists. Also, I don't think scientists try their best not to have fundamental beliefs. They just generally keep them very basic instead of building up some sort of metaphysic. Without some beliefs about reality there would be no way to apply the scientific method. In some cases scientists do have very strong beliefs about certain things but the better scientists separate their beliefs from their work.

Ah! That is where you are wrong! Believing reality is an a priori can have very huge advantages , especially when dealing with physics. The works of Sartre and Beauvoir have influenced many scientists. Besides that, what they have found out about the nature of reality are not beliefs, because they put them through incredible amounts of tests. This is the fundamental difference between belief and thought. Where Scientists start from a blank slate, build on it, and test, religious people make up some nonsense and calling it true! No amount of evidence can say otherwise. Scientists are constantly accused of hubris, when in fact, its the other way around.

Also, you are a fundamentalist, because you have fundamental beliefs that can not be challenged. No amount of evidence would persuade you otherwise, because if it did, you would not be religious. Religious people want to draw a dichotomy between "fundamentalists" and themselves. Why? Is it that they are willing to put their religion into action; put their money where their mouths are?

Fundamentalism is defined as:

"strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles: the fundamentalism of the extreme conservatives."

Well, any religion has that, or it wouldn't be religion! It would be philosophy, and true philosophy, philosophy that changes with argument and discussion.

Mark Twain, an agnostic and self-acknowledged skeptic, penned this in 1899 in Harper's Magazine:

"The Egyptian, Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away. The Greek and Roman followed, made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up, and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"

Why were Pascal, Mark Twain and many others so amazed by the survival of the Jews against all odds?

The 7 Wonders of Jewish History:
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/ ... istory.htm

You're right about that! I could find lots of things saying the same about HINDUs, Christianity, and perhaps Budism and even Islam! ALSO, such flowery things said by a politician, activist, adherent, descendent, or celibrity is MEANINGLESS! They tend to be biased and for public dispersal even when the speaker believes the contrary.

All of those are the same sickness. They all give comfort where there is none.

I believe that some speakers do not believe the contrary. Many do, but some are able to engage in the magic of doublethink.

"Doublethink is the act of simultaneously and fervently holding two mutually contradictory beliefs. It is an integral concept of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four." - Wikipedia

Those are the most dangerous of all public speakers. Nowhere else can you get a man who speaks with blood, then one who can believe anything and everything with the whole of his being.