'Happy Holidays' loses the spirit of the season

Proximaking

You wrote, "The Bible is certainly endorsed by it all but sad to say not the Torah but surely the truth comes first ahead of a superseded book."

If by "superseded book" you mean the Old Testament, than you do not have a clue.

Do you realize that Jesus was born a Jew, lived His Life as a Jew and died a Jew.

The Jews are the Chosen People for the simple fact that God chose them and not only chose them but formed them.

God created everything out of nothing, I suppose a nothing, so nothing, that we can not even perceive the nothingness of the nothing I am referring to.

God did not "blow Himself up", so to speak, so that God is in everything because God did not make everything out of Himself but out of nothing, God is not a "formula" that man can come up with but is a Being of Love, Pure Love.

I imagine when you wrote, "Big J believed in God", you are referring to Jesus, Jesus did not say that He believed in God, He said, "I and the Father are One" and "I will send the Holy Spirit...", Jesus said that He was God-Incarnate, it is that simple.

Take care, be ready.

Sincerely, Thomas Paul Moses Baum.

Stick with it, it's interesting.

The whole point is Christ is in Christ's mass. If we look at modern ideas in Science we see that we live in a conceptual multi-verse and that matter, "mass", is made up of a constantly enfolding electro-magnetic-spin conceptual field much like the one God steps out from in the book of Job. One prediction of this is that as the folding of a "flat" EMS sheet continues gradually it produces what we see all around us and ALL spheroids such as the earth, the moon, a baseball, every electron and so on has one tiny ever reducing error on its surface as the folding progresses.

What size would this error be on the surface of the earth? Who knows but "The Mystery Spot" in California may be it on the spheroid we call earth, one may lie under jupiter's great red spot, Neptune's white spot etc and all of these errors would have identical ratios of spot area to planet surface, or electron etc, area. The point of all this? When the error spots are mapped whose face will you see on every spheroid from the largest to the smallest? I leave you to look for yourself.

Let's keep the Christ in Christmas because Christ is in all mass, it is his even after all, without him nothing that has been made was made. Think of it as the garden of Eden having four sides with the corners crossed in again and again and again, and from there we come to here with a multitude of particles. How quickly the error is reducing by measurement here on earth, and the maths, would tell us when it all started, 4,000 years ago? 2,000 years ago? 7 years ago? who knows? Time has no meaning in this description of reality.

The Bible is certainly endorsed by it all but sad to say not the Torah but surely the truth comes first ahead of a superseded book. The spheroids would all look strangely like small Christmas tree baubles, spheres with little holes, ...... but where is the tree this near infinite array of particles and things hang from? I leave you to work that one out.

Anyway some musings for you that shows how he probably did it all, Christ's mass, .... made by him simply imagining it all. The top concept is surely capable of imagining a place for us to exist outside his mind, a new heaven and a new earth so to speak. Forgive the banner for the anti-shell site below, .... they are trying to liken Shell to Nazis, which is taking things slightly too far, though not much if you knew what Shell get up to in Nigeria.

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2008/01/06/crackpot-or-genius-has-a-shell-boffin-stumbled-on-a-scientific-breakthrough/

One thing is simpler than the above description of reality, the idea that God believes in God and we know Big J believed in God as he said he was his son so maybe creation was that simple, .... God believed in himself. I do warn you though, if correct every jewish Nobel prize falls but strangely no others, ..... a chosen people, maybe the only ones who could be trusted to admit they got it ALL wrong.

All the Best

John

"But Christmas, along with the debates about how to celebrate it, belongs to other people, not to me."

Yes, true. But the Christian fundamentalist right wing, by insisting that everyone -- in particular, retail store clerks -- say "Merry Christmas" in December makes such debates an issue for all of us.

We can't simply say, "Oh, I'm not one of them, so I'll just ignore this." That's a "mushy" response in and of itself.

And, when Farnaz says, "I, too, take issue with the mushy sentimental intellectual surrender which claims 'all religions are the same,' a process through which Other religions are brought under the auspices of the normative one," she is forgetting that "Happy Holidays" is one result of getting religious specificity out of public schools and government buildings.

In this country, Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist children no longer have to partake of any aspects of Christian holidays in their schools and classrooms. And this is huge.

So what if legislative efforts like this one result in an overall neutralizing of the richness of individual religions? These aspects of each faith are loved and appreciated by their memberships; it's not necessary that the public appreciate the nuances.

What IS important, however, is that the "dominating" (call it "normative," if you like) faith in any society be prevented from indoctrinating children of other faiths during the 6 or 7 hours each day that these children are a captive audience in their schools.

If the price of that kind of freedom is that individual religions' profiles become "mushy" in the minds of the public, then so be it.

Agree on most points. Hanukkah is, of course, a minor holiday, but the element of the miraculous brings to it something that makes it remarkable. The commitment to Judaic identity that ushers in the miracle gives it beauty, and it is this that children and adults pay homage to.

I, too, take issue with the mushy sentimental intellectual surrender which claims "all religions are the same," a process through which Other religions are brought under the auspices of the normative one.

"When I think about Judaism's voice, I think about the centuries of discussion in the Talmud and later books, about how to create a just and sustainable society"

Of course. However, few genitiles have a clue on this. The Christians/Catholics believe that Judaism is the "Old Testament" [sic]. Indeed, a couple of years ago, a colleague and I reviewed the most common history of religion texts currently in use at the university level. With two exceptions, these books "explained" Judaism with a brief summary of the "OT" [sic].

For three years, I've tried to disabuse bloggers on this site of this sorry notion. However, for reasons you and I know well, such an endeavor will not succeed easily.

I hope you take it up, Rabbi. I am--the Jewish problem.