OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
In Australia, there are no widely-held rules about identifying as Aboriginal - any amount of claimed ancestry is sufficient, and plenty of Aboriginal-identifying people pass as something else, often with only the tiniest amount of Aboriginal descent. The media sometimes publishes stories about how racist it is to question the Aboriginality of fair-skinned, white-passing people.
You might ask then why everyone doesn't just tick the Aboriginal box on all forms all the time, since it can be advantageous for employment and so on. As far as I can tell it's still just the honour system, though.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
One day I need to make a top level comment about uses and abuses of the term 'original sin'. Calling anything and everything bad that involves guilt a form of original sin is distressingly common, and like the 'wokeness as religion' metaphor I think it's usually a bad metaphor that tells us almost nothing about wokeness or guilt, but what really drives me crazy is that it seems to be made in almost-complete ignorance of what original sin actually is.
I realise that theological literacy is pretty low even among Christians, and maybe I shouldn't expect secularists to know much better, but if this analogy is going to be so dominant, we can at least take the time to explore it a bit further.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
It's also hard to imagine that if the gay marriage plebiscite had failed, there would be a exhibition celebrating this as a triumph of Australian democracy like there currently is one celebrating its success (ironic given that many pro-gay marriage advocates initially opposed the plebiscite before they got the results).
This seems particularly baffling, because even today you still find quarters that feel the plebiscite was a mistake, that it was harmful to marginalised people, or that it was in some way inappropriate to have a vote on a 'rights matter'. We had that argument back in 2016, and now it's being made again for the 2023 indigenous voice referendum. See, for instance:
The real damage inflicted by any opposition to the Voice will be in the potential discourse it brings about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The country has already seen the damage a partisan battle can do to marginalised groups, most recently on the same-sex marriage plebiscite.
I confess I find this a very troubling and anti-democratic attitude - if rights are so important that it's wrong to hold a public debate or vote about them, then rights can only be identified and implemented by some other body, smaller than the public as a whole, and that way lies oligarchy.
The government is currently trying to change the way referendums work, incidentally. Specifically, in the past , the government would fund a public debate on the issue, which requires funding both sides. The logic is fairly straightforward - for any issue consequential enough as to require a referendum, there must be a robust public debate, which requires an informed populace aware of the best arguments for each side. If one side is vastly wealthier than the other, this might be difficult. So the government funds a debate, as it did last time. The current government wants to change this.
I don't think it's hard to guess what their motive might be here - they don't want to spend any money on or give any publicity to the "no" side of the debate. The Albanese government is not interested in treating the indigenous voice referendum as a serious debate between two sides, both of which are reasonable and whose best points should be heard, so that the Australian people make an informed choice. One imagines that if they did give money to the "no" side as well, they would be raked over the coals for funding a racist position. One also imagines they know that the "yes" side is much richer and has far more media reach than the "no" side.
This just strikes me as another example of an increasing lack of patience with or interest in the public voice, or in democratic processes overall. If an issue is important, if it is good, if it is about human rights, then why would you ever subject it to anything as capricious as democracy?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie
A famous court case from the 1970s - neo-Nazis wanted to march through a Jewish neighbourhood, and the ACLU controversially defended the neo-Nazis, on free speech grounds. It's one of the most famous examples of publicly fighting for a "I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" position.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I think the cases I find trickiest are the ones where I want to say, "This is a bad post, but the one it's replying to is worse and they both deserve moderation", or "This is bad but not for the obvious reason", or "This is a good contribution phrased in a terrible way", or any other judgement more nuanced than just good or bad.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Sure, I understand that I'm not modding. I also understand that more detailed feedback would create additional workload for mods, which is the exact opposite of what this system is supposed to do.
I just stress a little when I worry that the option I select might be misleading.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
My guess is that Dutton opposes it, but is trying to figure out a way to publicly oppose it which doesn't incur the wrath of the Liberals' own pro-Voice wing, and which doesn't paint a giant target with 'I AM A RACIST' written on it on his back for Labor and the Greens.
I read Dutton's requests for clarification as being basically attempts to get Labor to put up a specific proposal that he can then oppose - much like the republic referendum, the Liberal strategy will be to sidestep the question of whether a republic/Voice is a good idea or not in principle while arguing that this republic/Voice is a bad idea. Labor are making what is probably the correct strategic move in reply by refusing to give any such details - they're trying to force him into either admitting that he supports the idea in principle, in which case he has to join the Yes campaign, or that he opposes it in principle, in which case he has the aforementioned target on his back.
It does show how far the terrain has shifted, though. Go back twenty years or so and John Howard bluntly opposed treaty, Voice, etc., on the plain small-l liberal grounds that the Commonwealth does not recognise or privilege any race or ethnicity, and further the Commonwealth cannot make a treaty with its own citizens. That Dutton doesn't feel able to make a similar argument now suggests that he thinks his position is quite fragile. Some of that might be specific to him - Dutton is a former policeman who was formerly in charge of border control, so he has a reputation as representing the tougher, more hard-right wing of the Liberal party; it makes sense that he feels particularly vulnerable to accusations of extremism - but I suspect that is not all of it by a long shot.
On the ideological background of it all - what frustrates me most is how underspecified all the public activism or debate in this area is. It seems to be something that runs on buzzwords. The biggest example for me is sovereignty. The word 'sovereign' pops up again and again like a tic, and it is extremely unclear what it's supposed to mean. It's clearly not sovereignty in the Western, Westphalian sense - Aboriginal people are demonstrably not sovereign in that sense. It's 'a spiritual notion', apparently, but what that means is never specified - a sense of being-on-the-land? Um, okay? What is that? It 'co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown'? Can someone spell out the political implications of that? If you try to look up any explanation, what you find is frankly a lot of waffle that no one seems to take at face value - the quoted elder there says "we are not subject to the Australian or British law but still maintain our own sovereignty", but good luck arguing in the public sphere that the law doesn't apply to Aboriginals!
And so on with so many of the other claims that seem to come up and time again. Another common one is that Aboriginals are the world's 'oldest continuous culture', another claim whose meaning is never specified and doesn't seem to bear up to scrutiny. So on and so forth. It's hard to escape feeling that, ultimately, there is no there there. Overall it seems that there is a desire among the Australian public to be nice to Aboriginal people, basically, but no consensus about what that means, so what ends up happening is that empty platitudes are voiced and no one thinks further about them. Certainly no one does anything.
Anyway, predictions...
Personally, I predict (but with low confidence) that the referendum will pass, and then conditional on the referendum passing, I predict that the Voice will have no real power. For all the symbolism, I don't believe parliament will do anything that would involve giving up any real power, so I think the Voice will have only the power to advise; and its constitution will be contingent on legislation, giving parliament the power to alter its make-up or defang it at whim. I predict the Voice will provide a bunch of well-paid committee jobs to indigenous activists in Canberra, and not make any difference as regards remote indigenous communities in poverty.
I would not be surprised if activists already expect the Voice to be ineffectual. The moment it's created, I predict the entire sector will turn to pushing for Treaty instead. Just as after the National Apology, energy shifted to advocating for constitutional recognition, and just as Malcolm Turnbull seemed about to achieve that, the Uluru Statement came out advocating for Voice instead, I predict that whether the Voice passes or not, in the next few years the whole sector is going to pivot to Treaty.
Is it? Theological ignorance is a massive problem in American Protestant churches as well - remember that Ligonier poll? That found 73% of evangelicals affirming the statement "Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God", which is as classically heretical as you can get. 43% of evangelicals affirmed "Jesus was a great teacher but he was not God". 57% of evangelicals agreed with "Everyone sins a little,, but most people are good by nature". 65% of evangelicals affirmed that "Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God". These are all obvious heresies.
There are even some obvious contradictions: 97% agree that "There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit", and then 60% agree that "The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being". Not only is that false, they just said that the Spirit is a person!
Likewise I am sure that a majority of Catholics deny the Real Presence, or think that the Immaculate Conception is about Jesus, or some other basic misunderstanding of doctrine.
Catechesis is a massive problem in Christian churches in the West right now.
On the Ligonier poll, it is striking that there is a very high degree of conformity on culture war issues (e.g. 92% agree that abortion is a sin), but extreme levels of confusing on even basic questions of doctrine. It suggests to me that churches have become very good at lining people up into political tribes, but are failing at their more basic, essential duty of teaching the gospel.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Please note that the Talmud is a record of historical debates, and therefore includes records of many positions which are advanced, considered, and then rejected. In ths case, Sanhedrin 59 is the section concerning Torah study and Gentiles, and the view that Gentiles should not study Torah is contested and rebutted - it goes on to say that "even a gentile who engages in Torah study is considered like a High Priest".
On a purely anecdotal level this has tracked with my experience with Jewish communities and synagogues - I mention the above passage in particular because I once discussed some of these questions (specifically the relation of Gentiles to Torah) with a few rabbis, brought up this dispute in the Talmud, and the response I got was a smiling rabbi saying, "Like you." I ended up attending a Torah study for a while and being part of a beit midrash.
Obviously synagogues vary widely in their level of welcome, but I bring this up just to have a contrary example present as well. There is tremendous internal debate within Judaism - even the link you provided above points to a record of debates about the status of Gentiles, and cites the very Gemara passage I mentioned above.
I think there's a tendency you get in many external critiques of religion that simply read a given sacred text, draw a lot of surface-level assumptions from it, and therefore conclude that either the religion is painfully anti-human and cruel, or that almost all practitioners of the religion are hypocrites. I'd suggest that it's often better to pay more attention to what is actually practiced - not that sacred texts don't matter, but those texts are held as part of interpretive communities. The history of the text's reception and interpretation, and then the way it is applied communally, are inseparable from its meaning.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I'll add that, in my experience, I've heard this as a common Islamic criticism of Judaism as well. Islam is very clear that everybody is made good and beloved by God and is of equal intrinsic worth. God sent prophets to every nation, and everyone regardless of ethnicity or race or culture can become a Muslim and be saved. That door is always open, and sometimes I talk to Muslims about how they could never sympathise with Judaism because it excludes so much of humanity. Jews are no better and no worse than anyone else.
It makes for an interesting contrast with Christianity. In Islam, the history of Israel is in a sense unimportant. God sent prophets to all peoples to teach them his ways, and eventually summed up and collected them all in the Final Prophet. Israel is a historically relevant case of this happening, because it influenced so much of the rest of the Middle East, and provided cultural context for the final revelation, but it isn't theologically relevant, in any deep sense. We know the prophets of Israel well because they're described in detail in the Tanakh, but the prophets of Israel are not intrinsically any better than any other prophets.
For Christians, on the other hand, the history of Israel specifically does matter - Jesus is the messiah and king of Israel, the summation of that nation's history, but in a way that somehow 'breaks out' and expands to the entire world. The New Testament is full of quite painful wrestling with what this means, and how you get from Israel to the New Creation in which all are one in Christ. So Christianity still has to reckon with Israel in a way that Islam doesn't.
Certainly Islam is very strongly influenced by Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an is full of stories and references from the Hebrew scriptures.
What I want to argue is that as a theological category, Israel doesn't cause the sort of problems for Islam that it does for Christianity. Israel is relevant for Muhammad and early Islamic Arabia in a contingent, historical sense, but only in a contingent sense. God's covenant with Israel matters because it happens to have been a very influential one in the region, but that's all. The Final Revelation to Muhammad isn't dependent on the covenant with Israel.
That is, Israel is not special in Islam. It had a covenant with God and prophets sent from God, but so did every nation - see Qur'an 16:36 and 40:78.
This is not really the case in Judaism or in Christianity. In both of those traditions, you sometimes get the idea that God might have spoken or sent prophets to other nations to warn them, but this is relatively radical. Rather, both seem to take the view that God revealed himself only to Israel. That's why in Romans 1:18-21 Paul need to present an argument as to why the Gentiles are at fault for failing to recognise God. Likewise in the sermon in Acts 17, he invokes 'the times of human ignorance', suggesting that there was some period in which God was not known to the Gentiles, which might be a mitigating factor for their ignorance.
So Israel retains a central significance for them. For better or for worse, it was the place where God first made himself known to mankind, and everything proceeds from there.
That said, both Judaism and Christianity have the idea that in some sense Israel is supposed to illustrate or reveal God to the nations. As I understand it ancient Judaism was somewhat more 'evangelical' than modern Judaism, and allowed for actively going out and attempting to convince Gentiles to worship the God of Abraham, but even in modern Judaism, there is the idea that because of Israel's faithfulness all the nations will come to recognise and worship God. They will not become Jews, but they will know God.
Exactly how this will happen has been disputed. There are passages that you can read as implying a sort of empire, e.g. Deuteronomy 15:6, but that is not a common understanding now, and I believe now it's usually thought to be a sort of global moral influence, as in e.g. Exodus 19:6, with Israel as a 'kingdom of priests'. At any rate, there's the idea of Israel as a light on a hill - God using Israel as a vehicle for the salvation of the world.
What that would look like is, again, unclear, and sometimes it might be something left for the messiah, so all Jews need to do now is follow the mitzvot and live righteous lives, as good examples to the world. Sometimes I believe very liberal Jewish teachers have suggested that Jesus or Muhammad might have been means by which God made himself known beyond the Jewish people. That doesn't mean endorsing everything in Christianity or Islam, but prophets to the Gentiles, so to speak. That said that is a very liberal move. At any rate, I think the exact way it will work continues to be a matter of reasonable debate among Jews.
Christianity, at any rate, does think it knows how God used Israel for the salvation of the world. For Christians, Israel becomes a sort of prelude to Christ - it was, like John the Baptist, there to make straight the way. This does not indicate any special righteousness on behalf of the Jewish people, for all have sinned equally and fallen short of God's glory, but merely that this was the history that led up to Christ. Israel's relevance is subsumed within Christ's relevance. The old covenant with Israel is not negated - on the contrary, it is fulfilled - but it becomes part of the new covenant in Christ's body, which is for all people.
There's still massive debate within Christianity as to exactly how this works, and I won't rehearse arguments over supersessionism or dual covenant theology or anything else, but I think pretty much all Christians would hold that Jesus in some way fulfils the covenant with Israel or is the culmination of Israel's history, and inaugurates a new creation in which all people are saved.
So to broadly summarise:
Judaism: Israel is the community of the covenant, a people that God has chosen and reserved to himself out of all the world. We are those people and we must follow his commandments.
Christianity: Israel was a theologically important nation, the product of a covenant which led up to and was completed in Jesus, God's only Son. In Jesus all divisions between peoples and nations have been abolished. We are born to new life in Jesus and must carry this gospel to the nations.
Islam: Israel was a historically important nation, and one whose prophets are known particularly well to us and are especially dear to us. However, all nations received prophets, for God neglected none of his people. All revelations to all nations have been collected up and completed in the revelation to the final prophet, however, and it is this revelation that all people must now follow. We are the people of this final revelation and must issue this call to all people.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Plus a lot of people don't even know what the military lifestyle is, or have received a picture of it entirely from popular media. So you potentially have some people avoiding the military because they want to avoid something that doesn't even exist.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
It doesn't seem like you need to be racist in any sense to find it odd that they chose a non-Christian to read Christian scripture on this occasion. The blatant racism of the person objecting to gospel music only delegitimises any other concerns he might name.
So in that spirit: the presence of Sunak at the coronation isn't inappropriate, nor is it inappropriate for him to take part in some capacity. Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu leaders appeared later in the ceremony to present items to the king. Being a Hindu doesn't disqualify Sunak from taking part in the coronation.
But you'd think that the reading of scripture specifically is something that ought to be done by a Christian, or at least by a person who believes it.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
I suppose I'd say that seems like a rather arbitrary place to draw the line, and it would make me suspicious of the complainant's motives. I can't recall any requirement that everything at a coronation must meet some standard of Britishness, and neither do I know how you'd define Britishness in this sense anyway. Indeed, it seems that previous coronations have often included elements we would associate with other countries, most famously France.
And it seems as though Charles III and his household should have the right to select the music they wish at their coronation. The gospel music was skilfully performed and appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
It's common in many states in the Commonwealth of Nations, of which Charles is titular head. It's also practiced in some of the Caribbean nations of which Charles is king, and I believe Afro-British in the UK itself also sing gospel music. For that matter it's a popular form of Christian music that even many people of no African heritage sing - I've sung gospel music in church before, even though I have no ancestral connection to Africa.
It doesn't seem unreasonable for Charles' coronation to include elements reflecting the cultures of countries that he rules, and again, if he or his household wish to include that music, is any more justification necessary?
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
My guess is that that was seen as less important, because the people who use a product are not necessarily the same as the people who buy a product. This is most evident in marketing to children, but even for adults, there are a lot of households where the wife does the grocery shopping. Thus sometimes you get ads for men's products that are targeted at women - the Old Spice commercial is probably the most famous example.
I wouldn't be surprised if Gillette's theory was that it's an ad for women, who buy shaving cream for their husbands or male relatives.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.
Okay, this is not sinister.
Christians and Muslims believe that as well. If we add up the Abrahamic faiths, over fifty percent of all human beings belong to religious traditions that explicitly believe that everyone should abandon false gods and turn to the only true God - the Lord of Hosts; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of Israel.
If Jews believe that the world will be perfected when everyone recognises Adonai, then as a Christian I feel entirely unthreatened. I greet that belief with a hearty "Amen!"
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
Can you make your point more clearly?
Yes, many Christians and many Jews have bizarre, mistaken theological views. But that's nothing to do with my point. Sure, there are lots of woke Jews, like the one in that TikTok you linked. But there are also many woke Christians. The issue at hand is wokeness, not Judaism or Christianity.
You then linked this to a prayer in the Aleinu (a noticeably non-woke prayer that is over a thousand years old), which, yes, prays that false gods will be banished, and all the human race will return to worship God.
There are two problems with this.
Firstly, there is no apparent connection between the woke Jewish girl in the TikTok and the content of the Aleinu beyond the phrase tikkun olam. That phrase is used very widely by Jews. You might as well point out that there's an entire chapter on the necessity of Social Justice in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Secondly, the Aleinu is totally innocuous. Praying that idols are destroyed and everyone worship God? That's basic Judaism, sure, but it's also basic Christianity and basic Islam. Hatred of idol-worship is deep in the DNA of all Abrahamic religions. You wrote as if there's something scary about Jews praying that all the world abandon idols and worship God, whereas in fact that is believed by the majority of the human race.
I think you are attempting to draw massive, unsupportable, and conspiratorial conclusions from the existence of woke Jews.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I'm not sure what HBD has to do with it. Certainly the Aleinu tells us something about Judaism as a religion, and in this case what it tells us is that Jews believe that Israel is a nation set apart, chosen specifically to worship God, and that eventually God will reign and all people will worship God.
This... isn't sinister and doesn't imply anything about genetics? It doesn't centre a genetic distinction as such - if you read the Aleinu in good faith it's clear that the distinction is that of covenant rather than idolatry. How are Jews different to other people? They are different for they prostrate themselves to vanity and nothingness... but we bow, prostrate ourselves, and offer thanks before the Supreme King of Kings. They key principle is being called to worship God. This certainly isn't a frightening thing, particularly because Christians and Muslims entirely agree with this duty.
No one is going to be surprised to discover that Jews believe that they are a people specially called to worship God, set apart from the other nations of the world. You need to do a bit more work than this to show whatever it is you want to prove about Jews genetically.
Here's a contrast. There's a fixed liturgy of Catholic daily prayer. Priests, monks, and nuns are required to say these liturgies every day. This liturgy includes the Benedictus, during Lauds, and the Magnificat, during Vespers. Here's what they say:
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,
for he has come to his people and brought about their redemption.
He has raised up the sign of salvation
in the house of his servant David,
as he promised through the mouth of the holy ones,
his prophets through the ages:
to rescue us from our enemies
and all who hate us,
to take pity on our fathers,
to remember his holy covenant
and the oath he swore to Abraham our father,
that he would give himself to us,
that we could serve him without fear
– freed from the hands of our enemies –
in uprightness and holiness before him,
for all of our days.
And:
He has put forth his strength:
he has scattered the proud and conceited,
torn princes from their thrones;
but lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things;
the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel,
he has remembered his mercy as he promised to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever.
What HBD conclusions would you draw about Catholics from this?
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
That had nothing to do with the admins. The short version of that controversy was:
A group of BattleTech fans wrote a Pride Month themed fanzine about LGBT characters in BattleTech. The mod of /r/BattleTech didn't allow links to this fanzine, feeling that it breached the sub's rules against politics. There was a revolt among users, and Catalyst Game Labs, BattleTech's current publisher, said that they disagreed with this decision and supported the fanzine. They made a new 'official' sub, /r/OfficialBattleTech. At this point the mod of /r/BattleTech reversed his decision and posted a grovelling apology, and /r/BattleTech resumed as the central sub.
(Some long-running BattleTech authors also made comments, though they seem frankly bizarre - the Warrior trilogy criticises racism, sort of, it's still a story in which the heroic English/French/German states fight a moustache-twirling Fu Manchu stereotype, but there was one sympathetic Chinese character and there was a whole subplot about how samurai are cool, but that's a different issue to the present drama. 'Woke' is a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly Stackpole himself has also been criticised as a conservative.)
This is a particularly interesting incident, I think, because BattleTech has historically been a pretty right-wing property, fitting squarely into the right-leaning milSF genre. Previous BattleTech-adjacent controversies have often been in this direction - for instance, a few years back there was some drama because MechWarrior Online allowed people to have Confederate flag decals in game, but banned someone for spamming "trans rights" at the start of every game. More infamously, one of BattleTech's flagship authors for a while was Blaine Lee Pardoe, a solid, Trump-voting conservative. It's not worth rehearsing tired personal drama (he claimed someone stalked him), but he was eventually let go and now he writes bizarre alternate history/revenge fic about a Second American Civil War. So this is an interesting example of how what was probably a relatively conservative-leaning game and community has still been really subject to the hegemony of Pride Month.
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards. I also find the politics of it bizarre - the Clans appear to be presented positively in it, despite being militarist eugenicist space fascists. So to me the whole thing comes off as something closer to 'rainbow fascism' than anything progressive. This is arguably consistent with the tone - the most recent BattleTech story arc, the IlClan arc, is basically pro-fascist (as in, genuinely in favour of fascism as a political ideology), but somehow they seem to have gotten away with it.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
It's not published. It's a fan work - you can download it here, if you like. That is a real quote from it.
Now this scenario with the Chinese playing this role is unlikely for two reasons: First, despite their intelligence they completely lack the Jewish talent for creating myth, propaganda, and social narratives... amazingly, people here are citing the worldwide adherence to Abrahamic religion as evidence for the innocuity of Jewish mythmaking, rather than acknowledging that as evidence for the potent psychological influence of their talents. This is without a shadow of a doubt derived from their cognitive profile that goes way beyond IQ alone.
So, firstly, you've omitted the context of that disagreement entirely and in doing so changed its meaning. You quoted part of the Aleinu with the implication that it's a call for outright ethnosupremacism - for the supremacy of the Jewish tribal deity over other deities. Per your own comments, you think that Adonai is just 'a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people'. I thus understand you to be claiming that the Aleinu is an outright call for Jewish supremacy - for the superiority of the Jewish race over other people.
In that context I think it is extremely relevant that the part of the Aleinu you quoted is not only common knowledge but also uncontroversially accepted by billions of non-Jews. I can only assume that the non-Jews who agree with that statement do not see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. Certainly I don't. If so, then it also seems at least imaginable that Jews themselves don't see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. This seems supported by the fact that if I ask Jews directly, they tell me that it isn't a call for Jewish supremacy.
As such I think your claim about the Aleinu is a tissue of nonsense. I invite you to consider that it actually means what it says it means - that it is a statement about God, rather than one about race.
Moving on...
Why is the global success of Abrahamic religion 'without a shadow of a doubt derived from [the Jews'] cognitive profile'?
For a start, 'the Jews' in a macrohistorical sense aren't a single clear genetic profile. Even if for some reason there was proof that Ashkenazim or something have a unique genetic tendency towards subterfuge and malevolence, it is not clear how this would equip you to productively speculate about the genetic profiles of the 'myth-makers' of Abrahamic religion. Bluntly, we don't know anything about the genetics of Abraham or Moses, if they even existed, or David or Solomon, or Jesus or St. Paul. So you're attributing whatever storytelling genius they might have had to an entirely mysterious genetic factor, which there is no evidence they even possessed.
It is worth bearing in mind that, as far as we can tell, the early narrative tropes of the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly unique. If you read something like the Mesha Stele, it is remarkable how similar it is to biblical narratives. Ancient Hebrew stories are often visibly influenced by contemporary stories - Genesis 1 is informed by Babylonian creation narratives, for instances, and indeed in places the Hebrew Bible seems to get mixed up with Babylonian stories. (e.g. Gen 1 itself reads like a response to or parody of the Babylonian motif of Marduk slaying the sea monster and fashioning creation from her remains, but with the sea monster removed, indicating God's absolute supremacy. However, in other places - Job 26, Psalm 74, Psalm 89, Isaiah 51 - the monster-slaying narrative element has crept back in and God is depicted as having killed a sea monster to create the world. Ancient Hebrew narratives don't look like the uniquely genius products of a malevolent culture of subverters - they look like what was going around at the time.
Maybe some Hebrew thinkers brilliantly remixed it all into the perfect combination to survive and spread. If so, I don't see how that's evidence for the unique storytelling genius of Hebrews - after all, they were probably pretty darn similar, genetically, to all their neighbouring peoples. It seems more likely to me that whichever strand of ancient Near Eastern religious thought came out on top, you could accuse it of being the product of a genetic community with a unique gift for myth-making. But that doesn't make it so. Any number of contingent historical factors apply as well.
Moreover, I think the argument about the Jews as supremely good myth-weavers, creating narratives that powerfully spread on their own, has to reckon with the fact that it is not Judaism as we know it that actually spread to half the world. It seems to me that non-Jews deserve some credit for the spread of Christianity and Islam. If judged purely by personal success (and ruling out the possibility of divine intervention), the decidedly non-Jewish Muhammad seems to have been a far superior maker of myth than any Jewish figure. If we consider Christianity, sure, maybe you can declare that Jesus and Paul have whatever mysterious genetic trait you're ascribing to Jews, but the successful spread of Christianity across Eurasia seems to have had less to do with super-capable Jewish Christians and more to do with a vast array of apostles of many different genetic backgrounds. To take a specific local example, the Christianisation of Britain seems to have had more to do with non-Jewish missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury than it did any Jews.
You might reply that even if the standard-bearers and the myth-tellers weren't Jewish, the fundamentals of the narrative had been worked out by Jews, with whatever this unique gift they apparently have is. But by the same logic I might as well say that the Jews themselves deserve no credit at all for Judaism, because the fundamentals were worked out by the Egyptians or by the Babylonians. Judaism modifies many ideas from other ancient Semitic religions, but then, Christianity and Islam modify many ideas from Judaism. (Although to be fully pedantic I should say that rabbinic Judaism in the modern sense is itself a modification of more ancient ideas - Second Temple Judaism was destroyed in the first century, and both Christianity and the rabbinic tradition from which modern Judaism descends are innovative reactions to that disaster. Both had to significantly reformulate what it meant to worship God.)
I'm not sure how you can get past this - if Jews are uniquely gifted at myth-making and the formation of religious narrative, it seems at least a bit odd that Judaism is the least successful of the major Abrahamic religions. When it comes to formulating a narrative memetically optimised for spreading, the Christians and the Muslims seem to have significantly outdone the Jews.
Why were the Abrahamic religions so successful at spreading?
Well, leaving aside the possibility that God wanted them to, there is indeed the possibility that many of the basic elements of the Abrahamic religions are memetically optimised for spreading. But that possibility does not require the hypothesis of a unique Jewish talent for myth! It does not follow.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I think you're muddling quite a few things here.
For a start, I want to clarify exactly which standards you're using. The global spread and popularity of biblical narratives does indeed seem like evidence that those narratives have some merit. But what I would challenge you on is that there's any particularly unique about those narratives, which implies anything sinister about Jews as people.
After all, you mention other highly successful ancient narratives. I suspect most people on the street who recognise the name 'Thor' do know that he's an ancient Norse god, and Thor is actually a pretty weak example because the surviving corpus of religious Scandinavian literature is so small. But I invite you to consider, say, the enduring recognisability and popularity of Hercules. Consider the enduring narrative power of the Iliad and the Odyssey - even when the entire religious culture those stories were embedded in faded away. People may not specifically worship Zeus any more, but even in the Superman comics you reference, Perry White continues to swear by Zeus! ("By Jove!") This seems like an enduring hold on the imagination by these ancient writers. The power of Greek mythological narratives is such that they've even successfully hopped across cultures - you can find the Greek gods popping up even in Japanese media, for instance.
What I want to suggest is that the existence of an extremely successful narrative or set of images doesn't necessary imply anything nefarious about race. Certainly the success of Greek mythological narrative suggests that at some point in history something creatively fecund was going on in Greece, but leaping from this to the assertion of a unique, genetic Greek talent for myth-making that continues to the modern day and makes Greeks a powerful conspiracy manipulating non-Greeks to their advantage is simply ludicrous. As with Greeks, so too with Jews.
I think you're also tending to single out the involvement of any Jew in any creative endeavour as evidence that the whole thing is somehow Jewish, or part of this cross-historical Jewish myth-making scheme. In practice, however, Jewish influences are often only one of many involved in creating the narratives that you're describing. I was just talking about Greeks, after all, and we have to grant that Judaism in the classical world was extremely Hellenised, and Christianity's early growth involved a lot of fusion of Jewish and Greek ideas. You might say that this shows the power of Jewish narrative to co-opt and absorb Greek thought, but why not the opposite? Why doesn't it show the power of Greek narrative to co-opt and absorb Jewish thought? Why are the Jews, in your telling, always the manipulators and never the manipulated?
Thus with the Superman example. The Christian and for that matter Greek influences on Superman seem pretty clear - Superman has been read as an allegory for Jesus but also as coming from the Greek heroic tradition. There is certainly something very Apollonian about him. Greek or Christian memes flowing through the minds of Jewish people are still Greek or Christian memes. A figure like Superman is pretty clearly an aggregate of diverse influences, some of which are related to the Jewish experience in America, and some of which are not.
If Jewish ideas can flow through non-Jews in a way that, to you, is just Jewish influence (as with Christianity and Islam), it seems like non-Jewish ideas can also flow through Jews in a way that retains their power. If so, perhaps we'd be better off thinking of ideas in less of a race-essentialist way.
In this case, there are some foundational ideas that originate in ancient Israel, yes - monotheism is the big one. Those ideas spread between many different peoples, mixed with different other ideas and contexts, and eventually formed several different religious traditions, including rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At no point in this process do you need a posit a special genetic propensity for myth-making or cultural manipulation on the part of the ancient Israelites.
I'd also suggest that you use the term 'the Jews' in a very vague and general way, such that it's not clear what you refer to or why. For instance:
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Judaic pantheon, this is like saying "we don't know the genetic profile of Iron Man so we can't say anything about his behavior in that regard", the storytellers are the Jews themselves who keep these myths alive and propagate them among themselves and others with their rituals and behavior.
Who are 'the Jews' in this context?
Read 'Abraham and Moses' as shorthand for 'the people who historically came up with the core ideas and narratives of the Torah'. The point is that we cannot know anything meaningful about the genetics of the community in which the fundamental elements of Abrahamic faith were born.
I note that it is clearly the case that people like Abraham or Moses are revered by people of many different ethnicities. A specifically racialised interpretation seems weak. Muslims say explicitly that Abraham was a Muslim, and reject any significance for race. Christians also say directly that what matters is being a spiritual heir of Abraham, not one by blood (cf. Matthew 3:9, John 8:39, Romans 4:16, Galatians 3:7). Clearly Abraham is a hero and is understood as an ancestor by members of all the Abrahamic faiths - you have to go significantly against how these traditions have understood Abraham to see him as deeply racialised figure.
This even seems consistent with Jewish understandings of Abraham. Converts to Judaism are given the name ben/bat Avraham v'Sarah - son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah. The Jews themselves understand descent from Abraham to be spiritual rather than genetic!
It seems to me that the genetics of Abraham and the other originators of Abrahamic religion are firstly unknown and secondly held to be unimportant by his own heirs, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. So I think you're wrong to racialise this as much as you do.
In order to calibrate our baseline perspectives, would you accept the proposition that HBD provides explanatory power for why Jews tend to be more successful lawyers than non-Jews? I am suggesting that this holds for culture-and-myth-creation, and the cognitive traits that explain this go beyond simply IQ.
I'm wary of and try to avoid the term 'HBD'. I think there are probably multivariate reasons why Jews are overrepresented in professions like the law.
I do dispute, however, the claim that there is a genetic propensity for myth-making unique to Jews. I don't think it's even correct to say that Jews (as in a historically distinguishable genetic community like the Ashkenazim) do have a special talent for myth-making above other peoples.
Secondly, we should dispense with the absurd claim that the Aleinu is not supremacist, if a group of white people all cited some refrain proclaiming that the master of the universe chose them as his favorite people and made them differently from everyone else, and all else will bow under the yoke of the Creator who made Europeans his chosen people, you would unambiguously call that supremacist.
You're taking a very misleading reading of it. What the Aleinu says is that God has called and made a covenant with the Jewish people, differently to all the other nations of the world.
How would we feel if a bunch of other people said something like that? We don't have to speculate. We know, because they do. Americans say something similar to that all the time - that's American civil religion, the unique and special identity of the United States, chosen by Providence to be a beacon of freedom to the world. Americans make this claim all the time.
Judaism is an ethnically supremacist religion, and I don't mean that as a criticism, it is the entire reason it has survived under hostile conditions for thousands of years. Their god is their race, and their race is their god.
Judaism is an ethnoreligion, certainly - it is a religion associated with a particular people (though as I have indicated Jews understand Jewish peoplehood to not be reducible to race or genetics). That's not the same thing as being a supremacist religion - as you just admit in the next line, Jews speak very clearly about Jews not being superior to other people.
Moreover, you're taking an interpretation of Judaism here that almost no Jew would agree with. The God of the Jews, as Jews understand him, is the most high and the creator of the universe. They understand God to be a real being, and a different being to they themselves. They have this in common with every other Abrahamic religion.
I would encourage you to consider how the people you're talking about understand themselves. If nothing else, I'd like to suggest that Jews themselves might understand what Judaism is better than you do. Listen to them.
Oh, where to begin...
Let me clarify my point, regarding Stan Lee and Thor. My point was that just because Stan Lee used a large body of preexisting symbols and myths to craft them into contemporary cultural signals for receptive audiences does not mean he isn't a talented mythmaker, so your point "Judaism borrows from these other myths so we can't give them credit" doesn't hold.
The problem is that you have defined 'myth-making' so widely as to allow you to declare any involvement of a Jew at any stage of a creative process as evidence that the Jews are uniquely talented myth-makers.
Thus if there's a story involving ideas related to ancient Israel, even if no Jews at all are involved in that story's production, this is for you an example of the pernicious influence of Jewish myth-making.
At the same time, if there's a story involving ideas related to ancient Greece (or any other culture), but a Jew was involved in telling it, this is also for you an example of the pernicious influence of Jewish myth-making.
There's no consistency here. Anything touched by a Jew or Judaism or Israel ancient or modern in any way is evidence for your hypothesis, in a way that you don't claim for other ethnicities or narratives or ideas. I am tempted to ask - is there anything Jews could do, any way that Jews could tell stories, that you would not see as evidence of their subtle infiltration and co-option of other cultures?
I have another take. It goes like this. Ideas created by Jews, both ancient and modern, are frequently taken and used by non-Jews in creative ways. Likewise ideas created by non-Jews, both ancient and modern, are frequently taken and used by Jews in creative ways. This is completely normal and a harmless process of cultural exchange and influence.
I don't doubt the success of Greek mythology, and it is another example of the sort of culture-creation I am talking about. I am not saying the Jews are the only ones capable of doing it. Greek mythology was intelligently formulated with a race consciousness. Modern Gentile mythology, like say George Lucas, can be potent and influential but it is not created with a race consciousness compared to, say, Superman whose creators crafted these myths with a Jewish race consciousness that someone like Hlynka could not understand.
What on Earth are you talking about? Greek mythology was certainly not 'intelligently formulated with a race consciousness' - Homer or Hesiod or Pindar certainly had no concept of 'race' analogous to the one you're spruiking. The Theogony or the Iliad are not texts with a strong race consciousness in the sense in which you are using the term.
And I have no idea what you are talking about with Superman. Is it true that one of the influences on Superman was Siegel and Shuster thinking about the experience of Jewish immigrants in America? Yes, probably. To read that as 'created with a race consciousness' is simply dishonest.
Can you imagine a world where Jews denounced the Hebrew god as a false demon, all the old laws as superstitious pagan nonsense and then zealously forced all their fellow Jews to convert to the worship of Apollo? I don't think you can imagine that.
Of course I can imagine that, because that has actually happened before. Back when the state of Israel was founded there was actually a small but real Jewish pagan movement, the Canaanites, who believed something like this. They were heavily influenced by Italian Fascism and wanted to restore an imagined past Canaanite identity. They felt that contemporary (i.e. 1940s) Jewish culture had become effeminate and weak due to centuries/millennia of oppression, and came to understand Judaism itself as an enervating parasite, sucking the spirit out of the Jewish people. They wanted to abandon Judaism, return to a sort of Canaanite paganism, and establish a multi-ethnic Middle Eastern empire along fascist lines ruled by a Jewish aristocracy. They wanted to discard Judaism as a religion in favour of a highly aggressive, masculinised concept of Jewish racial identity.
That movement wasn't successful, thank heavens, but the point is that I can very easily imagine Jews rejecting Judaism and attempting to zealously enforce some new religious or ideologial structure by force. Jews are a diverse group and some among them have flirted with such ideas in the past.
Of course there are Greek elements in Christianity, but they worship a Jewish god. In this alternate universe where Jews decided to denounce the Torah as Pagan sacrilege in submission to the true master of all Apollo, that cult would also likewise retain some Jewish elements, but there would be no mistake regarding who absorbed who.
I think this is simplified to the point of nonsense, especially if you consider it in light of other cases where there's been substantial religious change in a society - take the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, or the way Persia became Shia, or Islam in southeast Asia. Does, say, the spread of Islam in Indonesia constitute the Arabs absorbing the Indonesians? Did the Jews absorb the Romans? The Safavids brought a new religion to Iran, Shia Islam, and they themselves were probably ancestrally Kurds or Turks - at any rate something other than Persian - and yet it seems absurd to say that the Turks absorbed the Persians.
Cultural assimilation can mean multiple different things. When the Roman Empire came to worship the God of Abraham, yes, there's a certain sense in which something of Israel came to dominate the Roman Empire. But to say that the Jews 'absorbed' the Romans seems nonsensical.
St. Paul, the OG "fellow white people, you must love your enemy and accept Jesus or else suffer eternal damnation by the wrath of Yahweh."
This is a gross distortion of anything Paul actually said. He certainly told people - without distinction as to race - to love their enemy and to fear the Lord, but that italicised part is important. There is no basis for seeing Paul as some agent of Jewish infiltration attempting to weaken or destroy a 'white race' that neither he nor any of his contemporaries would have believed to exist. Paul's message is undoubtedly preached to both Jews and Gentiles, and he sees all people who have received it as fundamentally in the same boat and called to the same standard of behaviour. He could hardly have been more clear about this.
There is basically no distinction between the two. Their spiritual status is a blood covenant and membership is inherited. There was no knowledge of genetics in the ancient world, but the phenomenon was captured conceptually with a blood covenant and inherited ingroup status.
The link I provided there was to a modern Jewish website. Contemporary Jews understand what genetics are, and yet they clearly indicate that descent from Abraham, in the sense that it is matters for being a Jew, is a spiritual rather than a genetic notion. You are making bold assertions about the nefariousness of the Jews without any reference to what Jews themselves actually say or do.
The notion that America was just conceived as some idea open to the entire world, rather than a people, is another example of a clever 20th century mythological revision. Americans make that claim you describe precisely because they have long been denied the ability to assert an ethnic particularity as Jews do. They instead have to embrace a conception of America as an idea rather than a people.
Are you asserting that from at least the 18th century, the Jews somehow prevented the Americans from asserting an ethnic or racialised sense of American identity? Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, that would not even be particularly germane to the point. The Americans are, for whatever reason, an example of a nation who assert a particular 'chosen' status for themselves in the eyes of God and accompanying mission to the world. They were talking about themselves as an 'Empire of Liberty' as early as the Revolution itself! The 'City on a Hill' motif has been deeply significant over the last century, and regardless of any quibbling about the origin of the phrase, I think the notion of America as a destined nation specially chosen by Providence goes back well before it.
As such I repeat that Jews are far from unique in having a sense of a covenant nation with a mission to the world.
I guess that puts you in an odd position because you are left to explain the peculiarly disproportionate representation of Jews in these areas of culture creation, which cannot be explained only by IQ.
I don't think there's anything particularly suspicious to explain, really. Jews are a very well-educated creative minority with very large historical populations in centres of American media, most notably New York. Of course there are lots of them in the culture industry. This seems entirely explainable to me without needing to posit some malicious Jewish talent for infiltrating and destroying non-Jewish cultures.
Some certainly do, but others who think "Judaism is not about genetics it's about spirituality", no I actually do understand Judaism better than them and they are fish who cannot tell they are in water. They say that Tikkun Olam means dismantling whiteness and fiercely protecting Jews from any measure of criticism or negative sentiment, no actually, I understand Tikkun Olam better than they do. Believing your own myths doesn't mean you understand them, it usually means the opposite.
I'll be blunt here - when you're telling me that you understand Jewishness and Judaism better than Jews, better than Jewish sacred texts, better than Jewish rabbis... I'm going to be very, very skeptical. When it comes down to it, I trust a rabbi to know what tikkum olam means better than I do a random I met on the internet.
This seems like an odd choice to read anything into? There's no such thing as a non-accented person, and I certainly wouldn't accept that a person with a British accent is not a 'high-quality English speaker'. The translator certainly does have a British accent, and the translator also appears to speak English quite well. Perhaps he is Sino-British, as you say, or learned English in Britain or from a British teacher.
I'm not really sure what weakness that could possibly convey, or how it would show disregard for the listening experiences of foreigners? The translator's English is perfectly pleasant to listen to.
If I notice anything about the translator, it's perhaps that his speech is conspicuously slow and clear. That seems understandable given the context, though. The translation is probably intended for people all around the world, many of whom have their own heavily-accented varieties of English. It's also quite possibly intended even for Chinese people who don't speak Mandarin - China has considerable linguistic diversity, and there may be even within China audiences that understand English as a second language, but not Mandarin.
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