- Get up early in the morning to see the sun rise and have a cup of tea
- Practice Judaism more seriously
- Blog more
- Learn how to podcast in college
- Publish an essay (or two) in a journal
- Become a “Jewish Buddhist”, or Jubu
- Design a website from scratch
- Write more for my own enjoyment
- Learn how to make certain things (writing, photography, etc) part of my life
- Play cello again
- Push myself at school
2009 New Year’s Resolutions
Previous post: Happy Hanukkah!
Next post: Two New Essays
Kabren Levinson is fist-year student at Bard College. Throughout high school, Kabren has worked in various technological, political, and artistic positions. He has worked as an intern at the MIT Media Lab Computing Culture Group and during his senior year of high school, he developed an Academic Technology program at the Cambridge School of Weston. He has been podcasting for over three years and has been blogging for two. Kabren is a philosopher, technologist, and artist.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
You might want to drop the Judaism one. It’s a religion without any grounds in reason or science whatsoever, and all it’s done so far is cause unnecessary conflicts.
Read Deuteronomy 21. Or Leviticus 20. I don’t think you would want to base your life on “laws” like that. Just saying.
No thanks. I’ve practiced my entire life within a reform community, and have loved it. Reason and science don’t have the answers to everything, and reason and science tell me that religion is something worth considering. Reason, logic, and science are things we can hold on to, they are things within the box, but religion is outside of the box, it is not finite or tangible. I enjoy that uncertainty. I find pleasure in the unknown. I’ve gained a lot of joy from being part of various Jewish communities and that is not something I want to let go of.
The thing is this: There are millions of unanswered questions in science, but each century, there are a few less. We learn more and more as time progresses. This cannot be said about Religion. The books of Mose have been around for thousands of years and they’re still as contradictory as they were when they were written. I mean, Genesis can’t even decide on the order of creation! And then all those Isrealis wandering around the desert for 40 years… weren’t they supposed to leave behind even a tiny bit of evidence? How come no one has found anything yet?
As for your box argument, consider Pascal’s teapot theory. He postulated that if he was to say that there was a very small teapot orbiting earth that you couldn’t see with any telescope because of it’s size, people would call him stupid. But if that theory had been taught as holy fact in churches and sunday schools for centuries, no one would doubt his intelligence for making such a ridiculous statement.
Joy can be gained from any community, but you should be aware of what your religious community stands for. Just because vices like xenophobia, misogyny, racism and homophobia are justified by an invisible God, that does not mean you should support anyone who represents them.
Lastly, consider this: There are about a million religions in the world. Take the ancient Greek one for example: we know for a fact that there was never anyone named Zeus sitting on a mountain, controlling the Greek people and making babies with their women.
As a Jew, you also believe that all of the other religions you see in the world are just as false as Greek mythology. So what makes Judaism the only right religion? And if Muslims won’t go to heaven because they don’t follow God, why shouldn’t you go to hell for not following Allah?
Look, I’ve been where you are right now, I was a devout Christian at one point myself. But like many other people, I’ve had to admit that I’ve been lied to for my whole life. However, once you get past that disappointment, a whole new life opens up before you. And this one is much better than the old one with all it’s crazy rules. Like how you have to kill your own son for all his backtalk because God Almighty commands it.
“The thing is this: There are millions of unanswered questions in science, but each century, there are a few less”.
Most in fact remain unanswered. Each century we have more and more scientific theories providing models to attempt to explain why observed phenomena happen – but ultimately they are only models with no proof. Is light an electromagnetic wave or a stream of photon particles? Different models explain different phenomena. Can science yet explain the strong nuclear force? Has a single living cell ever been able to be manufactured from scratch in a laboratory?
“Genesis can’t even decide on the order of creation!” The Hebrew language version of Genesis is perfectly clear in the order of creation. Sometimes it’s just not possible to translate all the nuances of meaning from one language to another. Some English translations of Genesis may seem to portray a conflict in the order of creation – some don’t. The argument is largely an academic one based on how we translate the tense of some Hebrew verbs into English – when the way that the tense of verbs on Hebrew does not work the same as it does in English.
“And then all those Isrealis wandering around the desert for 40 years… weren’t they supposed to leave behind even a tiny bit of evidence? How come no one has found anything yet?”
Evidence? After 3000 odd years?? How much evidence that lasts this time be left by a group of people who did not build anything?
“Lastly, consider this: There are about a million religions in the world. Take the ancient Greek one for example: we know for a fact that there was never anyone named Zeus sitting on a mountain, controlling the Greek people and making babies with their women.
As a Jew, you also believe that all of the other religions you see in the world are just as false as Greek mythology. So what makes Judaism the only right religion? And if Muslims won’t go to heaven because they don’t follow God, why shouldn’t you go to hell for not following Allah?”
It’s called faith based on the evidence available to us. Have you personally performed the experiments and investigations performed by scientists over the centuries to arrive at their conclusions? Have you got the resources to do so? No. You accept, on faith, what they and others have written in books to have been the results of their experiments. Just the same as Judaists accept what others have written in the scriptures.
“Look, I’ve been where you are right now, I was a devout Christian at one point myself. But like many other people, I’ve had to admit that I’ve been lied to for my whole life”
Man is not perfect. There are other forces at work than just God who will get men to lie and teach against what is in the scriptures. When you were a Christian did you ever read and study the Bible carefully on your own and compared what is in it to what you were being taught? Or did you just blindly accept what your church told you without checking out scripture for yourself? Just because one false church lied to you – is that sufficient justification for denying the existence of God? As an illustration I could have read a series of vandalised Wikipedia articles or misinformed websites and come to the conclusion that the Earth’s atmosphere is 90% argon. I then read some other books and found out I had been lied to and in fact there is very little argon around us at all. Would that then be sufficient reason to deny the existence of an atmosphere at all?
If your current research leaves you confident that science has all the answers and that God does not exist – then so be it. However I would make sure I hade considered all the posibilities – just in case I later found out that “science” had been lying to you all along.
Listen, I don’t want to get into a flame argument (it already has, unfortunately). The notion of having fewer questions doesn’t interest me. In the Hebrew Bible alone, the Torah, there are an infinite number of questions one could ask. Part of what I love about religion is the uncertainty of it all. I like being able to ask questions – for me, it’s not about answers, it is about questions. Having answers to everything in life would be boring, to me, at least. The world of science is amazing. I’m proud of what science has been able to tell us about our world surrounding us. It’s truly breathtaking. But scientific method over the past hundreds of years tells me that I should not prevent me from considering religion.
What you say may be what you’ve gotten from studying these books (about other religions being false, etc – I don’t believe that, for the record), but I’ve gained something else. For me, religion is not about blindly following commandments and abiding by rules. Rather, it is about finding a community within which I can freely and openly ask questions. Religion so far has been more of a cultural experience – I don’t practice much, and most of my “jewish” time has been doing non-religious activities, activities which have helped me grow as a human being. However, I’d like to know more about the customs and traditions of my very own religion. I hated religion for much of high school. I’ve rediscovered it within a good community in college.
And please, don’t tell me what I believe on my own blog. That really pisses me off.
Hey Albert,
Thanks for the response! Part of what I’ve loved about being Jewish (more in the last year) is sitting down, with a Rabbi, and studying Torah. Going through each chapter, each line, and each word, and dissecting it and asking what it all means. Thanks for raising more questions and defending my position, a bit.
K.
Please, I don’t want to piss anyone off, I’m just trying to give advice here. I know life with religion, and I know life without it. I just want to warn people of glorifying the former.
Albert, what science cannot explain now, it might be able to explain later (I’m not talking about photon particles). Ancient people believed that sun and moon were gods battling for dominance of the skies every day and night. Today, we know they’re not, so those heathen religions of old are proven to be wrong.
What’s important is that science is made up of millions of models and theories, and they change over the years with more and more research, until finally we’re left with the thing closest to the truth. Religion does not do that. For example, the Catholic Church taught for ages what Ptolemy thaught about the sun and its relationship to the earth. When people put research into the question and published evidence that Ptolemy (and thus the church) might have been wrong, they Church didn’t change its view, it just burned those people and banned their work.
Genesis might be perfectly clear, but still fails miserably at making sense. First, god creates light, then day and night, and then after some time, he creates sun and moon – the sources of that light. It’s not hard to see that there’s something fishy going on here, is it?
Archaeologists have dug up the remains of burial rituals that happened easily 6,000 years ago. And those were single skeletons. For a people living in a desert for 40 years, it would be quite hard (read: impossible) not to do something that leaves behind traces. Like dying for example.
Don’t compare religious texts to scientific texts, they’re completely different. I haven’t done any research about gravity, I’ll admit that, but I’ve performed experiments in chemistry, biology and physics class that clearly supported what scientists and scientific studies had suggested. I have not experienced anything remotely comparable with religion.
But there’s more that’s wrong with your example: With religion, you get millions of different world views, most of which overlap at least at one point, but also, most of them are fundamental at their basis. Meaning that they not only claim to know the answers to most questions, but also that everyone else doesn’t. So, religious texts are nowhere near uniform.
While I was a Christian, I read the bible very carefully and compared it to what I was learning at church. And yes, there were major differences. For example, I was never taught at church to kill gays for having sex. But I was taught that in the bible. In Church, I was taught that premarital sex was sinful and would get you into hell. In the bible, I was taught that marriage is defined by sexual activity, which is in accordance with god’s laws. In Church, I was taught that God loves everyone to pieces. In the Bible, I was taught that God is a hateful asshole.
I believed for ages that the reason for religious radicals destroying the world was simply false teaching. But then I realized that pretty much every laid back church this side of heaven should be called a false teacher as well. Just because they don’t support all the hate and anger that is in the bible, but instead lie about god and man’s nature.
Science does not lie to me. Lying means telling somebody something as the truth when you yourself should know it isn’t. If research unveils that the atmosphere is in fact 90% argon, scientists will admit having been wrong and put more research into whether or not (and why) this might be harmful to us – or not. If research unveils that Christianity is a bucket of lies, the Church won’t admit anything. They’ll just say scientists are false teachers sent by the devil.
Kabren, I think it’s nice that you have such a relaxed view about your religion, but please do keep in mind that the religion you chose is not a relaxed one. No matter how peaceful you are, remember that you’re still worshipping a merciless warmongerer.
And don’t be offended by what I’m saying here, I just mean to help.
Nice new year’s resolution.
Really like that you are looking into Buddhism.
Hey Kabren!
How early are you planning on getting up? I get up around 6am, which gives plenty of time to get organised and time on the computer!
I also need to practice Judaism more seriously. I want to celebrate festivals and holidays, knowing why I do and why it’s important. I want to be able to ask questions and creat my own theories, while still keeping the bases of Judaism. I think perhaps I should study philosophy. I don’t know yet!
On the topic of Jewish Buddhism, are you planning on becoming a Buddhist with Jewish ethnicity or are you planning to be Jewish with an interest in Buddhism?
Those are some really great New Year’s Resolutions! I might steal some of them!
Henning, in my view, Kabren is not being realxed in his views of Judaism, he’s taking an intellectual, modern view of it. He’s thinking and pondering Judaic questions and their answers. I believe that should be a central part of Reform/ Progressive Judaism, intellectual thought, not following it because he has to.
Thanks, Alex.
Also, to Henning once again, Reform Judaism openly supports interracial marriage and gay marriage in most cases. So your view of Kabren’s religion being against certain peoples is crap.
The only problem with Reform Judaism is that not all Hasidic or Orthodox Jews accept people who have Paternal Jewish roots or converts to Reform Judaism. Those people still have instant Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.
Alexander,
Philosophy is awesome…I encourage you to take it up. Be ready to read, write, and think! I’ve had a lot of fun in philosophy so far.
I’m planning to be Jewish with an interest in Buddhism. I particularly like certain spiritual and meditative practices of Buddhism, while I love being Jewish and the customs, traditions, practices, and texts of Judaism. Here’s a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Buddhist.
K.
Alexander, my view is certainly not crap. I’m looking at Judaism’s holy scripture, which says that gay marriage is pretty fucking gross. If Kabren’s religious views don’t include that, imho (!) he’s not following his own religion accurately. Which is definitely not a bad thing.
Henning, don’t make that call. There is more than one holy scripture. Religion isn’t as easy as following what one book says. In fact, most Jewish rituals are not even in the Torah.
Look, you wanna practice Jewish rituals, be my guest. It’s your people, your life, your decision. Just drop the religion.