erratio | Day of judgement

Today was Yom Kippur, the day of judgement where God decides whether we will live or die during the coming year. I find it fitting and symbolic, even though I didn't intend it this way, that today will probably be the last day that I self-identify as Jewish.

It's taken me a long time to reach this point. Even though I haven't believed in the rituals of Judaism or in the existence of a Judeo-Christian God for years, I still fasted on Yom Kippur, avoided bread during Passover and kept an abbreviated form of kosher (no ham/pork/etc) out of some sense of tradition and obligation towards my family and my past. I think I'm over that now.

What happened? Well, I read an article last night about the difference between actually believing in something and only half-believing, in the way that most of us don't believe in ghosts but would still get freaked out if we spent some time in a haunted house. And that caused something of a personal epiphany, where I realised that I've been behaving as though I half-believe in Judaism, even though I'm sure that the monotheistic God doesn't exist.

Today I fasted, because it seemed like a bad idea to change my beliefs when I had such a huge incentive (being able to eat normally) for deciding to give up on religion on the spot.* Starting tomorrow, I will be making an effort to discard my last observances of Judaism. From now on, I will only identify myself as Jewish in the sense of having had a Jewish background, not in the sense of currently identifying myself as one. Let's see how it goes.

*Probably also because as soon as I realised that my personal epiphany happened to match up with the most serious day of the Jewish year, that determines your fate for the entirety of the coming year, I couldn't resist the temptation towards symbolism.

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Do you feel any pressure from family or friends about this? Expectations?

I didn't grow up in a Judeo-Christian home, but it was devoutly Buddhist. Not the "philosophical" Buddhism, either. I'm an atheist, on the outside looking in. Where the faithful see meaning, purpose, and take comfort in their religion, I just see the reasons why we're at each others throats, whether it's the bigger world picture, or the smaller family or community picture where we exclude and hurt each other based on religious ideas.

Like you, I had that sense of only half-believing. Not just Buddhist tenants but Christian ones as well. I live in the USA's so-called "Bible Belt," where there's a church every few blocks, sometimes they're next door to or right across the road from each other. Every other street? A synagogue. There are a few mosques, too, but they're trying to stay out of the public eye due to recent socio-political events in the US.

I see it as a big business, not some means to define our lives and give it meaning. It's possible to be an atheist and still have humility, morals, mores, and knowing right from wrong and being able to logically explain those decisions. Let's not forget criminals have religion, too.

Religious Buddhism? What kind of beliefs does that entail? I have a Burmese Buddhist friend but his beliefs are pretty incoherent, as far as I can tell. I would appreciate hearing about it since it's one of the few that I don't have a good feel for.

I haven't told my family about it yet; I don't want to make a big deal about it because my mother has some (weird confused) level of belief that gives her comfort, and a large part of that is about tradition. As for my friends, most of them are either consciously atheist or at least not religious, so most of them won't care one way or the other whether I uphold some silly dietary rituals.

I'm still pretty ambivalent on the function of religion as a whole. At the lowest level, I find them perpetuating some incredibly toxic memes. Not just the obvious anti-abortion and anti-gay rights stuff, but (for example) I've also noticed anecdotally that people who were raised religious and then deconvert usually end up with lots of problems because they've been trained to believe in some kind of Deep Universal Meaning that isn't necessarily there and certainly isn't going to be handed to us on a silver platter. At the higher levels you see all the usual problems that you get in a large hierarchical structure; it becomes more about politics than about serving the congregation.

But on the positive side I've met some really good religious people - not just nice, but that rare kind of person who seems to radiate goodness and compassion - and I think that a large part of that goodness comes from growing up in a tightly integrated and cohesive community and knowing with absolute certainty that you're unconditionally loved and accepted. It would be nice if we could recreate that sense of acceptance without having to posit a God, but it just doesn't seem possible since it rests on God being Other and omni-everything.

Neutrally, religion fulfils a lot of important community-building functions, but I'm pretty sure that even if religion vanished tomorrow some other structure would immediately take its place and have most of the same costs and benefits. And I don't think people need religion to engage in mob thinking or bigotry - religion is just a convenient vessel for it.

With Buddhism, there's the notion that it's simply a way of thinking about the universe or life: karma, reincarnation, nirvana. No soul, no gods, nothing outside the self. Then there's the Buddhism where the original Buddha is venerated as a god, and Buddhist pray to him to change their negative karma to positive karma so they come back as something better than what they are now. Priests and other Buddhist clergy talking about coming back as cockroaches if the lay believers don't do certain things.

My mother grew up in Thailand, where Buddhism is the state religion. That Buddhism was practiced by her until we were stationed on Okinawa (my father was in the US Air Force). There, she was introduced to a Japanese Buddhism called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichiren_Buddhism>Nichiren Buddhism</a>. It looks and feels a lot like Shinto stuff. It also reminds me a lot of the American fire and brimstone evangelical Christianity wherein you're always threatened with dire consequences for not chanting enough, praying enough, or being fearful enough. When I turned 18, I left my family and joined the Marine Corps. Religion doesn't really figure much even though there are lots of religious people in the military. It's a private thing and most people respect that. So I never received my own gohonzon or kept chanting namu-myoho-renge-kyo. The feelings of guilt, if that's the right word, certainly dissipate over time. My mother still practices but I have no desire to discuss it any further with her.

I have flirted with the idea of conversion to Catholicism, but only because I was eager for the existential angst that might come of leaving the religion the comprises every aspect of my identity. Sadly (and I went so far as to consult with somebody more knowledgeable in the halakha than I), leaving Judaism is virtually impossible from the standpoint of Jewish jurisprudence. So far as personal identity goes, I wouldn't want to actually leave, although I hear where you are coming from loud and clear.

I utterly disavow a belief (however symbolic) in any of the traditional claims that Judaism makes, save the most airy and insipid ethical regulations, which I accept for reasons entirely secondary to my religious identity. It saddens me that there are so many people in our community who disavow Jewish identity for that reason (and I am not for an instant accusing you of this), because doing so only attributes more power to the religious Jews of our world, who claim (with very little competition) that such is what Judaism is.

Of course, Judaism is more than the texts that make up the tradition, and even if you are an avowed literalist like myself, the literature itself is so much more than the individual texts that make it up. There is no injunction to believe in any of it or to accept any of it, nor even any indication as to how you should prioritise any of it, or what else you might welcome into the "canon". The fact that numerous of the texts do outline such frameworks is beside the point: there is no reason that you should agree with those bits either :)

To my mind, religiosity is fascinating on paper, and intellectually insulting in practise. I work at a synagogue, in the role of an educator, but feel more like an anthropologist than a participant in their services. I have a love/hate relationship with extreme orthodoxy, and a very liberal outlook as regards the beliefs and behaviour of others in my community. In short, while I could never make the same choice as you have made, I support entirely your right to make it, and applaud your openness and honesty in publishing it!

Best of luck to you: you did more to commemorate Yom Kippur than I have done in years, and I hope that you continue to struggle with your identity, even as you take further strides towards cementing it.

what caused big bang in the first place? :)

If you think the answer is God, you still haven't answered the question of where God came from. I think "i don't know" is actually a pretty good answer for now.

imho no one created God, God has been there since the beginning.
God is the base case in recursion.
It is a God of the gaps argument.

Why suggest a God at all then if you know it's just a placeholder? It doesn't make any more sense of the universe than just saying "magic" or "random chance"

because it is a belief, we can't prove it.

Day of judgement

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I applaud your courage!

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