Day of judgement

[erratio]

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.

Comments

[focality.livejournal.com]

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.