In one way it must be very comforting to be a Christian who believes in Original Sin and holds it to be a matter of faith that all humans are born essentially evil. This can explain how humanoids can set off bombs in the midst of civilians going about their daily business, who have nothing to do with them, have…
Marrying Out
Marrying out of Judaism is such a major issue and I’ve received so many emails recently asking my opinion that I have to bite the bullet and address it. It is irrelevant to look back to Biblical Judaism and think that because King Solomon did it (some 700 non-Jewish wives and 300 concubines), therefore it can’t be a problem. Judaism…
Anglican Disinvestment
Isn’t it interesting that the Christians who are most sympathetic to Jews nowadays are either the Catholics or the Southern Baptist Fundamentalists on the Protestant side? You would have thought that the more liberal, open Protestant Churches such as the Anglicans would be more understanding. After all Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, started off very sympathetic to the Jews.…
Karl Marx
If you log on to the BBC Radio 4 you can vote for the greatest philosopher of all time! This is a by-product of a series of programs hosted by Melvyn Bragg on the History of Ideas. Now I guess most people are familiar with only a couple of names like Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato from Greece, perhaps Aquinas and…
Africa Aid
The pop charity bandwagon is rolling again. Scruffy old Irish pop singers are reviving their careers by going back to Africa and World Poverty and bringing the banality of pop lyric clichés to a very serious and heart rending problem. Anything that brings charity to the forefront of the public mind (which is usually hypnotized into throwing immoral sums of…
Religious Gangsters
I am saddened but not surprised by the news that the son of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Amar, has been arrested for beating up an Orthodox young man who offended by communicating with Amar’s unmarried daughter “unofficially”. Meir Amar, the son, is something of a suspect character altogether, but the Chief Rabbi’s wife, Mazal, has also been…