<p>It is not stupid to suggest religion is socially mandated superstition. It may make some people feel disrespected, but it is not stupid.</p>
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<p>Now, seeing as Allah, Yahweh, karma, etc. are abstract concepts and have no physical manifestations in the real world–such as objects, actions and circumstances–most modern-day religions do not really fit this definition, which is what makes the use of ‘superstition’ here imprecise. If we are to take the broader definition of the word, however–basing one’s understanding of the world on fallacious reasoning and assuming a set of irrational rules to be sound–then it fits.</p>
<p>Sometimes the State has a superseding interest over a religious practice. In the case of the Florida woman with the burqa, especially in the post 9/11 era, the picture on the license must actually identify the driver. Identification is the issue.</p>
<p>In the case the OP has shared, it is an opportunity for the rest of us to learn more about the reason behind Judaism’s rules and why this young woman lives according to them. Clearly she is an intelligent and educated woman. I differentiate her case with an educated Christian (maybe Jews too?) who embraces teaching Creationism in school. Some might accuse me of being intolerant too.</p>
<p>Though I am not a practicing Jew, I have always admired my people’s willingness–even mandate–to question, question , question. POIH should do a little more questioning and back off on the accusations.</p>
<p>POIH…your posts here are nothing short of contrary…and bigoted. I’m sorry but there it is. Your OP to this thread did nothing but show a student who has some true beliefs. There are articles every year about students who do not attend their graduations for the same reason. Your comments about holidays and religion in general smack of prejudice and intolerance and IGNORANCE.</p>
<p>I “thought” this online message board community was one that welcomed all faiths, ethnic groups and folks from different backgrounds and beliefs openly without judgment. Your posts are offensive, and don’t support this at all.</p>
<p>In our family, differences in beliefs are RESPECTED. Clearly you have do not do the same…and yes posting your “opinion” on an online message board shows this.</p>
<p>You live in a well populated urban area of this country. There are plenty of folks practicing plenty of different religions in your area. Be respectful…and my request would be for you to do so here too.</p>
<p>To say that your bigoted post makes me sick…is an understatement.</p>
<p>You mentioned the prohibition against Muslim women wearing head scarves in France.</p>
<p>We don’t live in France. We live in the United States, a country that places a high value on religious freedom. The French evidently place a higher value on other things. Many Americans are puzzled or offended by the French action, and one of the first reactions many of us had when we heard about it was “That’s not something that would happen in our country.”</p>
<p>You criticized me for mentioning that there are observant Jewish students at Ivy League colleges on the grounds that it is irrelevant. I think it may be relevant if you would like your child to attend such a college (as your username suggests). If you are looking for colleges that are intolerant of students’ diverse religious beliefs, you had better go elsewhere. The Ivy League colleges welcome students of all faiths and accommodate most religious needs. For example, the Ivy League college that my daughter just graduated from accommodates the dietary restrictions of observant Muslims and Jews by providing a halal/kosher dining facility and accommodates the religious holidays and Sabbath days observed by these students by providing opportunities to take examinations that are scheduled on these days on alternate dates.</p>
<p>You mentioned in one of your posts that English is not your first language. It seems likely then that American is not your first culture. Perhaps without realizing it, you have created a controversy here because you have criticized one of the most basic principles of American culture – religious freedom. </p>
<p>You are perfectly free to consider the religious practices of the young woman you are discussing to be superstitious or silly, just as she is free to follow her religious beliefs. But when you imply that the American public schools, which are not in the business of religious indoctrination, should have taught her not to practice her faith or should not have made a reasonable accommodation to it by allowing a taped speech, you are trespassing against something that is at the very core of what it means to be an American.</p>
<p>I think this is part of the reason why you are receiving such hostile replies to your posts. The other part of the reason is that you seem to be in the mood to pick a fight. However, on a board full of Americans, you have chosen an unfortunate focus for your desire to start an argument.</p>
<p>Wondering if OP’s wife is still on an extended visit with her family out of the country. Might explain the increasing hostility of the posts over the past several months, and her good judgement to be far, far away. Wait… maybe marriage is a “superstition” too.</p>
<p>Your comments are ignorant and intolerant no matter what religion, belief, or creed.</p>
<p>I hope your child learns tolerance in college and she has roommates of diverse faith. It is faith and tradition, not superstition, that guides many people. I think if others can be tolerant of you, then you should exhibit the same respect.</p>
<p>At this point, I am wondering if we all stop commenting, we will discontinue giving POIH the forum he so desperately needs.</p>
<p>I think that perhaps you are not familiar with Orthodox Judaism – which is not unusual, given that the number of Orthodox Jews in the United States is relatively small, and most Orthodox Jews choose to live in areas where there are others of their faith – meaning that there are quite a few areas where there are none at all. It is not uncommon for people to be unfamiliar with the religious practices of observant Jews and to find them puzzling when they first learn about them.</p>
<p>If you were familiar with Orthodox Jewish religious beliefs, you would not have said that this young woman’s practices have “no basis whatsoever.” They actually do have a basis in her faith. She is not making this stuff up. But perhaps you did not know this.</p>
<p>POIH, you claim that the student “forced” the school to accommodate her, but that’s not the case. She was willing to forgo the honor of speaking at graduation (i.e. giving the valediction as the top ranking student) because it interfered with her religious obligations. She did not insist that the school accommodate her. The school decided to do so. The student also expressed appreciation for the school’s cooperation and an awareness that they did not have to offer it.</p>
<p>Basically, this girl did what countless millions of other Americans do; she arranged her life to accommodate her own religious convictions. That is one of the things about this country I am truly proud of. Separation of church and state doesn’t mean an absence of religion in the public sphere. It means that people of different faiths (or non-faiths) can practice their beliefs without state interference.</p>
<p>You and others have the right, of course, to dismiss faith as ignorant superstition. Millions of others will happily ignore you, as is their right.</p>
<p>pOIH, you need to distinguish between organizations choosing to accommodate religious beliefs, and those with religious beliefs insisting that EVERYONE follow their restrictions. </p>
<p>The Jewish community at MIT has asked for kosher dining halls, which without a google search I am confident they have. The Jewish community at MIT hasn’t demanded that the entire MIT campus not serve pork, shellfish or cheeseburgers. See the difference?</p>
<p>POIH, once again, raspberries to you. I suggest that you read up on William James. An argument can be made, that it is irrational to believe that anything of what you think you experience exists at all. Maybe it is all a dream. No amount of studying at MIT or any other college can prove that any of us really exists. Did you see the Matrix? Don’t you know that you can not prove, with your measly 5 senses, that anything exists?</p>
<p>To me, perhaps the OP does not exist, but is some computer malfunction typing provocative and insulting drivel that appears here to annoy many of us.</p>
<p>I value W.H. Auden’s words “the kitchen table exists because I scrub it” as a viewpoint (look up Christmas Oratorio).</p>
<p>I went to an interesting lecture by one of my own former professors where he discussed views of religious belief. One of the things that he noted was that many people believe that it is good to believe. He then said that there were Popes that fell into this category. Without taking on any religious belief, in short, the point he was making was that belief is a choice. If you don’t want to believe, that is your choice. To tell others that they can not or should not smacks of the communist totalitarianism practiced in the former Soviet Union and not so long ago in China. Fortunately for those of us in this country, our beliefs are to a large extent protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A reading of the case law will find that there is not an unfettered right to practice religion. Go read the cases if you have questions. A course in Constitutional Law will help you.</p>
<p>I don’t find anything in POIH’s posts to get irate about, he has an opinion and is free to express it. Of course anyone is free to get irate and insult him too.</p>
<p>Within any religion there are many elements, practices or beliefs that are indistinguishable from superstition. Superstition may be a provocative word in context, but it is not ridiculous or inarguably wrong to use it.</p>
<p>Well, others have defined superstitious, but it’s worth noting what the word “educated” means. It simply means “having an education” – Merriam-Webster. To “educate” can include (this is my dashboard dictionary) “give intellectual, social and moral instruction typically at a school or university” and Merriam-Webster says " to provide schooling for
b : to train by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession 2a : to develop mentally, morally, or aesthetically especially by instruction." </p>
<p>Anyhow, I’m too lazy to drag out my big heavy hardbound dictionary. An OED definition would be nice, but the point is that I can’t find a definition that says that being educated means the rejection of all religious practices and/or faith. It’s a ridiculous pre-supposition. Those Ivy League schools – at least Harvard, Yale and Princeton – were all religious schools when they started. It would be enlightening for you to study all the advances that have happened in the world by those who were religious. Some of the greatest literature was written by those who were religious – Paradise Lost comes to mind. History abounds with the accomplishments and advances that were from people who were true to their faith. It’s sad that you can’t see that.</p>
<p>so let me get this straight this morning…
(and kudos to those on the east coast who stayed up into the wee hours of the morning dealing with this; jym, soozie)…</p>
<p>POIH is not a native english speaker; does that mean he has come to this country as an immigrant? …can’t he leave “through the same door” he came through? why is he complaining about the way things are done here?..nobody is holding him prisoner…</p>
<p>I guess one could argue (the way he and James Madison has) that even “atheism” is a superstition…after all, it is a belief system…</p>
<p>Or maybe (as someone earlier in the 20th century believed) that the only “religion” that should exist is the “worship of the state”…</p>
<p>If we are to use their definition literally…</p>
No I never did. And I think it is far far better that people with religious beliefs that I don’t pretend to understand are at a liberal (in the old fashioned sense of the word meaning tolerant and open) are there than at institutions where they are only exposed to their own beliefs. I think the world will be better if we make efforts to understand each other. And yes, our dorm had a custom of making milk and cookies on Sunday night. He wanted to participate. The rest of us were happy to eat his cookies, it was very sweet of him to participate.</p>
<p>One of the best explanations I read about keeping kosher was in a kids’ book I read years and years ago about a family (conservative not orthodox) that emigrated to Israel. They kept kosher not because they believed the laws made sense, but because it was a form of discipline and a way to say “we are part of an exiled community” and further part of a community that not so long ago was subject to the Holocaust and pogroms. </p>
<p>As for bending the rules to tape the speech. I am quite sure that there were no rules being broken. Graduation ceremonies are generally governed by custom “This is the way we’ve always done it”, but the way one has always done it, isn’t necessarily the best or only way. Our school would never have held graduation on a Friday night in the first place.</p>
<p>A. Its not only Orthodox Jews who observe shabbos and holidays. There are many Conservative Jews, and a few Reform Jews, who would have made the same decision</p>
<p>B. for some of those Conservative Jews, and many of those observant Reform, the choice is not connected to theology - they have beliefs about the role of observance in preserving jewish continuity, and in creating personal discipline, etc, that are not tied to a particular theology</p>
<p>C. For many Orthodox and Conser and Reform Jews for whom it IS connected to theology, that theology is often complex and not at all traditional - it can be rooted in the Jewish existentialism of Rosenzweig, Buber, or Levinas, or in the process theology of Kaplan. </p>
<p>Unless you have READ say, the works of Franz Rosenzweig, or of Mordechai Kaplan, or esp Abraham Joshua Heschel, I would consider someone judging this student to be ignorant to themselves be ignorant - they are judging without knowledge.</p>
<p>And yeah, I am sorry I posted this on Shavout.</p>
<p>"If he can’t think that the dorm over whether kosher or not will produce the cookies based on his skills of baking then he shouldn’t be there. "</p>
<p>Hmm? can someone parse this sentence for me? If he cant think WHAT about the dorm?</p>
<p>I have relatives who believe that if they eat non-kosher food something bad will happen to them. I consider THAT a superstition, and one that many traditional Jewish sources argue against (though yes, some sources would support that POV) When I was Reform I kept kosher (not strictly, but to some degree) out of a personal commitment to Jewish continuity, out a resolve to be disciplined and Jewish and spiritual in something as intimate as eating. When I became Conservativ/Masorti, I added a rationale - to observe halacha as a system (again, as far as I could given “where I am now”) as part of a relationship to the Jewish people, and to G-d. I do NOT fear (like some of my relatives do) that I will face tangible negative consequences for eating the wrong thing (well I do fear that for eating too much sat fat, but thats a whole nother thing)</p>