Ok, but that still doesn't explain the fact that jews, no matter where they live, tend to have vastly different cultural traditions than other people in their community. Many jews also don't seem to have any problem with holding differing beliefs that are radically different from what the religion itself teaches and are many times incommpatible with traditional beliefs.

They have their own holidays, languages, country, history (both psuedo-history from the torah and their own history after that) and this is all off the top of my head. Why do you only bring this up when it comes to Jews. Are Germans only people who live in Germany? What about all the Germans living abroad? What about the ones who were born in other countries but still identify with the German people, despite not having citizenship in the country or one of their parents being a non-German?

Your obsession with things Jewish is remarkable.

Have you noticed how you rarely draw concusions from your (many) critical observations about Judaism which can be applied to theistic belief in general, or that you even attempt to do so? It kinda makes me think that perhaps your beef with Jews has little or nothing to do with your professed atheism.

What is it actually based on?

As there are no Jews posting in this forum I continually wonder why the negative replies.

I have explained that in Strike the root. Clearly taking down Judaism takes down both Christianity and Islam at the same time,

It does appear to be of interest to many here as I was temporarily banned for misquotation of material I did post on this subject. So I have to ask why, when I posted this to address the issue of ethnic group which was a loose end from a discussion months ago, there is such a "got something about Jews" issue. Clearly I have nothing against followers of Judaism any more than any other atheist. But I am talking about Jews not about atheists who cannot possibly be Jews.

Seriously, if you think taking out the jews takes down christianity and moslems as well, you are quite delusional. Such an act would STRENGTHEN the christians and moslems, not harm them. That's why most people here frown upon attacking only one religion. Even if you win, you've just strengthened your other opponents that you didn't even credit as a threat.

Your arguments didn't counter my points, so there's nothing else to say.

You're totally missing the point. Attacking only the religion itself instead of its causes is where your strategy falls on its face. Indeed, your own comment "can only result in people changing religions not abandoning religions and hopefully theism entirely" applies to your position, not mine. I find the perfect metaphor in: You give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats the rest of his life. Teach a person why ALL religion is bad, you have an atheist, or at least an agnostic. Teach a person that A religion is wrong, and they'll just join another religion, and you're back to square one.

Attacking judaism above and beyond any other is literally counter-productive. And worse, gives you the appearance of hate monger, not a rational atheist.

I have read through this thread and I have no idea what it's about. Is it me? Or is this totally inconsequential?

You can't talk about Jewish etnicity in the context of Israeli supreme court, without first establishing that Israel is not representative of Jews in general. It is a unique construct, both a country and a military instalation, constantly fighting. It's economy rests on exporting "security" solutions and wars. It's tourism industry is based on high tech defense demonstrations for foreign corporation representatives - the only tourists are there to browse surveilance, weapons and military training industry, like a Wal-Mart of death. It is literally the only country in the world supporting every violent US act and issuing scorn for even the most modest peaceful approach. Israel's business at the moment is war. It is the only country in the universe whose economy starts booming the moment they engage in military violence.

Contrary to Israeli opinion, US jews opposed the war in Iraq in far greater percentages than US citizens, both before the war and all the way to today. Why? Because of the again emerging shadow of dual loyalty that can potentially limit their personal interest in the US. The accusation, of course, is nonsese. Just like any other ethnical group Jews have only one allegiance: each man to his own interest. But the accusation of dual loyalty can be a very real threat in a country where you can be isolated and harrased for not being patriotic enough. While it was popular to support Israel, some US jews were the self-appointed Zionist champions, not because they believed in anything in particular, they were really liking the Super-American status and cashing in on it. Today it's different.

What Israeli supreme court says has no bearing on whether Jews are an ethical entity. Indeed, what Israeli supreme court says should have little bearing on anything at all, other than material evidence in a new set of Nuremberg trials; featuring US leadership as main defendants.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away a man was telling me how unique was Yiddish and was giving me examples. I responded to his examples showing I understood what his examples meant before he told me what they meant. He was surprised and asked where I had learned Yiddish. I told him he was speaking German. He refused to talk about Yiddish ever again.

That was some 20 years ago. Since then I have looked into the subject and found quotes from Jews saying it was important to go to German universities and learn proper German instead of "this gutter dialect" we speak. I did not find it in the original but in the translation so I do not know the word the translator chose gutter to represent.

In fact since the gutter dialect of German issue was made there have been inventions of it being an "old" dialect of German and some have been so bold to date it to the 17th c. without a lick of evidence.

If you have evidence of something else please let me know. "Unfortunately the physical evidence was lost" exposes the claimant as a bullshit artist.

You assume a strategy can win in one fell swoop. Only one can: Extinction. Assuming that because strategies have not brought ultimate victory overnight means they are uneffective or less effective than others neither wins you the battle nor the war.

There is similarly only one strategy that will lose the war, and that is a strategy of alienating the casual theist, doing so by concentrating on one of the weakest of our enemies. Compared to moslems, christians, and even scientologists, the jews are nothing.

Except they have the sympathy vote. People of all walks of life will defend jews, not for their religion and culture, but to prevent a recurrence of the holocaust. The jews are totally invulnerable to your tactics. Hitler gave them a defence that your strategy cannot harm. They don't even have to lift a finger against your strategy. Everyone else will do it for them.

All effective strategies should be used. Yours doesn't qualify.

And WWII didn't come close to wiping them out. Not even remotely.

I can see some sense in what both of you are saying.

Vastet: you are right that focusing on a single aspect can be damaging in this context.

Mouse: you are right that multiple approaches can be beneficial, if you are trying to reach a broader segment of the public by aligning with their concept of reality and their concerns.

Your arguments compliment each other as well.

As Vastet says, multiple approach can be problematic, because demagogues don't care for argumentation, but really defend themselves by confusing the discussion and never discussing anything with any meaning, so multiple approach works well for them here - we don't want that. However, Vastet proposes multiple approach himself, without knowing it. He proposes unification of arguments against all single religions to an argument against all religions, which opens up a new approach: argument against all misconception. Notice that this also includes misconceptions generated by science, just like any other single way of thinking: famili first, liberty vs rights, liberal vs conservative, yes even the concept of duality of any argument - why the hell did I just list everything in pairs?? These certainly do not appear in reality as any real individual positions, which means that my own understanding contains misconceptions.

At the same time, Mouse argues that we should attack on all fronts, which really argues for both his and Vastets position. As long as he agrees with Vastet's argument, he must agree that "any" strategy is not just as good as any other - Vastet's position can lead to realisation that misconception is the problem rather than religion and agreeing with this means that one must review one's own positions and approach continuously, often from the perspective of a unified whole. In short - "who mourns Adonis" type arguments, while very useful in creating some perspective in practical discussion, have other aspects to them as well. One of these aspects is deeply anti-human and in my opinion destructive: no one alive today was alive to experience Adonis' social phenomenon and equating it to religions of today disregards the current social experience as a factor that should be considered.

Since your second post was inspecific, and your first made an error based on my posts, I will clarify for any others who may be conused or have read into my posts incorrectly.

I have said it before, but it was long ago. Probably the posts I said it in are too buried to have been read in ages:
Multiple strategies are needed to win the war. From nice people to pricks, from intellect to trolling, and from emotion to logic.
But one must recognise that some events are SO emotionally charged as to leave a subject incapable of being discussed without automatically shutting the audience out, from all sides of the equation. Only time can heal such wounds to such a degree that they can be rationally discussed. The holocaust is the single most emotionally charged topic of our species today, and for the last 50+ years. Attacking the jews, and only the jews, is literally the dumbest angle one could possibly choose today. Even if everything you say is right, you're still automatically wrong simply because you're

Attacking Jews is idiotic, but the reason you cite stems from a false assumption - that the religion is the root problem. I think you both are not seeing forest for the trees when you aim at religion instead the power interest that is clearly behind it. Yes, attacking any individual religion is counter productive, but so is attacking all religions because of the same reasons - you attack a symptom rather than the source and bog yourself down in inconsequantial discussions of mirage controversy.

Attacking Israel is not that controversial, even by the standard of Jewish people: http://www.counterpunch.org/bruinsma01052008.html

You should aim your guns that way.

I will have to go with Bertrand Russell on this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Social-Analysis-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415325072

"Product description: In this remarkable book, regarded by Russell as one of the most important of his career, he argues that power is man's ultimate goal and is, in its many guises, the single most important element in the development of any society."

I think that the description above is mistaken in insinuating that Russell concludes anything in particular about what "man's ultimate goal" is, but he certainly did see the work as one of his most important and he expected it to become a kickoff for a whole new way of scientific work with society. In the book he gives religion it's place in the world and I dont have to tell you how he feels about it. In his mind power relations are the underlying motive for all organized deliberate misconception, including religion. Read it.

I am pretty sure you misunderstand what Russell means by "power". He does not mean authority or any system of government per say, he is really talking about principles of human relations which are the root of everything that we do, including politics, religion, education - you name it. This is why he considered it important - he thought that there is an underalying force to the things that we do and that this force plays out in all human relation. I think he was right.

Therefore you have to let go of the traditional concept of power and understand it as an integral part of reality, something we can't avoid even in the most insignificant human relation. A mother and a child are in a very complex power relationship between each other, mother and the external world, child and the external world; a university classroom is a battlefield in this sense; you and I are engaged in power manipulation as we write this thread. Understand power in social science as the law of gravity in physics - not good, not bad, but condition for everything else. Maybe the word "power" was bad choice on his part, but it really ties in on the phenomenon that grants us most control of human relations - the many faces of power.

ON UNDERSTANDING religion: Just like any other complex human relation, religion is subject to Russell's power concept. You say that religion exists independant of it, but Russell says that if you believe that, you might as well believe that the solar system exists independant of gravity. We don't know what gravity really is, but without this central concept in physics we would be a lot more confused than we are today. The same can be said about power relations in our human community - to a certain degree they can help us understand how our society functions and this includes religion.

ON INFLUENCING religion: if you wanted to push Pluto out of it's orbit, calculations of gravitational pull would be essential to your plan. The same has to be true about religion - if you want to influence religion, you have to understand the power relations that created it and keep it alive; you have to understand it the way people who created it and people who promote it today understand it. Atheists often go with some one sentence explanation of faith and religion, as if understanding it can be put in a few words and is otherwise inconsequential to fighting it. This is a huge mistake - if you don't truly understand religion, not only do you not know what makes it tick and how to get rid of it, but you don't even know whether you want to get rid of it. You simply do not know what it is, what it's used for, or how.

You are getting somewhere, but there is more to it I think. We see acquirement of power as a way to control our environment and we see control of environment as the way to satisfy what we really want. This means that you can attack need for acquirement of power on levels beneath it. Different religious systems aim at these levels beneath acquirement of power - they try to alter what general public wants and try to eliminate the perception that need to control the environment is necessary. They have this in common with socialism. They also have the failure in common with socialism, since they can be used to turn a revolutionary crowd into comformists and leave unclaimed power to the few scoundrels.

Comformism is just a word, but the concept is a symptom of the force of human relation at work. Just like a marble can appear to lie still because of the continuous application of gravity, so do the voices of descent appear to die down in a society under constant and prolongued intellectual and/or physical preassure. We need to use this concept to our advantage, but we can't do it if we don't know how it works and are not willing to abandon prior misconceptions once we are faced with truth.

If you read my last post, I directly tell you that I do not want to eliminate this concept of power. It would be the same as saying you wanted to eliminate gravity - there is no way to have a reason for doing that. Since you don't know what would happen if gravity wasn't there, there is no way to aim at anything in particular. It's just a mechanism shaping our reality and I think we should learn more about it. Religion, in my opinion, is a great subject for study.

That is exactly what you could say about socialism - it exists due to lack of power. I think that general attack on all religion at this point is misguided and might even be good for our real enemy. We should look at the nature of different religious organisations, pick the ones that support violence and inequality and generally disagree with our world view, attack their weaknesses, make an example of a few of them and let the comformism work on the rest of the spectrum. They are usually eazy to target in US, since their leaders tend to be swindlers and are actually atheistic pragmatists.

Ok, so now read my last post with emphasis on religious organisations, not whole religions. Do you think Dr. Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu should be repudiated and attacked because of their beliefs?

You are expressing a difference in favor of antitheism vice atheism. But even then you are expressing antireligion vice antitheism. Pro or con the existence of god(s) is as inconsequential as the existence of ghost(s). The existence of religions is a different matter and in fact yes some day it may become necessary to deal with religions more directly. However the Soviet Union from 1919 through 1989 or so dealt forcefully with the existence of religion. Its actions were far beyond anything a rational person would advocate much less be able to implement.

Fact is the Russian Orthodox church has grown rapidly since the fall of the SU. At the present rate of re-establishment one can suggest the effort and lives were wasted.

So there appears no point in trying to duplicate the Soviet failure by peaceful means.

I am fully aware that Jews and particular the zionists have leveraged any commentary that is not favorable (or if unfavorable preceeded with praise which negates the criticism) into the invented "sin" of hate. I really do not give a damn. I have seen it done so often in so many circumstances there is no way to avoid it. The Ashkenazis at least have created a paranoid culture. The greatest harm I can do to them is to agree with them.

Keeping in mind the only Jews are those who confess the religion there is really nothing I can do they have done to themselves. The confession is so primitive that well over half of those claiming to be Jews are not.

If you were paying attention the post with which I started this thread was simply pointing out they are NOT Jews by virtue of ethnicity as there is no single Jewish ethnicity. I am simply separating the fake Jews from the real Jews.

Get a grip. Every time there are surveys of popular belief in the holy holocaust it is 80% and higher calling it bullshit. It is much more common to believe in alien abductions than gas chambers. Believers in gas chambers are the minority whackos who want to believe.

Besides, you know any belief protected by law is bullshit. You might as well bring back the blasphemy laws.

If my approach is as useless as you suggest then there is no basis to complain that I choose to waste my time on it.

They are a stiffnecked people ... not really but that is what their book says so they will strive to imitate a real shit translation.

As to WWII, the Jewish world population surveys show there was no "wiping out" if you should ever take the time to look at them. Even without looking for the evidence 80+% of the people know bullshit when they hear it.

Extra post

Ugh.

'You are expressing a difference in favor of antitheism vice atheism. But even then you are expressing antireligion vice antitheism. Pro or con the existence of god(s) is as inconsequential as the existence of ghost(s). The existence of religions is a different matter and in fact yes some day it may become necessary to deal with religions more directly. However the Soviet Union from 1919 through 1989 or so dealt forcefully with the existence of religion. Its actions were far beyond anything a rational person would advocate much less be able to implement.'

I'm not professing anti-theism at all. I am anti-religious. Ghost believers don't have organisations telling everyone what to do, so your comparison is invalid. And good luck finding me say that we should start killing people off and imprisoning them ala USSR. You're insulting me and every other atheist here by drawing a ridiculous comparison between rational discussion and oppression. Even more so by saying peaceful discourse is as effective as

A Deist is an anti-religion theist. There is a difference between an atheist and anti-religion. Openly professed Deism preceeded openly professed atheism by more than a century.

I don't remember him having said anything to the effect. He has claimed some weird things, but so have you. I don't think he's an imbecile, just severely wrong on several points, just like you are.

Here's a "religious organisation" meddling in politics and public affairs you might wan't to set your sights on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catonsville_Nine

But you insist upon saying responsible for.

No one is responsible for the stupidities of others.

Why do you keep working so hard to find a reason to claim I have something against Jews? It is not like you are a Jew. You could not be posting here if you were a Jew.