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Why Are Progressive Jews Afraid of God? Ask the Expert!

September 5, 2012 by Patrick Beaulier


As I watch eager children (and not so eager high school students) waiting for the school bus, I am reminded of a Facebook comment a friend made last year around this same time.

She and her husband are atheists, and have raised their child to be just as skeptical. Having said that, they are a warm and loving family with good values, and not having a Higher Power has certainly not diminished the awe and wonder that the child feels while discovering nature and friendship with other people. Good times, all around.

But then school started, and a quandary happened. The parents had not prepared their child for the Pledge of Allegiance, a nominal token of morning patriotism where children place their hands on their chests and declare the USA is “one nation, under God”. How would this child react to that? What kind of conversation would the family need to have, after [Read more…]

Filed Under: Community Member Blogs Tagged With: atheist jew, convert to judaism, convert to judaism online, darshan yeshiva, god in judaism, harris poll, humanistic judaism, Jewish atheists, jewish god, online conversion, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah

Rabbi Drew Kaplan: The Prophet Micah and Atheist Jews

September 12, 2011 by Patrick Beaulier

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwHwVMThrDo

What does it take to be good? The G-d Project is the world’s first social media platform dedicated to Jewish spirituality. We bring God back to the conversation. www.theg-dproject.org.

Filed Under: Podcasts & Videos, The G-d Project Videos Tagged With: bible, Jewish atheists, micah, modern orthodox, the g-d project jewish, the god project jewish

Five Things I Wish My Atheist Friends Understood About God

June 13, 2011 by Patrick Beaulier

I love all my friends. We are friends not because we agree with each other on everything, but because we have shared experiences, ideals, interests. But thanks to many run ins with Jewish atheists, I feel like it’s important that I talk about the things that I wish my atheist friends understood about my faith.

Whatever God you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either

It is very easy to be an atheist when you see God as the parent in the sky throwing down lightning bolts like Zeus. Reading the Torah with a literalist view, God seems like the kind of character that no modern, sensible person would believe in.

Very few people, however, actually believe in this kind of God, me being one of them. I think what my atheist friends have a problem with is not God, but rather a concept of God that conflicts with science and progressive philosophy.

Knocking over this proverbial “straw man” is simple, and that’s why atheist writers in debate will actually mock the God concept. If you build God in an image that’s easily defeated, then guess what, you’ll win every argument! But this isn’t the God that most people believe in, myself included.

God is not in your science book, and science is not in my God book

Just as it is easy to knock over a caricature of God, so is it easy to knock over the fundamentalist believer. When we allow the religious person to be someone who is outdated, rigid, backwards and prejudice, then it’s easy to denounce religion entirely. If all I saw in the religious landscape was fundamentalists, I wouldn’t be that religious either.

This is not an Orthodox vs. non-Orthodox issue either. The more one studies kabbalah, reads sacred text and speaks with learned people, the less the Parent-In-The-Sky-God seems to be obvious. I will never forget the Orthodox rabbi who told me he wasn’t sure what God was. That’s religion at its best!

You believe in something, whether you believe it or not

Instead of focusing the God conversation on Pat Robertson-ism versus Richard Dawkins-ism, I think we need to focus instead on what I consider to be the key parts of genuine spiritual experience: faith, rapture and covenant.

Faith is about allowing oneself the permission to not have all the answers and to dwell in the mystery. Science is like that. Science is agnostic on everything until proven otherwise.

Whether we like it or not, we put faith in things. I have faith that my mother loves me. I have no way of proving it — it could be that she took care of me as a child for fear of social reprisal, that she sent me to college so that I could get away from her faster, that she supported my marriage and came to my wedding because it meant that I was “someone else problem”. Never the less, I have a strong conviction that her love is real.

It’s not hard for a believer to put his/her faith in God. We feel God in the same way that we feel love with people. A stranger walking down the street has no reason to love my wife because they have no person experience with her. In the same way, a non-believer who has no experience with God has no reason to have what some might call “perfect faith”.

Rapture is about being caught up and enveloped by the experience of the transcendent. This is not just a religious experience, either. Gazing at the stars and becoming aware of one’s smallness and preciousness in the universe is the same kind of feeling. This sense of losing control and submitting to an experience that is somehow beyond oneself is how the theist experiences God, and the way that atheists experience other things.

Covenant is the final piece of the God puzzle, and yet the trickiest part for most non-believers. Theists, because they have experienced the first two ingredients in a belief in God, easily live in a covenant with their Creator. Atheists, on the other hand, lack the first two experiences as they relate to the divine and therefore cannot stand covenant, as it seems like arbitrary nonsense. I can understand that. But it’s important to me for my atheist friends to know that I am forced into a sense of covenant because my experience of rapture and faith put me there. Covenant is not about fearing God’s celestial finger pointing, but rather a logical extension of an experience.

Religions don’t kill people…people kill people

Religions on their own do not promote violence, bigotry, genocide, sexism or any of the other things that my atheist friends are convinced they do. In reality, it’s violent, bigoted, genocidal, sexist people using whatever tools they have at their disposal who promote all of our social ills.

The only reason you feel the way you do is that the wrong people have given you the wrong message about religion

I’m not out to convince anyone to believe in a higher power. But I do think it is time that theists “come out of the closet” and commit to active religious lives in full view of the public. We need to show people who use God as a vehicle for social control and manipulation that the creator of the universe is beyond agenda.

The best way to make an atheist is to give a person a negative experience with religion. The more positive experiences we can give, the better.

Filed Under: Community Member Blogs, Rants Tagged With: atheism, convert to judaism, convert to judaism online, darshan yeshiva, Five Things I Wish My Atheist Friends Understood About God, fundamentalism, Jewish atheists, online conversion, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier

Can You Disbelieve Everything and Still Be Jewish?

November 4, 2010 by Patrick Beaulier

I posted a video a while back saying that, in my opinion, all you really needed to do to be Jewish was believe in the G-d of the Torah. I also put in a few nods to the importance of diversity, LGBT people, converts, etc. etc. etc. You get the drift.

Immediately, I got this reply:

“I disagree with what you said about believing something in order to be Jewish. Being Jewish isn’t about what you believe. It’s about what you do.”

My secular friends all agree with this statement. Doing Jewish is more important than Believing Jewish. But I wonder if that actually makes sense. Judaism, it seems, is the only religion in the world that says you can disbelieve in every tenent of the faith, yet still be a member. It’s like saying, “I don’t believe in Allah or Mohammed. The Koran is made up and eating bacon and drinking whiskey is awesome. But I’m a Muslim and you can’t take that away from me!”

I do believe that actions matter. But intent matters, too. Remember the old saying, “it’s possible to do the right thing, for the wrong reason, and the wrong thing for the right reason.”

At what point, though, does it matter that you believe in what you are doing, beyond making yourself happy that you continued on an ethnic tradition?

Please discuss. I’d really like to know.

Filed Under: Community Member Blogs, Random (Feelin' Lucky?), Rants Tagged With: 3xdaily, atheism, convert to judaism, convert to judaism online, darshan yeshiva, Jewish atheists, Judaism, kavanah, online conversion, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punk torah, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier, Religion

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