Who's to blame for low conversion figures?

To know the signifigance of your "ummm...huh?" in this connection....

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I'll alert the media.

It had seemed to me that we might have drifted onto the shoals of theology, so dangerous to civil discourse, in this matter. As a hard old pagan, it may be possible for me to back us off to calmer waters, or at least to offend all present in the attempt.

It is important to remember the antecedents of the deity in question: a tribal totem, merely one among the many brandished by the peoples of the region, with no claim originally to universal status, or even pre-eminence, of any sort. As a tribal diety, it was concerned solely with the people of the tribe, and they in turn were unconcerned by any deity or code of any other tribe.

Down the years of priesthood and prophecy and history, the concept grew somewhat grander. The diety was proclaimed as pre-eminent, and finally as universal, by those who directed the worship of the people of the tribe. It acquired a pretension of ethical standard somewhat more elevated than that of tribal raider writ large, tasked solely with seeing to the fortune and well-being of the tribe it was the sacred focus of. It encountered a greater world beyond its place of origin that the tribe inhabited, and clever men, and wise men, sought to assimilate the philosophies, or as they were viewed in that time, the science, of that wider world, into the structure and nature of the diety.

Yet all this was built on the foundation of the original tribal totem, which remained within all its new attainments, as a python's leg-bones do, in reminder of its formerly limbed ancestry. There remained a sense of special attachment of the diety to the particular people of its original worship, for all its unversality of power and ethics. There remained even a sense of its particular attachment to a particular portion of that people, a hereditary caste of priests, just as there remained a sense of attachment to a particular location on the earth. This is no more surprising than it is that a person retains an attachment to the events, whether of bliss or terror, of childhood, and a feeling of attachment to the old home grounds of youth, and is shaped in adult character and actions by these things, however much growth beyond them may have apparently occured.

The particular form that this takes is the doctrine that the people of this diety is a chosen people, singled out by the diety for special obedience to its ways, and especially for its worship. As the caste of priests within the people is selected out especially for the most intense practice of the diety's worship, and rigorous obedience to the ways it directs, so is the whole people chosen out from all others in the world, to be a nation of priests before them, an example and inspiration of worship and obedience to the diety. Should they fail in this duty, punishment will be awful; should they fulfill it, they, and all the people of the world, will be blessed with the favor of the diety.

Thus the sort of questions you see in this little piece, and the sort of answers smiled on by the examiners. They are men deeply steeped in this tradition and view, which stretches back through millenia, and offers a valuable window into early human religious practice, in the same way the survival of the Celestial Throne of China into the modern era offers a valuable window into early human political practice. Originally the tribal diety of Israel, it is a sort of father to all but especially to that people, and the transgressions of that people are of greater moment than those of others, just as embezzlement by a minister of chuch funds would strike most people as somehow a greater offense than embezzlement of company funds by a procurement clerk.

There is no point in raising any special outcry over these peculiarities of the creed: there is none on the face of the earth against which similar pecadilloes could not be charged, and the charge easily sustained. All religions have their feet of clay and heads of gold. It is in the nature of the beast....

but judging by your excellent answer, I can only imagine
what was said.


Thanks.

...

I escaped that mental prison long ago...after 16 years of force-feeding.

Once the Master said: "What does Heaven ever do? The seasons turn, grain grows, men eat. What does Heaven ever do?"

to the Israel Palestine issue.

Demographic issues are very relevant.
That is quite a backlog they have.

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Those which need to go through the conversion courts, especially in mass numbers, seems to me will not be drawn there by any deep religiousity; these people will tend more towards the agnostic/secularist side of the spectrum.

Not good news for the traditionalists and fundamentalists whose voices will become increasingly diluted should this succeed. However, that could be part of the reason it has not, or that Judaism has never been a proselytizing religion.

However, I am with the majority, could you care to expand on Ummm....huh?


L-

On Edit: Spelling

anyways...see post #6