God Only Knows, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

November 22, 2014 Martha Thomases 3 Comments

Among the things for which I am thankful during Thanksgiving, this most secular of holidays, is the fact that I don’t live in Jerusalem.

I mean, Jerusalem is a beautiful city, with a lovely climate, gorgeous buildings, and a sense of history so thick you can slice it.  Unfortunately, it also is a picture book example of why one doesn’t want to live in a non-secular society.

Israeli Jews control part of the city.  Israeli Arabs and Palestinians control other parts.  There are places sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians, and sometimes all of them at once.

Now, I’ve been interested in religion and mythology (if that isn’t redundant) since I was in elementary school.  When I was in Israel, I was thrilled to go to the sacred sites to which I was permitted entry.  There were all kinds of reasons I was not — too Jewish, too female — but I didn’t feel it was my place to cause a fuss.

The most recent cause of tensions in Jerusalem is the insistence by some ultra-conservatives that Muslims should no longer be able to control and worship at the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred places to both Jews and Muslims.  There may be a bit of historical justification for this (it was the site of the Second Temple, a Jewish holy place before the birth of the Prophet), but it has been superseded in modern times by an agreement by the Israeli government to let Muslims have it.

I would very much like to see this place.  It is the Holy of Holies, where the priests made sacrifices and spoke to God.  I’d like to see what kind of window treatments he selected.

That said, I doubt I’d be allowed to enter if the site was controlled by Israeli Jews.  It would most likely be treated as a sacred place, not historical.  And the gatekeepers who insist they are the experts on the sacred do not include women as equals.

Anyway, because of the anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up by the conservative Israelis, a few Palestinians felt threatened and shot up a group of rabbis.  Now the rabbis are dead, the Palestinians are dead, and their homes are being demolished and their families left on the streets.  I think they are getting the concept of fairness mixed up with everyone being miserable.

If there is a good side to this, it’s a small one.  Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, condemned the attack on the synagogue.  He was pressured to do this by John Kerry, but he did it, the first time this has ever happened.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this when I read about a recent kerfuffle with Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist.  I’m not going to link to it here because he has said he was misunderstood on Twitter, something with which I can relate.  I disagreed with what I thought he said, but that’s not really the point I want to make, either.

Journalists thought that what Dawkins said was important because he is a prominent atheist, and a Twitter war with him would be like a Twitter war with Pope Francis or Pat Robertson.  It’s not the same thing.  Atheists and agnostics (and most Jews, and certain kinds of Christians and Muslims) don’t blindly follow a spiritual leader.  We/They consider the evidence and experience before us, read and study those things of interest, and come to our own conclusions.

The problem, as I see it, is that some atheists see the world in the same way as some religionists.  They (and only they) have the truth, and they won’t be satisfied until that truth is acknowledged by everyone.  At their worst, they have a tendency to dismiss religionists as superstitious and stupid.

Don’t get me wrong.  I, too, think some religionists are superstitious and stupid.  I suspect I would consider the murdered rabbis among them, because I have as little patience with fundamentalist Jews as I have with other fundamentalists.

But that doesn’t mean I want them to be murdered while in prayer or at any other time.  If prayer gives people comfort, I’m all for it.  If keeping kosher, or wearing a wig, or not shaving certain parts of your body makes you feel as if you’re in touch with the divine, go for it.  In my volunteer work, I see many families devastated by cancer, for whom faith is the glue holding their families (and their sanity) together.

My only problems arise when you use your sincerely held beliefs to interfere with my life and my sincerely held beliefs.

Mine, by the way, include living the best life I can.  And by “best,” I mean both the most virtuous and the most pleasurable.  The concept of a deity is pretty much irrelevant to this perspective.  This idea is not original to me, but is part of a Jewish tradition that goes back millennia.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases is especially grateful this year for the warmth from her family and friends, since the climate is supplying any.