And look, this is from a public health study, not a religion study. If you're not *trying* to get a statistically significant sample of non-Christian religions then it's not surprising it problematic to not have a statistically significant sample. There aren't a lot of us.
But if that's the case it should be reflected in the visualization title and labels. Don't just pretend we don't exist.
The rate of vaccination among Jews is 85%, btw, according to PRRI. May we all be inscribed for life.
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Over the high holidays I heard a teaching that helped with a section of Torah I've always found troubling - the that God visits the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and fourth generations. This repeats several times in the Torah.
It's softened a bit by what follows: "but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments".
But it still seems pretty harsh. What kind of God would punish children for the wrongs their parents did? And aren't we told elsewhere God *doesn't* do that?
I would like to invite any Christians who feel like observing Yom Kippur to do so by reading Galatians and reflecting on how your own Bible is super explicit about how gentiles not only don't have to, but *should not* engage in Jewish observances.
Additional contextual material on what exactly Paul is talking about in that time and place:
In Hebrew 'circumcision' is called brit milah - literally "covenant of cutting". The rite of circumcision, in Judaism, is the rite of bringing someone into the Jewish covenant
When Paul is warning against circumcision for Christians, he is warning against signing the contract that says they are bound by The Law. The Law is literally the mitzvot - the set of practices and observances and behaviors that Jews follow.
This is a popular exegetical take in progressive Judaism - I hold by it for sure - and a good example of both projecting contemporary socio-religious ideas backward AND grounding them in the actual text.
To start off, there's the examination of how it fits in the narrative. At first glance, it seems counter-intuitive, right? God flat out says "Because you have done this ... I will bestow my blessing upon you". Seems straightforward enough. But then what *happens*?
After the Akeidah, God never speaks to Abraham again. The story tells us that *Abraham* returned to his servants and *Abraham* stayed in Beer-Sheba. Not Abraham and Isaac - just Abraham.
Just before Rosh Hashanah I was arguing with some Edgy Atheists about the Old-Testament-God-is-Mean thing, and one of them pulled out "What about the binding of Isaac?" - so, some post RH thoughts about the Akeidah, biblical originalism, and exegetical norms in Judaism:
The question posed to me by Edgy Atheist (I can't find the original tweet, because I'm blocked now) was - what do you think was originally supposed to be the moral of that story? And of course, EA's answer was "obey God no matter what, even if God says to murder your son, duh."
But the thing is, if we're talking about the *original intent* we can't do that in the context of *contemporary norms*. We have to consider what the societal norms were of the people who were hearing this story for the first time.
The past several years I've spent the last bit of Elul getting frustrated and stuck, and then right before Rosh Hashanah something shifts and I think about the whole thing in a way I hadn't before.
This year I just thought - this period of atonement isn't just about asking God to forgive us. It's about us seeking to forgive God.
And maybe we don't deserve to be forgiven. Maybe God doesn't either. But we try to do it anyway, because that's what you do when you love someone and you don't want to be mad at them anymore.
Progressive Christians, I'm gonna need y'all to reverse course on this crap right now. The people pushing regressive, theocratic laws are not doing it because they're too Jewish or too Muslim. They're doing it because they're *Christian* nationalists. Stop trying to avoid it.
It doesn't matter what you were *trying* to say, or that you were attempting to make some more nuanced point. What you are actually doing when you talk about "old testament God" or "the American Taliban" is associating the threat with minority religions and excusing Christianity.
You can't address the nationalist, theocratic wing of American Christianity by denying it's Christian foundations. If you want to attack it, attack the negative *Christian* interpretations.