Controversial non-political opinions

[pbrower2a]

(04-09-2022, 09:08 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: I do not understand people's desire to go out drinking, being loud and stupid at the bar with their friends and putting themselves at risk of getting heavily drunk around total strangers. I didn't understand it at 15, 20 or 25, nor do I now at 30. It's one thing to hang out at your friends house and have 2-3 drinks, but getting totally hammered in public in a crowded room of total strangers? That just sounds like a disaster, not a good time.

I was involved about twenty-five years ago in a nasty knock-down, drag-out flame war on some other, long-departed, forum in which some creep first denied the Holocaust (which began to look like simply a sick joke but has since become recognized as hate speech) and tried to hammer me for being Jewish while attributing to me most of the hallmarks of Jew-baiting smears that antisemites use. Most of those are easy to debunk. Anyone who rigidly follows the 613 commandments of Judaism (the Torah has a famous Ten for Humanity as a whole) is fully moral. Jews are not particularly greedy and materialistic (they were when they were poor, but nothing induces greed and materialism as does poverty or its memory; at that if I find greed and materialism among blacks or Hispanics, then I excuse that), and they were far out of proportion in their participation of non-blacks in support of African-Americans in the struggle for basic dignity and political rights in "Ku Kluxistan". Judaism is arguably the most tolerant of all religions in that it holds that all good gentiles will get to Heaven -- the Jewish Heaven -- and that much of the reward of Heaven will be that they become Jews. Judaism does not do evangelism, and as I understand the only semblance of effort to win converts is to get gentile spouses of Jews to convert to Judaism. If Christians have used Biblical (Torah) passages to justify slavery, then such misreads the Torah; the "slavery" is more like an indenture in which a poor man seeks to marry a wife who has a share of interest in what is his father-in-law's inheritance. 

I can understand that one. Considering that it would be tempting for him to take property from the father-in-law, sell it, and then go on a pattern of debauchery while abandoning his wife, this indenture proves his dedication to his prospective wife, his work ethic, and a bond to his new family. Because marriage for love (life was much more marginal due to economic realities) did not exist, shared economic effort was as close as one get. Prevention of destitution and hunger among loved ones was as close as one got to love. Contemporary Judaism condemned the chattel slavery of the slave-holding South, as it offered no redemption (aside from "Pie in the Sky When You Die") from bondage.  

I expressed hatred of Nazis, and the Holocaust-denying creep faulted me for my (as he understood it) "never forget and never forgive" religion. Supposedly it is definitively Christian to forgive and forget any wrong, even if it is mowing down or mass-gassing loved ones or working people to exhaustion on starvation rations, which is also lethal. It's best that people forgive seemingly-minor and now-irrelevant misconduct so that people not continue vendettas like those of the Montecchi and the Capoletti (Shakespeare renames those families as Montague and Capulet). it is safe to say that Jesus never met a Nazi, as a Nazi would have gassed Him or mowed Him down.

I left plenty of hints that I am not Jewish. One was to make a reference to Dante's Inferno, suggesting that there would have to be a new tenth circle of Hell to accommodate the most egregious sinners of all time -- then Nazis and Stalinists. (a hint: the Rwanda genocide had not yet happened).  Another is that I never spoke of myself as a Jew or of Jews in the first-person (we/us/our) plural. Another was to suggest that antisemitic slurs caused me to investigate them for their veracity -- and that in such an investigation I found that I saw virtues in Judaism unique to Judaism that caused me to contemplate conversion. Now why would a Jew convert to Judaism? A lapsed Jew returning to Judaism is not a convert. One virtue of Judaism is that it does not do religious persecution... and Jews did not persecute my Huguenot, Quaker, or Mennonite (or any Hussite if I had those) ancestors. But self-proclaimed Christians did. You know those -- they are Christians because they are not something else. That is weak Christianity.    

The bigot showed his resentments, and one Jewish participant in that flame war said of resentful gentiles that they needed to give up the boozing and whoring that ensure personal failure in most aspects of life. If there are two traits that I do not associate with Jews (or successful gentiles) but instead with losers of all kinds, then those are boozing and whoring. People who give up those bad habits will find compulsion to do things that genuinely improve their lives -- like starting a business, learning a lucrative trade, getting educated, or having a wholesome family life -- and those are in no way exclusive. One will be too busy and happy to cast blame upon innocent people instead of upon personal vice. A hint: at most pogroms and Nazi mass-shootings of Jews, plenty of liquor was available. This was also so at the Rwanda genocide and in the massacres of non-Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, both of which had practically no Jews as victims. I doubt that the massacre at Wounded Knee was done with sobriety, for that matter. Liquor has a way of dissolving a conscience, which may explain why the bulk of bank robberies are done by persons drunk or on drugs.  

I chose to play a game with that bigot, letting him believe that I was part of some Jewish conspiracy for world domination -- you know, straight out of the Protocols of the (Learned) Elders (of Zion)*, the one that claims that infant Jews and senile  Jews on their deathbeds alike are part of the conspiracy -- because I am some vile, disgusting, evil Jew. I got him to expose what he thought he was protecting, and he exposed that as 

"Germans and German-Americans".

I told him at that point that I was a German-American (OK, subsequent study of my genealogy exposes that
I am only about half German and Swiss, with almost all of the rest English, Welsh, or Scots-Irish... with no known Jewish ancestors back to at least 1800), and that German-Americans often experience antisemitic bigotry. We do not like it. Some of us recognize that our morals are much the same as those of most Jews, and that we recognize the Ashkenazim as cultural brethren. Obviously, there's one thing that we don't want to be confused with. Instead of denying Jewish origin (I have already lost that argument) I prefer defending Jews as mostly good people. Sure, Jews have their rogues, but Jews are swift to warn gentiles about those because those rogues can do much harm to gentiles while sullying the reputation that Jews want and need. 

NAZIS!

I told him that I had met plenty of Jews, and that at one time I sheepishly confessed to German ancestry. Yes, it is entirely likely that some eighth-cousin was a brutal guard in a camp who "selected" Jews for gassing or was in an SS unit that exterminated Jews. That Jew could recognize that I had no personal fault.  Of course I made clear that I hated Nazis. To be a good person one must hate Nazis. 

I told him that if I had the unlikely choice of being a Nazi or a Jew, I would convert to Judaism, as the latter requires no compromises of my moral values and few moral compromises. It's bad enough to be a target of illegitimate hatred, so why would I choose being the target of legitimate hatred?

If Dante is at all right about the damned... then I certainly don't want to go where the Nazis are. Even the first circle of Hell that Dante for the most meritorious (harmless or meritorious) circle would at the least have Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, James Mason,  Lauren Bacall. and Anne Frank... quite a few American politicians (including Carl Levin, whom I have met), and a large number of figures from Classical Greece, the golden age of the Islamic world,    and probably such figures as Confucius and the Buddha.        
   
*It is never both "Learned" and "of Zion", as if that matters much.