Tao Te Ching
Judaism
Jedaism יהודה
Ancient monotheistic religion, an ethnoreligious group, mother religion of Christianity, deep influence on Islam, Baha’i, Western secular ethics and civil law; Judaism traces its roots back more than 3000 years to the Bronze Age. An important factor in the development of Western civilization, Judaism, helped shape Western ideals and morality. Branches today span the philosophical spectrum from rigid Orthodox Judaism to non-theistic Humanist Judaism. Since ancient times, frequently the focus of political and religious prejudice, persecutions, expulsions, and ghettoization; Jewish culture and identity only seems to have deepened.
Quotes (79)
“The ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day… Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.”
“When he goes to the court of Rome and sees the lewd and wicked life of the clergy, not only will he never become a Christian, but, were he already a Christian, he would infallibly turn Jew again.”
“The Jews hold a middle place between the Christians and the pagans. The Pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Christians know God, and do not love the earth.”
“When I see Christians cursing Jews, methinks I see children beating their fathers.”
“Tell me if there have been peoples other than the Christians and the Jews in whom zeal and religion wretchedly transformed into fanaticism, have inspired so many horrible cruelties…. Yes, the Mohammedans… As for the other nations there has not been one right from the existence of the world which has ever made a purely religious war.”
“The Jews afford an astonishing spectacle... They mingle with all peoples, yet are not confused with them; they have no rulers, yet they are always a people. Of all the systems of legislation now known to us, only this one has undergone all tests, has always been steadfast.”
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
“That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel.”
“Energy is the basis of everything. Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal… It is the most perpetual people of the earth…”
“The laws of the Jews were the basest and most oppressive of human codes and—being like all other codes given under the pretense of divine command—were... the Abomination that maketh desolation, i.e. State Religion which is the source of all Cruelty.”
“The Temple of Zion is destroyed; the God-serving nation is scattered to the winds.”
“In its explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior to any other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation, it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the soul.”
“All that miserable tale of the Devil and Eve, and an Intercessor with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars.”
“I had gradually come to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than… the beliefs of any barbarian.”
“Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.”
“Judaism is not a religion of the present but of the future [which looks] forward to the ideal future age . . . when the knowledge of God and the reign of justice and contentment shall have united all men in the bonds of brotherhood.”
“The emancipation of the Jews in its last significance is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”
“Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
“The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say of a national tragedy lasting for 1500 years in which the poets and actors were also the heroes?”
“Anti-Semitism is a pathological condition, a peculiar form of sexual perversion... Among all disgraceful phenomena, it is the most disgusting and abominable.”
“What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish... The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.”
“take the Jewish people, the aristocracy of the human race—how is it they have kept their place apart, their poetical halo, amid surroundings of coarse cruelty? By having no State to burden them. Had they remained in Palestine, they would long ago have lost their individuality in the process of their State's construction, like all other nations.”
“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
“The Jews are members of the human race—worse I can say of no man... Anti-Semitism is the swollen envy of pygmy minds, meanness, injustice”
“The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe; they know how to succeed even under the worst conditions (in fact better than under favorable ones) by means of virtues of some sort, which one would like nowadays to label as vices-owing above all to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before 'modern ideas'”
“The Jews performed a miracle by inverting traditional values—'poor' became a synonym for 'saint,' 'rich' for 'evil' and 'violent.' In this they brought about and began a slave insurrection in morals and this is where their significance as a people can be found.”
“Should we have an Eleventh Commandment? Most assuredly no—we have ten too many now!”
“[anti-Semitism is] the hatred of the lazy, ignorant fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business.”
“The pre-eminence given to intellectual labors throughout 2000 years in the life of the Jewish people has, of course, had its effect. It has helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence”
“either under Persian influence or by a parallel development Judaism came to believe in a future life, a resurrection, a last judgment, heaven and hell, a cosmic duel between right and darkness, and a divine Savior. A cynic might even say that we owe more to Zarathustra than to Moses.”
“Here there are neither Russians nor English, Jews nor Christians, but only those who pursue one aim — to be able to be.”
“Neither Gautama nor Lao Tzu nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a jealous God who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic or old customs… The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear and clean”
“The idea of a Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous or contemporary religion displayed; it made Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its fierce intolerance…”
“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
“Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.”
“[the German anti-Semitic campaign] is aimed, essentially, not at the Jews at all, or at them exclusively. It is aimed at Europe and at the real spirit of Germany.”
“Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; […] We have no desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. We do not want to dominate them: we want to serve with them.”
“The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence — these are the features of the Jewish tradition”
“The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice”
“It is a fair guess that neither the great Indian nor the great Jew would have found anything unacceptable in Lao Tzu's mystical uses, which have been made no more mystical by the one, no more useful by the other.”
“So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.”
“What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”
“what have poets, in any case, to do with sin? They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant or die!”
“my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a State where 80 per cent of the revenue is drained away for the public purse—a country where everything is built on the dollar?”
“The Egyptians lost themselves in trying to preserve the bodily form, the Greeks in trying to capture the beauty of the human body, the pre-Columbian Americans, by establishing cosmic laws over human considerations, Christianity and Islam—the daughters of Jewish monotheism—by overpowering the human mind through dictatorship of a a partially world-creating and at the same time world-negating spirit.”
“The word 'wilderness' occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.”
“organized religion... goes back to myths which, though they may have a kernel of truth, are untrue. Why then should the Jewish myth be true and the Indian and Egyptian myths not be true?”
“One problem with Yahweh is that he forgot he was a metaphor, he thought he was a fact and said, ‘I am God.’ This is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah—that he thought he was God.”
“In the Bible, eternity withdraws, and nature is corrupt, nature has fallen. In biblical thinking, we live in exile… But once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.”
“This role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark story.”
“To understand Hebrew scripture is not enough... we must transport ourselves into a distant land and an earlier age, and read it as the national poem of the Jews, a pastoral and agricultural people, written in ancient, simple, rustic, poetic, not philosophical or abstract language.”
“Jews, Christians, Muslims believed that the true answers had been revealed by God to his chosen prophets and saints, and accepted the interpretation of these revealed truths by qualified teachers and the traditions to which they belonged.”
“Pasternak was a Russian patriot—his sense of his own historical connection with his country was very deep... This passionate, almost obsessive, desire to be thought a true Russian writer, with roots deep in Russian soil, was particularly evident in his negative feelings toward his Jewish origins.. he wished the Jews to disappear as a people.”
“Judaism in particular, without a country, a governing institution, a unified culture, a pure ethnic identity, an army, a creed, or a priesthood–a religion that has perfected the art of disagreement, of sustaining arguments of undiminished energy extending across centuries has never given itself completely over to civitas”
“Buddhism and Taoism—unlike Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism—are not whole cultures but critiques of culture: endearing, non-violent revolutions or 'loyal oppositions' to the cultures they live in.”
“It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.”
“the United States was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic 'race'... However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their own situation int the U.S. as much different.”
“Many organizations dedicated to ‘Jewish continuity’ are running a heart and lung machine to keep a dying patient alive. They don't have a sense of how to build a future for Judaism, because most of the time they want immediate results.”
“All culture is based on the past. For example, Judaism is the reediting of Egyptian and Babylonian culture”
“I don'think there is any truth. There are only points of view.”
“The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.”
“We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did was 'illegal.' It was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.”
“We must never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'... It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.”
“It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamization of all living infidels...”
“Those Jews who claim the right to certain territories on the basis of a biblical promise, those Christians who believe the Russians are the great evil armies foreseen in biblical prophecies of the end of the world, repeat the bible but do not resonate with it.”
“In Jewish and Islamic mythology God provided us with a garden but did not, indeed could not, do the gardening for us. It was only a garden because we could respond to ti, because we could be responsible for it.”
“The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand.”
“What is most necessary for people and what is given us in great abundance, are experiences, especially experiences of the forces within us. This is our most essential food, our most essential wealth. If we consciously receive all this abundance, the universe will pour into us what is called life in Judaism, spirit in Christianity, light in Islam, power in Taoism.”
“At our best, we inhabit a biblical landscape and… unless we really take up that invitation to walk into that biblical landscape… it's really not worth saving or manifesting or redeeming or anything”
“The idea in the Western world is bringing the Kingdom of God to earth, or trying `to create the ideal Jewish level which is really a poverty-stricken way of viewing it. As long as we condemn ourselves, no confidence can take place. People are bewildered and only rely on technicians, technocrats, theologians, politicians...”
“From the point of view of the Madhyamaka school, these other approaches... earlier Buddhist philosophical schools, theistic Hinduism, Vedantism, Islam, Christianity, and most other religious and philosophical traditions... can be grouped together into three categories: the eternalists, the nihilists, and the atomists... atomisitic pluralism”
“Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.”
“Islam is the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book. [Comparing Islam to Judaism] is beyond stupid. There aren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that the Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay. It’s idiotic.”
“The ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day… Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.”
“it might seem that the important part of the Jewish story had ended with the Bible, leaving only a long sequel of passive suffering... the Jews had possessed none of the things that made for the usual history of a nation: territory, sovereignty, power, armies, kings. Instead, the noteworthy events in Jewish history were expulsions... Perhaps this constant evolution of the meaning of Jewish history is, in fact, its truest meaning.... full understanding is only possible when a historical phenomenon is concluded, when it has become part of the past. But Jewish history, after three thousand years and against all the odds, is still very much a work in progress.”
“The Jewish tradition is full of deep insights and noble values—though it is also full of questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes... Jewish orthodoxy, which even today holds that Jews are intrinsically superior to all other humans... Israeli Jews, who are educated from kindergarten to think that Judaism is the superstar of human history... People fed on such a historical diet have a very hard time digesting the idea that Judaism had relatively little impact on the world as a whole.”
“I cannot name the 8 million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them, and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history.”
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