Re: The Gain Is Dross
David bin Bedlam
> "elephty" <ele...@cox.net> wrote:
[...]
>> There are some questions of morality that must be asked.
Definitely. I wasn't thinking of morals when I posted, but yes.
>> Should a damn fool be permitted a license to drive, fly or sail?
>> Should a damn fool be able to order war on a whim? Should self-aware
>> damn fools be allowed to participate in group activities? Should damn
>> fools be permitted to teach philosophy? Hint: the answer to the last
>> question is yes.
> The answer to all of them is yes because, since you forgot the
> caveat, "self aware", everyone is a damned fool anyway.
Actually, if we include that caveat the only change from I'd need to
make is that even a self-aware damn fool should NOT be allowed to "order
war on a whim." But then I don't think that *anybody* should be allowed
to do that.
Whereas most people who drive are damn fools, whether they know it or
not; we only require that they mind the rules of the road and safe
driving, which is ever so much simpler than maneuvering ourselves
through life. If only life were so simple as "red light means stop."
> If we say no, we wisely mimic the universe as a world of damned fools
> moving ever farther away from each other (as we should be, if we had
> any sense).
You think we should humans move farther away from one another? I think
we should move much closer together, including (as what I hope to be a
telling example) the Jews of the world and their Israelite "cousins"
known as "Palestinians"; that the latters' conversion to the religion
and language of their Arab conquerors doesn't make them subhuman (as the
former's refusal of the "message of Muhammad" likewise does not). To say
otherwise is, in my mind, "to let the terrorists win" -- to concede that
the big difference is Islam is to agree to the Islamists' whole spiel.
One thing that must be faced is that conquering armies and a large ratio
of those who follow them have always been men, so that the Palestinian
"Arabs" are descended from Jewish women and therefore halakhically Jews.
Maybe you would rather die than birth the child of an Arab or Muslim,
but one can't make that choice for everybody one thinks resembles one;
it's also unjust to hate somebody because of a choice his/her great-
great-great-great-great-grandmother made.
D.
--
"I don't need no makeup, I got real scars."
................................................................
(C) 2009 'TheDavid(TM)' | All Rights Reserved World-Wide Always
David bin Bedlam
[...]
> One thing that must be faced is that conquering armies and a large
> ratio of those who follow them have always been men, so that the
> Palestinian "Arabs" are descended from Jewish women and therefore
> halakhically Jews.
That is, it's my understanding that halakhic Jewish descent, like the
question in pre-1866 America of whether one was legally entitled to
non-slavery, follows "partus sequitur ventrem" ("that which is brought
forth follows the womb"): if a woman is Jewish her children are Jews, as
are her daughters' children and her daughters' children, etc. Orthodox
Jewish law does allow for a Jewish woman's sons to have non-Jewish kids
if their mother is not Jewish (which is why "intermarriage" is such a
no-no), but in a case like Palestine where most of the "natives" were of
halakhic Jewish descent it's likely that a man whose mother was a Jew
but who lived as a Muslim/Arab would marry a local woman who was also
halakhically Jewish (regardless of which side of the "line" she walked
on in life), so though their children might have been raised as Arabs
and/or Muslims but "deep inside" would be as Jewish as Maimomides (and
more Jewish than either David or Solomon). The womb decides the status.
As to individual Palestinians, the principle of generosity is enjoined
by all the Abrahamic religions (especially the monotheistic ones), so
one need not minutely scrutinize every aspect of the geneology of every
person in a city; one need only "generalize in the mass," e.g., "most of
the people in Gaza City are halakhically Jewish so we should treat them
all as Jews." (Perhaps "lapsed" Jews, or "apikoroi" as Moggin would have
it, but "of Jewish wombs" nonetheless.) Furthermore in Gaza you're not
even dealing with pig-eating Maronites but with halakhic Jews whose
"non-Jewish" religion forbids pork, commends male circumcision and holds
that Jesus and Muhammad were only human beings.
Of course none of this would matter to me if it's true that I'm an
anti-semite, because Arabs and Jews are both Semites -- and Arabs who
are halakhically Jews are doubly so. Of course if I were a *consistent*
anti-semite I would be happy if they killed each other off, instead of
arguing that Jews should regard Palestinians as "family" and be *nicer*
to them, but then anybody so fucked in the head as to call me an anti-
semite is way beneath such logic, n'est-ce pas?
Ex Cathedrally,
TheDavid(TM)