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WHEN I STARTED
THIS SITE...
I was a highly observant Jew. A contrarian one, to be sure, but I believed in the Jewish God. In fact, one of my primary motivations for this site was to rescue the concept of God from the grips of modern-day Judaism, the vast majority of which was created by rabbis.
Here was my plan.
I would craft a more nuanced version of God by deep-diving into the Torah, Judaism’s foundational text. If I could interpret the text from God’s point of view, the picture that emerged would support the universal humanism I so believed in.
That’s not what happened.
After a full year, I finally finished analyzing the whole Torah. The process changed my entire worldview. I no longer adhere to any religion, Judaism included. Rereading the Passover story with fresh eyes was the final nail in the coffin, but I won’t spoil the surprise: you’ll have to read to see why.
Hopefully, you’ll do me the honor of reading further. If you do, there are three points I want to call out before you dive in.
1. I’ve made the admittedly embarrassing decision to keep all of my older work in its original form without any edits. As a result, this blog documents the slow, awkward journey of religious deprogramming, which means the beginning entries represent views I no longer hold. When I started this project, I was trying so hard to justify God’s actions and reconcile my morality with my belief in the Jewish God that I ended up justifying some awful things. I left it up because I think seeing the progression is important.
2. Concurrent with this Torah deep-dive, I also found myself in a research hole about comparative world religions. I was particularly drawn to eschatology, or the study of End Times. Throughout this research, one overarching theme became unavoidable: despite cultural differences, Earth’s religions describe the same things. They have the same themes, benefits, and drawbacks. Even crazier, their prophecies are largely the same. No matter how much we try to partition ourselves, we are just one people who come in different flavors.
3. Doing this analysis while the genocide in Gaza occurs has provided a surreal comparison between current and historical events. One central thread in the Palestinian resistance’s message is that Israel’s crimes didn’t start on October 7th. While this is true, they also didn’t start in 1948. Israel’s current crimes are the same crimes Moses committed during the founding of their initial Biblical state. Genocide, dispossession, slaughter, displacement, and colonialism. It’s happening today just as it happened thousands of years ago. You often hear the refrain “This is Israel, not Judaism,” among the progressive left. Unfortunately, after a laser-focused analysis of Jewish religious history, I can say with certainty that this is false. Judaism does support this. Now, that doesn’t mean Jewish PEOPLE support this, but this type of behavior has been baked into Judaism since its inception. In this way, Judaism is no different than most other religions; their adherents are much less observant, and therefore much less violent, than the dogma calls for. Please don’t take my word for it: I included a bunch of long-ass quotes for just this reason. It’s all there in the book. Peace-loving Jewish people are peace-loving because they have adjusted their mental model of their religion to fit their peaceful and loving natures. If religion is the tool they use to help motivate them to be better people, I support them in that. But I support them, their peoplehood, their intrinsic morality, because they are the reason for their high moral standing, not their religion.