Jews and Christians disagree on God the Son, but they both understand the metaphysical reality of God the Father.
St. Thomas Aquinas drew from the works of Jewish philosopher Maimonides to formulate his arguments for the existence of Gid. While Maimonides asserted that you can only describe God via negativa, St. Thomas Aquinas went beyond that by describing God with positive attributes: all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good.
The Jewish focus on not-idolatry was fairly important to my conversion.
warpedellipsis said: An atheist Jew is common, so no, “understanding the same reality” isn’t at all true, given that an atheist christian is not a christian and plenty would even call that evil.
Are you aware that I spent the last months before my conversion as something like an aspiring Atheist Catholic? I know at least one other such person here.
(Also, to what degree is an “atheist Jew” ethnic plus endurance of some of the anti-idolatry stuff I’ve mentioned?)
(Also, to what degree is an “atheist Jew” ethnic plus endurance of some of the anti-idolatry stuff I’ve mentioned?)
Oh boy, this thing.
EPISTEMIC NOTE: I am not an unbiased reporter here. I broke with the Judaism of my youth because I couldn’t swallow the metaphysical / historical / “doctrinal” claims, and the recent wave of “of course it’s OK to be an atheist Jew, that’s not what it’s about at all! :-) uwu” stuff makes me want to scream with rage. But I did in fact spend many years immersed in fairly serious Jewish study and practice, so this is not, like, coming out of nowhere.
Partly it’s an ethnic thing, yes. In a purely Eliadean sociocultural sense, one of the major emphases of any religion is going to involve knowing who’s in and who’s out. For Christians that determination is creedal, so creeds are going to matter to Christians. For Jews that determination is made in a totally different way, so belief can be a lot less important in certain ways.
But that is a [very partial] causal explanation of the thing, not a description of the thing.
Look. If you went to pretty much any rabbi in the world before let’s say 1950, and asked “does you think God exists? does that matter?,” you’d get an answer like: yes, of course God exists, and of course that matters, more than anything else possibly could. What are you, stupid? Have you not looked at a single thing we do? Have you not actually read the text of this book that we venerate more than anyone in the history of the world has venerated anything, or the text of these prayers that we recite many times every day? They’re all about God and why His existence matters!
(…almost “any rabbi.” There are, of course, outliers on the philosophical fringes, just as there are in any other religion.)
But it’s true that this basically doesn’t affect praxis, and never did. No one will ever ask you whether you believe. No one will try to talk to you about the shape or the content of your belief, unless you go to your rabbi with a crisis of faith or something, and then he’ll be pretty much winging it because the traditional sources don’t really touch on that stuff. You can go through your entire life as an observant but totally atheist Jew, and so long as you’re not bothered by the incoherence of things like “I am spending many hours praying to a fiction and explicitly claiming that it’s real,” nothing is going to get in your way.
The best analogy I can think of involves mathematics. You can imagine a mathematician who actually doesn’t believe that numbers, or even Aristotelian logic, reflect the real world at all – that math is just a silly game we play because we like the coherent rules, and that true existence is some kind of deceptive demonic nightmare where 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4 and nothing makes any sense. This person would be considered eccentric by his fellow mathematicians, and indeed by everyone…but it wouldn’t affect anyone’s opinion of his math, or of his good standing in the mathematical community. The work is what matters, socioculturally speaking, and the justification for the work is beyond the scope of anyone’s concern, even if doing the work without the justification seems kind of bizarre and pointless.
The anti-idolatry stuff mostly just doesn’t come up in these contexts, as far as I can tell. Not much danger of honoring foreign gods if you don’t even believe in your god.
Ok, interesting.
(what happened after 1950? I kinda get the idea that education to Gentile children these days are in a kinda pre-1950 framework, which is possibly why Jewish-gentile relations are so incredibly contentious on Tumblr.)
I would add that (for the orthodox churches) membership is not only by Creed but also by Sacrament (baptism) which is permanent or immutable once performed… And can possibly be done by an atheist.
(This led to controversies of course, since one person may have the gift of both blood and water…)
My own “atheist quasi-Catholic” Creed would have begun, “I hope for one God…”. Said God actually showed up in May 2016 and has not departed from my life.
So “1950″ is a very rough date, we’re really talking about a suite of processes that are all very fuzzy and very gradual. But relevant developments include, e.g.:
* Widespread access to various scientific and intellectual developments have made naive simple theism increasingly less appealing to your average Jew-on-the-street.
* The legacy of the Holocaust gave us ~50 years of “the survival of the Jewish people” becoming a Jewish obsession, in a context completely divorced from any religious question, so cultural praxis without coherent religious underpinning became increasingly more appealing.
* Hand-in-hand with the above, anomie / atomism / whatever-you-want-to-call-it has been as much a thing for Jews as for everyone else in the developed world, and so you get the expected wave of people saying “I want a community and a tradition” and using that as a justification for praxis.
* The existence of Israel has provided many Jews with a totally non-religious focal point for cultural cohesion, which similarly provides a justification for praxis.
But of course all this is possible because the traditional praxis doesn’t touch directly on theistic belief in the first place, even if it obviously sort of assumes the existence of theistic belief as a starting point. Christ-as-portrayed-in-the-Gospels was a spiritual movement-builder, someone who talked a lot about why you should believe his claims and why that belief was important; there is literally no one in Jewish source material of whom this is true. (Even the prophets weren’t saying “you have to have faith in God,” they were saying “you have to act justly / stop praying to idols.”)