Sarah + Kendal + Tiffany, it’s encouraging that I see on this thread a wrestling with a tough contender in the arena of public opinion. I want to use what we learn here to get past, however heartfelt, anodyne statements of what at 17 my religion teacher (a priest) called ‘pious pish-posh’. That’s what’s turned me off for much of my life from ‘organized religion’ and what led my late wife (z”l) to disengage totally from even the secular Jewish identity within which she was raised, very typical in later 20c Western society.
Part of that erosion of bonds that tie among hundreds of millions, believers, lukewarm, agnostic, seekers, is that propaganda has become more concerted against the follies of considering the supernatural plane, the intervention of the messianic prediction, the divine presence, in a particular corner of the ancient world.
The conflation of the return to Zion with the Edward Said ‘orientalist’ jibe, the rise of whatever’s seen as opposite the civilising process as automatically more moral, more correct, and more just: these paradigm shifts have unbalanced our collective ability to discern intelligently the nuances that prevent us from imposing blanket judgements upon millions of our fellow men and women, past and present. For all of us can never escape our fallen condition within which we err, and go astray, and, yes, sin, same as our ancestors.
