MTZUnconventional strategy.
FiniteBanjoIsrael is literally waging a war to expand borders, so yeah, maybe they want to be left alone in the sense that they won’t accept any state other than Israel existing in the end.
prettybunnysIt’s … wild because this is part of the roots of the Jewish people being chased from their lands.
In a world where folks accepted other peoples gods but revered their own … the monotheistic Abrahamic religions fucked all that up.
The problem with believing in gods is that you think you are right. That makes other people wrong. And so it begins…
MinnesotaGoddamWhy would you believe anything if you were going to believe you were wrong?
And that’s why you shouldn’t.
believing you are right is requisite to belief. acknowledgement that you might be wrong, in the existence of doubt, that’s maturity but it does not preclude the belief that you are right.
I think you’ve just talked yourself into a circle. You can’t both believe something and doubt it. Doubt is the opposite of belief.
What you’re talking about is possibly belief in belief. That’s the belief that you should believe, or belief that you do believe. That is not the same as actual belief.
If your bar for believing something is that you’re 100% certain that it is true (i.e., a complete lack of doubt), then you’ve rendered the whole concept of belief useless as there is no proposition this applies to.
Me, if I see a cat sitting on a mat, I will believe there is a cat on the mat. But it might be that it’s a capybara wearing an incredibly convincing cat costume. Very low odds, but the possibility is there. It could also be that I was a bit careless in looking, and the cat is actually sitting on an especially mat-like section of the newspaper. There is always doubt. Sometimes there’s more (maybe the lights were off), sometimes there’s less (I spend a good hour examining the cat-mat situation, consulting biologists and mat experts), but there is always doubt.
Asserting you have no doubt is asserting you made no mistake in assessing reality, i.e., that you’re perfect. And call me a dick, but I don’t think you are.
There’s a big difference between having no doubt, and thinking you’re infallible.
I believe if I drop something it will fall to the ground because objects with mass produce gravity. It may be that some other completely different force is at work, besides gravity. But I don’t believe that to be true. But if there is evidence that it is true, I will change my mind.
A good way to check if you believe something is to look at how you act. You see the cat, you act like. It’s a cat, you believe it’s a cat. If you see the cat, and hesitate and doubt, then you don’t believe it’s a cat. You may do some thinking and then determine it is a cat, and start believing it. And then you will act accordingly.
And that’s why funerals disprove religious belief. If people truly believed in their religion, and believed in the afterlife, funerals would be happy not sad. But they don’t believe in their religion. They hope that they’re right. But they don’t believe it.
Your comment on funerals reminds me of my mother yelling at me for crying over my grandpa’s death (the first death I experienced as an adult/college student). She told me “Why are you so upset‽ You’ve been to church more recently than I have!”
Anyways, that thought lives rent-free in my head, even though I no longer speak with my mother.
(mini rant: she gave me exactly as much space to feel my feelings when my own dad died more recently. Yes, she sucks.)
My grandma’s funeral was not a sad occasion. She’d lived a long life and died very demented, so there was a bit of sadness, but mostly those feelings had been dealt with over the years as her mind changed. The primary feeling seemed to be relief. The sermon was very “we’re not burying her, we’re planting her, rejoice for she will be reborn” and I wanted to throttle the preacher because he said nothing specific to my grandma, it was very generic. My main feeling at the funeral was stress from navigating the disfunctional relationships of family members I hardly knew.