Here is the Wikipedia's definition of "an atheistic Jew"

Wikipedia (the on-line free Encyclopedia) defines an atheistic Jew as

"An Atheist Jew is a member of the Jewish community who does not believe in God but still considers himself or herself a Jew. Some Jewish atheists retain customs of the Jewish faith, while others identify as Jewish primarily through ethnic or cultural ties.

Because Jewishness encompasses ethnic as well as religious components, it should be noted that the term "Atheist Jew" does not necessarily imply any kind of contradiction, unlike, for example "Atheist Methodist" or "Atheist Baptist""

"Jewish atheism can take both organized and unorganized forms. On the one hand, there is a long tradition of atheistic and secular Jewish organizations, from the Jewish socialist Bund in early twentieth-century Poland to the modern Society for Humanistic Judaism in the United States. Many Jewish atheists feel comfortable within any of the four major Jewish denominations (Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist). Again, this presents less of a contradiction than might first seem apparent given even traditional Judaism's emphasis on practice over belief. Much recent Jewish theology makes few if any metaphysical claims and is thus compatible with atheism on an ontological level. The founder of the Reconstructionist movement, Mordechai Kaplan, espoused a naturalistic definition of God, while some post-Holocaust theology has also eschewed a personal God."

Giving another Speech

Here I am giving another speech. This time on November 19, 2006. This was at the Synagogue (BSKI) when our Men's Club gave a Persons of the Year Dinner.

Well, sit down! And shut up!

New Picture

Picture taken at the end of September. This is the environmentally correct way to transport, it is the Segway.

Darwin vs. Creation

Apparently, many people don't see the true "battle lines" in the debate over "creation" vs. Darwin.

There are many, but not all, religious groups who insist on reading the Bible literally, they say that they believe the world is only 5767 years old and that a God created the world in six days (starting on a Sunday, stopping Friday afternoon, just before the onset of Shabbat).
However, in the Jewish world, the modern Jewish world, so unfamiliar to many, the majority understands that the bible should not be taken literally. No serious Jewish researcher would deny the existence of dinosaurs, or question that Darwin’s findings represent the truth.

Because the debate about so called “intelligent design” (a clever but transparent new label for creationism) is so prevalent currently, it is not surprising that books on the topic are created as if they were cars on an assembly line in Detroit.

The overall Jewish stand point in many issues is founded on this basic realization: Read the book, not as if it was another issue of National Geographic but as a story with lessons to be learned, with historic grains of truth but not as a super-human document. It is well established that the Torah/Bible was written by four groups of people, roughly between 1,000 BCE and 400 BCE and then redacted by Ezra into what we today know as the Pentateuch. In his book “Who Wrote the Bible”, Richard Elliot Friedman addresses the question of the authorship of the Bible, particularly the Five Books of Moses.

Richard Elliott Friedman, a world-renowned biblical scholar, is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Hidden Face of God and the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible?

More to follow.