Philosophy

Visiting Berlin on a Europe trip, I'm confronted head-on with many of the topics I've been grappling with for months. Meeting Germans, some of the nicest and most open-minded people I've met, in a city steeped with culture. Knowing that they had a similar reputation before they started two...

So, yeah, in case you didn't know. This is totally a real law. If you didn't wipe your butt properly, any prayer or study you've done during that time is a sin instead of a virtue. The same law (guf naki) that argues that some women shouldn't be allowed...

The worship of Israel as a state, especially by Jews abroad, is a recent invention. Not even after its founding in 1948, was this the popular sentiment. Only after 1967 did this become the mainstream, a way for Jews to express their Judaism even if they didn’t believe in...

The way I was raised, race, peoplehood, and identity were intertwined with ethics and morals. In Teachings It started with Jewish texts and teachings. Muslims were descendants of Ishmael, “a nation who resembled donkeys,” destined to be perpetual shit-disturbers. Christians were sons of Esau, a bloodthirsty cutthroat who lived by the...

The following is a guest post by an anonymous contributor. I found their response articulate, poignant, and personal, stating in different tones a lot of the issues and personal grievances I struggled with myself. I relate a lot to the feeling of having given my all, trying to be...

I am not above criticism any religion or social institution. I spend most of my time calling out Orthodox Judaism because I am intimately familiar with its fuckeries and am haunted by its residues in my psyche. But I think it's important on occasion to criticize some other sacred...

I have been on a journey of deconstructing religion for the last 9 years, and this site is a testament to the variety of angles in which I've (literally) attacked the subject. In many ways, the challenges I grapple with around religion were ones that were issues for me...

Everybody should —in their lifetime consider death, To wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. the contemplation of death, and the acceptance of death, is very highly generative of creative life. - Alan Watts In my hypnotherapy practice, I tend to attract a certain...

Hear me out. (No good idea ever started with that, did it?) What if the entire Zionist idea was just a first draft for an even more Final Solution? At the time, Zionism was revolutionary. And it has had its benefits, to a degree. (Although if World War II had broken...

Without the Holocaust, Zionism would not have succeeded. It was a fringe movement, ignored by assimilated secular Jews as unnecessary, and by religious Jews as oppositional to its beliefs. The Holocaust was critical for the formation of the state of Israel - it shifted the views of Jews around...