I have been involved in service at North Shore in ways that are not related to religion. My community service interim (Oak Terrace) was not tied to religion at all, but I think helping out at that school was just as important as any service I have done with my synagogue. The concept of “active faith” that we discussed in class really stood out to me. Nearly every religion we discussed has some teaching that stresses the importance of service and charity, and I think that is one of the more underrated values of religion. Many people argue that a belief in God is paramount, and while I agree that faith in God is important, it is also crucial not to forget the importance of the acts of charity that different faiths prescribe.

It’s not only movies that affect our perceptions of love. While many people still grow up wanting the ideal life with a perfect husband/wife, x number of kids, and a white picket fence, today’s society does not promote the images of fidelity and love that were prevalent in our parents’ childhood. If you turn on the radio, of course there are some songs about finding and having true love, but it’s more common to hear someone singing about being a jilted lover or about the numerous people they are seeing at one time. TV shows like “The Bachelor/Bachelorette” show someone dating sometimes 25 people at once all with the objective of finding “true love” in two months. In Hollywood, there seem to be announcements made by publicists every day that a couple has decided to separate or that paparazzi caught a celebrity cheating on his/her significant other. While most people don’t base their actions off of celebrities and TV shows, I find it interesting that there seems to be a severe lack of stable family units in a time where the divorce rates continue to climb.

In response to the question of “why does evil exist?”, I am reminded of the book that I have been reading over spring break. In Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People, he brings up the idea of choice and free will. Kushner says that the freedom to choose is what separates humans from animals, and that while God created free will, He cannot force people to choose what is right. If God is all-powerful, then he can destroy all evil; however, doing so would negate the whole concept of free will. God gave people free will, and I find it reasonable to believe that he wants people to recognize the difference between right and wrong. In Kushner’s book, he wrote “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them.” What I took from this, although Kushner doesn’t exactly say it, is that without suffering, there are some things in life that would be without meaning. For some reason, I think that Kushner’s theory relates to this question. The question of why evil exists is a very thought-provoking one, but maybe one hypothesis is that evil exists in order to help people see the good in the world. I don’t necessarily think that evil is necessary to have good in the world, but that is one hypothesis that I have read about in my research.

 (This is my post from over Spring Break. I was having some difficulty uploading it, but I think it worked this time)

“You do not kill innocent people, you do not cheat, you do not lie, you do not destroy any property of other human beings,” says Imam Abdullah Khouj, an Islamic scholar and director of the Islamic Center, in Washington, D.C.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “can’t be in the name of Allah,” he adds.”

Another interesting part of the article that I found was 

“People combine pieces of verse from the Koran and use it to justify their actions, says Khouj. “But to understand the full meaning of the verse,” he says, “you have to read the one before it, the one after it, maybe five to six verses to get the full picture.”

The “full picture” of Islam and the Koran, say Khouj and Nyang, is captured by Chapter 5, Verse 32: “[I]f anyone slew a person—unless it be for murder or spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people. And if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.”

For most Muslims, the callous and indiscriminate taking of human life violates Allah’s wishes. It defies the Koran’s central message and undermines the peace that Islam promises to deliver to all people.

“Human life in Islam is extremely sacred,” says Khouj. “We’re not talking about just Muslim [life], but human life in general.”"

I think that this article was very interesting because it shows that the people involved in the attacks on 9/11 were extremists who interpreted the Koran in a way very different than it is interpreted by most Muslims. Knowing that people base their assumptions about Muslims on the 9/11 attacks, I think that articles like these are very important because it shows that people who use their Muslim faith as justification for attacks like 9/11 do not represent the beliefs of all Muslims. While many people associate Muslims with killing in the name of God, there have been instances throughout history when people of all religions have used God as the motivation for murder. I think that is important for people to remember this fact, and also to remember that they shouldn’t judge all people of a specific faith based on the actions of a few.

The article I used was from National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/0925_TVkoran_2.html

Knowing that we were talking about suffering in class, I read an excerpt of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” and was struck by a particular paragraph. In it, Kushner said,

“I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom. 

I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.

Some years ago, when the “death of God” theology was a fad, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that read “My God is not dead; sorry about yours.” I guess my bumper sticker reads “My God is not cruel; sorry about yours.”

God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws.

The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God’s part. Because the tragedy is not God’s will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are.”

I was interested in this passage because it helped me recognize one of the reasons that I usually say agnostic, rather than atheist. Kushner provides his reader with the idea that faith in God is possible, even with all of the suffering in the world, because in his eyes, God is not all-powerful. The idea of a God that is not all-powerful is interesting because many religions view God as all-powerful, so Kushner contradicts this common notion, which is surprising considering he is a rabbi. This idea of God as presented by Kushner is something that I find a little closer to a God that I may believe in because I have trouble reconciling the idea of an all-powerful God while being aware of all the suffering in the world.

My belief in the fact that something happens after we die was strengthened by the passing of my grandmother last year because her death was the first time that I had to say a final goodbye to someone that I was close to. When my grandmother died in January 2009, it was difficult for me to accept that there were things I never got to talk to her about, that there were things she will never get to see me do, and that I simply didn’t have enough time with her during her lifetime. Because of this, I continue to believe in the idea that perhaps there is a heaven, and it is a place where our loved ones wait until it is our time to join them. I take comfort in this thought because although my grandmother will never get to see me through pivotal points in my life and she’ll never get to see what type of person I become, I am able to think that in some ways, she will get to see these events. While she won’t physically be with me, I’d like to believe that she is in heaven, watching over me and the rest of my family, and that hopefully, she’d be proud of the person that I am and the person that I will become.

I was raised Jewish, and Judaism teaches that the meaning of life is to serve God and emphasizes the importance of one’s relationship with family, community, and God. Although these ideas can be used as an overarching idea of the Jewish belief of the meaning of life, I cannot actually remember a time when the meaning of life was discussed in my Sunday School classes. Right now, I don’t think that it would be accurate to use my relationship with God as a way to give my life meaning, especially because I have come to question God’s existence and sometimes consider myself an agnostic. If I were to define the nature of human life and to say what gives life meaning, I would definitely agree with the sentiment that relationships with family and friends are a very important part of giving meaning to life. I am who I am today because of the people around me, and without them, I am not sure what direction my life would take and how I would be different.

(This blog is for Week 6, and it is late because I was at the Duke MUN. Mr. Dachille said to focus on completing the Found Poem assignment before completing this blog.)

I did some additional research on creation myths, and of these, I found the African stories to be very interesting, perhaps because I have had essentially no exposure to indigenous African religions. I would have to say the Zulu myth is perhaps most like that of Western creation stories. “The Ancient One” is the Zulu creator, similar to the Western concept of God, and the Ancient One came from the reeds and brought forth people and the cattle. He created everything, and he taught the people how to hunt, make fire, grow food, etc. The Maasai myth tells that the origin of humanity was fashioned by the Creator deity from a single tree or leg which split into three pieces. These three pieces became the first father of the Maasai, to whom he gave a stick; the first father of the Kikuyu, to whom he gave a hoe; and the first father of the Kamba, to whom he gave a bow and arrow. This offers not only an account of how man got on earth but also how different tribes developed their way of survival. I liked reading the African creation myths because although I am able to recognize certain parts of the stories, they introduce a different account of creation that I previously knew nothing about.