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Kingdom of Priests

Did you ever think you’d see those two names juxtaposed? I watched Beck’s CPAC speech online just now all the way through — an hour plus. Beck by virtue of his headlining CPAC appearance has been more or less designated as the conservative movement’s preeminent spokesman. The man is a phenomenal talker but I was squirming throughout.…

The week’s Torah portion poses a serious challenge, I think, to secular scholars of the Hebrew Bible and other skeptics who maintain that the Pentateuch was composed no earlier than about 500 BCE. Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19) begins the Torah’s overwhelmingly, sometimes mind-numbingly detailed description of God’s instructions to Moses on how to build the Tabernacle,…

Where is Mt. Sinai? And does it matter? The second question is easier to answer than the first. If God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses there is a historical event then yes, wanting to attach a genuine geographical location to the mountain makes sense. But finding Mt. Sinai presents a problem different from locating…

I was wondering when this would happen — to me! I’ve occasionally donned phylacteries, a/k/a tefillin, en route aboard an airplane to pray in the morning, per Jewish tradition. You don’t want to do it on an airplane since it’s crowded and more to the point, could alarm passengers. That’s what happened today when a…

I admit to a fond wish to impute significance to coincidences. Cynics such as Matthew Cobb writing at Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution Is True, explain away such things, like they do absolutely everything, as a function of survival value tucked into our genome from ancient days. In some recent posts, Cobb was full of mockery…

On the rare occasion it happens, it’s inspiring to catch a rabbi in the act of being what a Jewish religious leader should be — namely a cohen or priest seeking to confront the world with the Torah’s image of what we all could be.  It’s possible to kvell over the British chief rabbi, Lord…

No institution in Torah is more central than the Sabbath, with its twin themes of commemorating the creation of the world and the exodus from Egypt — the two pillars of Judaism, without which there can be no Judaism, and which the Hebrew Bible enshrines as narratives in Genesis and Exodus respectively. This blog spends…

When we say that God created life and all the rest of the universe that serves as its backdrop, if we try to think of what this actually means, then how direct should we imagine God’s intelligent design to have been? We know that natural forces, not directly but only generally manifesting God’s will, play…

From pagan times down to this very moment, the Jews have been widely reviled by other people. Anti-Semites will say that makes sense, since there really is something obnoxious about Jews. While anti-Jewish prejudice can be explained in part by reference to other religions and their holy books, or by a demonic strain in ancient…

Speaking of religion-bashers who dodge a challenge, Jerry Coyne a while back wrote a couple of posts on his blog responding to me on the problem of theodicy but when I replied with a fundamental challenge to him, he went quiet. Just for fun, here it is again, expressed in briefest form: What kind of…
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