Are you a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Atheist?

[DavidB.]

You should include Hindus and Buddhists, and Other.

Sorry.  Just check "Atheist" then.

Are you serious :')

[DavidB.]

I am a fundamentalist Christian.

Serious question. How do you define "fundamentalist"?

[DavidB.]

I've never really understood the idea of identifying as non-religious but accepting that maternal rite (Judaism) or baptism somehow makes you a Jew or a Christian.  If you're not religious, why do you accept the authority of religious rites in dictating what religion you are?  That doesn't make sense.

At that point it has become one's personal choice to identify that way, I'd say. Also, traditions (such as the tradition that one is a Jew if one's mother is; hard to disentangle "religion" and "tradition" here, but in my opinion the word "religion" doesn't accurately describe Judaism anyway) have social and cultural value apart from their religious importance. Even if people don't believe, they don't necessarily want to lose that. So many Jews go to synagogue on Yom Kippur and sometimes even keep the fast without believing in G-d.

[DavidB.]

You're mostly talking about cultural identification here, though, which I think is totally understandable -- whatever makes people happy.  But I've definitely met Jews who seem to believe that maternal rite is authoritative somehow, not just a something they choose to accept or that manifests as a cultural norm.  They seem to think it's objectively "true" for some reason, and this makes no sense at all to me...

The point is that you seek to differentiate between "cultural identification" (which would be understandable) and "religious belief" (which someone who doesn't believe in G-d would be expected to leave behind), which are terms that might be fitting for (some forms of) Christianity, but are simply not very useful at understanding Judaism, for the very terms "culture" and "religion" stem from a Christian, European paradigm.

We're not really a religion. Jews who don't believe are just as much part of the tribe as the Chief Rabbis of Israel. We're not really a culture. There's so many cultural differences between, say, the congregants of a Reform Temple in San Francisco on the one hand and the congregants of an Iraqi Jewish synagogue in a development town in Israel's Negev desert on the other hand. The words nation and tribe describe Judaism the best, I think, and maybe things make more sense to you if you look at it this way.

Even if one doesn't believe in G-d, one is part of the tribe, and maternal rite is still authoritative at deciding who's part of the tribe and who's not, regardless of "belief". Of course, one can choose to completely dissociate themselves from Judaism and everything it entails, just for not believing in G-d, but if one does not object to (most of) the tribe's rites and ceremonies in itself (and most people do enjoy lighting Hannukah candles and being at a Seider, and find it important to pass "something Jewish" on to their children), it makes little sense (and comes at a high social cost) to do so, especially considering the fact that belief in G-d is not nearly as much a necessary condition to function in the Jewish world as it is in the Christian world. Thus, many people reject G-d, but prefer to remain part of the tribe for all sorts of reasons, and that entails accepting (and often genuinely valuing) certain traditions that might be categorized (from a non-Jewish perspective) as partly religious, partly social. That might be strange from a Western perspective based on Christianity, but I find it to be pretty logical from a Jewish perspective.

[DavidB.]

I'm respectfully having trouble understanding how what you're describing isn't completely compatible with the "culture" bucket...you've just indicated that Jews are an atomistic, heterogeneous culture (or, if you prefer, multiple cultures/subcultures).  OK, but so what?  A normative belief can exist between multiple different cultures, and it's possible for subcultures to exist under a banner "culture" but exhibit different traits.  The fact that there are multiple (sub)cultures that share a cultural trait does not mean that the trait isn't cultural.  It just means that the presence of that trait doesn't wholly define and distinguish the (sub)culture.

As far as I can tell, you basically are just arguing that Jewish identity is a cultural identification that isn't contingent on religious belief.  That's fine, and I'm aware.  (Obviously you know more about Judaism than I do, but I probably know more about Judaism than Christianity, tbh.)  The thing about culture is that it's a system of traditions and norms that, unless you grant it intrinsic authority for some reason, has no innate claim to authority.  That's my point -- it's not "true" in any sense besides it's something that people decide to participate in (or people around them try to pressure them into participating in).  And yet I often hear people say "I'm x even though I don't believe it and it's not important to me."  It's literally just applying a cultural norm you're not interested in to yourself because people who are interested in it say you should.  It makes no sense.

Hmmm, I still would not call it a culture with different subcultures, but I suppose one could look at it that way. However, it is not the Jewish way of looking at it, and if one seeks to understand why Jews do things, I think it makes more sense to try and look at their behavior through a Jewish "lens".

I understand your point, though. Of course Judaism has no "innate claim to authority" in the sense that no Jew is obliged under anything other than Jewish law to follow Jewish law, or even to identify as Jewish. However, even if one does not believe in G-d, that does not automatically mean one is not interested in all the other traditions or norms; indeed, if one says "I'm Jewish even though I don't believe in it" (I'm not talking about "cultural Christianity" now, as it is different and I don't care about it) and one still deems matrilineality and maybe Pesach or Yom Kippur relevant, it is likely that people are actually "interested", as you formulate it, in these traditions -- they don't believe in G-d, but they do think the traditions by themselves have some legitimate claim to authority.

That makes sense. The Danish nation, for instance, has the right to decide who is part of the Danish nation, and it does not need religion for that. Likewise, the Jewish nation has decided that one is Jewish if one's mother is Jewish (apart from the recent situation regarding Reform shuls recognizing people whose father is Jewish as Jews, but not really relevant to my point), and even if one does not believe in G-d, one does not necessarily have to object to this. People actually do think such things are "true".

Also, this is 100% an aside, but "reject God"?  really, dude?  I assume you're probably using that as a shorthand for "fail to accept what I see as evident," but that's not what "rejection" means.  You're making it sound like atheists left-swipe God on Tinder or something.

It wasn't meant as something normative (or as "fail to accept what I see as evident"), just meant to say they don't believe in G-d. I could definitely see why you interpreted it differently (as something preachy or even condescending), but that wasn't my intention when I wrote it and that's also definitely not how I feel about it. To put it bluntly, I find it much more important that Jews stand with their fellow Jews in Israel than that they believe.