Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, and then ...we should see our way a little more clearly without falling into Judaism, or Toryism, or Jacobinism, or any other ism whatever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizi...ng, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You'd have to be a jew like me to understand. You've heard of the Pale. Every one of us has something fenced up way down in us. We...'ve been in prison for two thousand years. I have the mind of a jailbird, that's why prison can't hurt me. That's why we throw ourselves into every movement of freedom. That's why I feel the slavery of the workers, I feel it as a worker and I feel it as a jew. Oh you can't imagine the overheated stuffiness of life at home on the East Side when I was a kid. We were all jailed in poverty and Judaism and in old customs and hatreds and wornout laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost... no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its a...dherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the subsequent, now over, era of Western ...imperialism, when Eastern cultures were despised by us, have caused a block in European thinking, making it hard for us to acknowledge what we all owe to the East. Two great religions have influenced Europe, we say: Christianity and Judaism, but we scarcely mention Islam, which has been the third. We are the heirs, we claim proudly, of Greece and Rome, but seldom think of the Arabs, the Persians, the Moors, who, through Spain, fed culture into a Europe that was considered a poor and backward place, with a culture far below the dazzling civilizations of the cities of North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clea...rly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vices are character traits. Sins are specific acts of commission or omission. Once Judaism and Christianity adopted the concepts o...f vice and virtue from the Greek and Roman moralists, vices were often called sins and sins vices. The seven deadly "sins" are also called the deadly "vices," which is more accurate. They are basic, perhaps universal human tendencies, from which sins result. The vice of anger spawns the sin of violence against others and the vice of greed gives birth to the sin of theft.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Theology starts with dogmas, philosophy begins with problems. Philosophy sees the problem first, theology has the answer in advanc...e. We must not, however, disregard another important difference. Not only are the problems of philosophy not identical with the problems of religion; their status is not the same. Philosophy is, in a sense, a kind of thinking that has a beginning but no end. In it, the awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. Its answers are questions in disguise; every new answer giving rise to new questions. In religion, on the other hand, the mystery of the answer hovers over all questions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as tha...t of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »