It’s the Jewish blog carnival.
A Jewish carnival? You know what that means: Intellectual rides that don’t go too fast, lots of seat belts, waivers of liability, and plenty of food.
You could still have a good time.
Archive for the ‘Faith and Works’ Category
Life in Israel: Haveil Havalim #140
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 11, 2007
Posted in Blogophilia, Faith and Works | 4 Comments »
Atheism ascendant
Posted by Ron Coleman on October 29, 2007
Roland Dodds posted this weird, retro propaganda clip from the silly ol’ Red Scare days. It shows the new commissar of, I don’t know, Anytown, USA, trying to debrief a classroom full of wide-eyed Christian children on the topic of how their deity answers prayers. As Roland writes, “This great piece of Cold War propaganda would be hilariously bad if it wasn’t technically true.”
Indeed. The fact is, this level of argumentation is about what you get from the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” set anyway. They aren’t commies, at least not all of them, but they can be about that creepy in a certain sense — and no more logically compelling.
Posted in Faith and Works | 1 Comment »
Advertisement for Himself
Posted by Ron Coleman on October 17, 2007
Norman Mailer is in the hospital. “He’s not in very good shape. It’s breaking my heart,” his ex-wife Carol Mailer told the New York Post yesterday.
I hadn’t thought of the old man in a long time, until the picture above started glowering at me on all the newsstands in New York, from the cover of New York magazine, which announces thereon that Mailer has started his own new religion, kind of:
In a six-decade career, Norman Mailer has written thirteen novels, nineteen works of nonfiction, two poetry collections, and one play. He’s directed four movies. He ran for mayor of New York, and in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights home, he built, in three weeks, with two friends, a vast Lego city, incorporating some 15,000 pieces, known as the city of the future, seeming to take as much pride in it as in any of his other creations. But even at 84, he has a vast ambition. And now he has created something like a religion. In a new book, On God, a dialogue with one of his literary executors, Michael Lennon, he lays out his highly personal vision of what the universe’s higher truths might look like, if we were in a position to know them. But his theology is not theoretical to him. After eight decades, it is what he believes to be true. He expects no adherents, and does not profess to be a prophet, but he has worked to forge his beliefs into a coherent catechism.
I doubt it. But it appears he may find out very soon.
Posted in Faith and Works, Medialites | 2 Comments »
Guess who’s coming to kiddush
Posted by Ron Coleman on October 9, 2007
Roger Simon writes about “Why They Hate the Neocons” (via Insty) but besides a passing reference to the subject, completely ignores the Jewish issue and the underlying accusation against neoconservatives, at least on one level, of dual loyalty.
But it is not to be ignored. To even fail to address it at least by refutation suggests that perhaps Simon is not being honest… about himself.
UPDATE: “They all look alike” (same hat tip) but, again, the obvious issue is ignored — even though it’s as plain as the nose on my face.
Posted in Faith and Works, Oppression, Politics and Poker | Leave a Comment »
Out of this world
Posted by Ron Coleman on October 3, 2007
I’ll be out of the electronic, workaday world again observing Sukkos and Simchas Torah for the next couple of days.
So what?
Now, I don’t say this because I consider myself such a big blogger that people will notice if I don’t post. My mom, after all, knows it’s a holiday. But sometimes someone comes here for the first time and is interested, in one way or another… then sees a couple of days with no posting… and perhaps thinks the project has been abandoned and that person never returns.
This would be a shame, no?
So come back! I will. I’ll be posting again over the weekend.
Posted in Faith and Works | 2 Comments »
What “life” can do
Posted by Ron Coleman on October 2, 2007
Assembla Blog discusses ” 4 Things Life Can Do that Engineers Can’t.”
1) Make something big by starting with something small and expanding each part
…
2) Grow all of the differentiated parts of an organism, starting from a single cell, using only local cell-to-cell signaling.3) Make 100,000 proteins from 30,000 genes …
4) Make a brain with 100 billion neurons using 10,000 or so genes
An odd choice of things, isn’t it? I get a kick, though, out of the choice of words — what “life” (also called “the universe”) can do. Yeah, thank life.
Posted in Faith and Works, Nuvo-Techno | Leave a Comment »
Think fast
Posted by Ron Coleman on September 21, 2007
Tonight begins Yom Kippur.
If you are Jewish, please consider that by traditional Jewish thinking, fasting and praying by yourself is superior to fasting and driving to synagogue for public prayer during the holiday. In fact, driving is a big no-no. I will be happy to answer any questions about this after the holiday.
Have an easy (“and meaningful”!) fast!
Posted in Faith and Works | 1 Comment »
On the Final
Posted by Ron Coleman on September 21, 2007
I have been pondering this link from Instapundit for a couple of days now. It is about, in 
one sense, a cutesie trend on American campuses now called a “last lecture”:
Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted “Last Lecture Series,” in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?
Now the lecture in question in the article really was the last chance, for all practical purposes, for the professor involved, who is dying. I was, however, rather put off by this idea. The man was facing his end, I realized; how churlish could I be about such a topic?
On the eve of Yom Kippur, however — when among Jews the congregation as a whole admits to a state of sinfulness generically, but as individuals reserves the most intimate of confession for the private communication between Man and his Creator — I’ve had the chance to contemplate the matter some more. Regrettably for those among us who circulate heart-warming emails and who yet care about my opinion (uh, hi, Mom), I want to go with my initial instinct, at least as to the general trend; as to the case in the article, perhaps that requires more thought.
The “last lecture” trend is truly the emblem of ours, history’s most narcisstic era. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Americana, Faith and Works, O Mores! | 12 Comments »
Likelihood of life
Posted by Ron Coleman on September 12, 2007
Click here for our Rosh Hashana prayers. And here for some fancy hornblowing.
May we be inscribed for a year of life … of sustenance… of peace.
I’ll be back after Saturday evening.
Posted in Faith and Works | 1 Comment »
Men without a country
Posted by Ron Coleman on September 10, 2007
What pathetic losers — ethnically Russian non-Jews, the children of phony “Law of Return” immigrants to Israel, arrested for Neo-Nazi violence. In Israel. Where they live and were brought up.
Ach! Der Fuhrer zez
Ve are der Master race
But ven der Judensvotogrovers kommen
Ve kover up dem face!
Their mock-Aryan bravado is quite betrayed by their cowardice in the light of day. But beyond this, they make a fine emblem of the emptiness of the modern political entity on which the philosophy of Zionism stands. Imported as non-Arab white meat, their sponsors (limiting themselves to the lifestyle comforts of 1.2 or so children per couple) considered the Slavic parents of these hooligans a fine demographic offset against the Palestinian population bomb. So enlighted that their own Jewishness means nothing to them, the Israeli elite of both right and left assumed it wouldn’t mean anything to these Gentiles, either, to be surrounded by Jews in a country that strove, after all, to be merely a Greece or southern France. Socialism, atheism, free love and all that Eurostyle stuff, just with Hora-dancing and more Nobel prize winners. As the old Levy’s Rye Bread advertisement says, to like that, “You don’t have to be Jewish,” they figured.
Surprise.
And, of course, these men will be convicted (is there some White Nazi country that will trade for their freedom, the way Hamas or Hizbullah Nazis kidnap Israeli soldiers to get back five or six hundred of their own Jew-haters?) because of their own 21st-century vanity — it’s all on video. Because these days, even racism isn’t really happening if you don’t get it on YouTube.
UPDATE: At least one of them is supposedly really Jewish. That doesn’t help. Obviously, it’s even worse, but not surprising, from a country that is contemptuous of its own heritage.
Posted in Faith and Works, Oppression, Orient | 6 Comments »
