Practicing the Religion
Reader comment on item: El Al, "Goy" Airline?
in response to reader comment: Religious perspective

Submitted by Issac (United States), Jan 2, 2007 at 15:05

Yaakov- Firstly, its great that we are able to discuss this in a polite and civilized way, but unfortunately you still miss the point which is why one may label you as a fundamentalist.

Secondly, what's with the imaginary segol in the word SHABBAT?You're calling me a bigot? I think you have something against kamatzem!!!! (just joking)

An aspect of being a religious fundamentalist is thinking that God sanctioned you to impose your religious views/practices on others, and with all do respect, breaking the Sabbath is not a moral issue- we have to make clear distinctions between moral rules and religious rules. A moral rule would be - thou shall not kill. A religious rule would be something like- thou shall not flip a light switch on Sabbath -- these religious rules for Sabbath can't be moral rules because you are not bothering anyone by breaking them.

You do have to realize that there is a such thing a being a Jew nationalistically speaking without being religious. That is between the Jew and God, not the Jew and you. That discussion should have been settled when we left the middle ages!

It would also be a bad idea to mix religion with the state for two reasons, if you shove religion down the throats of people, you will cause them to hate it, and two, religion mixed in with politics will inherently be corrupted by politics.

About the Big Mac thing, I was exaggerating to make an obvious point in my last posting.

And finally Yaakov, it would seem almost pointless for the Jewish state to continue fighting its present war against religious totalitarians from neighboring countries whose modus operandi is convert-or-die if only to end up with being ruled by religious totalitarians of our own.

One last thing, I would have to say that you calling me bigoted is name calling, I was merely forming an opinion from what I saw from religious people making posts regarding this issue, the fact of the matter was that there were religious people who saw El Al's protection as coming from divine reward for El Al following the Sabbath, and I never said that orthodox jews were uneducated in science, engineering or running a business. I displayed that the Haradim did not care about the airline's issues, which seemed to be well founded.

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened for relevance, substance, and tone, and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome, but comments are rejected if scurrilous, off-topic, vulgar, ad hominem, or otherwise viewed as inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the Guidelines for Comments. For informational purposes, we identify countries from which comments are sent.