They didn’t do the whole ten plagues. Of course, rendering disease, boils, biting insects, and the death of the first born with a bouncy circus-tune soundtrack would have made the video a little creepy.
Agreed, but they skipped over the Passover part.
I played along with my Ten Plagues Finger Puppets! (I really do own these.)
The passover story is terrible, you would think it would have been glossed over by now.
Remember also according to the Torah their god “hardens pharaoh’s heart” which basically means Yahweh brainwashes the Pharaoh to prevent him letting the jews go so he can punish the Egyptians for “reasons”
@pesco is this an annual reposting?
Anyway Pesach really is my favoritist part of our calendar. Not only a reminder of why we still exist despite the efforts of empire after empire but also a reminder that no superpower (or “hegemony”) has more earthly power than HKBH.
Earthly? Does that mean power as executed on earth, or originating from it? I would have thought god was a heavenly power that moved around over the surface, influencing earthly things, but an earthly power sounds more like gaia or… hmm, coming up short here, mother nature or something.
Israel_B,
You basically say the same thing twice there.
When I was religious, passover was my least favorite part of the calendar. Mass murder of children (by God) makes me uncomfortable…
But why does it remind you of how the Jewish people have survived the (real) attempts at genocide? The story that we are referring to (Exodus) never actually happened. It is mythology. And it’s terrible, violent, racist, vindictive mythology at that.
The actual examples of attempted genocide of the Jewish people (for example when the Germans tried it), were stopped not by some mythical God with magic (mass murder of innocent children by the angel of death), but by actual people in the world, (the allied forces), who got together and decided that genocide is terrible. Real people making rational decisions in the real world.
And they did not put a stop to it because: “Jewish people are God’s chosen ones, so let’s start murdering the little children who are not Jewish”. That mentality is actually racist and genocidal as well.
That’s why passover is my least favorite religious holiday.
Otherwise enjoy your secularism, after all HKBH gave you free will to chose to believe those things.
Israel_B,
That is one compressed argument there! Very compact. So much so, it is hard to even know how to reply. I won’t get into a detailed response to (what I think) you are saying here. I will spare the other readers, and the editors of BoingBoing, of a long, drawn out response. I don’t even want to read that myself! I will compress my own thoughts as well, and we can leave this with at least (at most actually) a high-level understanding of what we each are saying.
You posted a list of historical tribal conflicts. Some were real, some are total mythology, but all focused on just stories of “your” people. Do me (and yourself) a favor and pull the focus WAY out. You will find a massive amount of similar human history, affecting all kinds of people all over the world. One example, the Roman rule over the Jews makes your list. Did you know the Romans also did the EXACT same thing to many, many other people, all over the world? For hundreds of years! How does that factor in to your belief in God’s one chosen people, and how the Romans were so bad to them? All of the other people that the Romans conquered, what about them? I guess they don’t matter. And there are many more examples throughout all of human history. Why do you only care about the tiny amount of human history that affects your people, and base your world view on that?
Pull the focus back, man. Take a look around. You seem to be living in the ancient past, when the Jewish people didn’t know anything about the rest of the world, and all of the other people in it, and the similar history that affected them as well.
When you allow yourself to believe ancient texts, written by people who did not know any better, and who were totally ignorant about the rest of the world and it’s history, you end up liking stories like Exodus, and all of the self serving, self interested parts of it.
Thanks but you don’t need to concern yourself with my well being so much. In fact, I don’t know why you felt the need to fuss simply because I said I enjoy Pesach.
Wow. Fuck that whole mess you just posted.
To be fair, you did not simply say “I enjoy Pesach”. You also said the reason why you enjoy it, describing how HKBH (your God) crushes so hard. That’s my paraphrasing 
Additionally, you posted a weird scorecard of mythology/history which emphasized how hard your God crushes.
You say you don’t understand the reason why I responded (fuss). Do you honestly not understand why a dude like me (a secular person) would want to respond to a person posting on my favorite, progressive website about how they like a story that includes the mass murder of children? Come on now, I don’t think I believe you. I think you understand just fine. You just don’t like it. Why don’t you just say you don’t like your beliefs being challenged?
But even if you had simply said “I enjoy Pesach” and nothing else, what is so wrong about me saying “I don’t like it”, and giving some very straight forward reasons for not liking it?
Maybe you just are not used to that. I hate to break it to you, my friend, but secularism is the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. In the past, the small number of us kept our mouths shut when the religious point of view was spoken so proudly. That was because of how poorly the religious people responded to being challenged, and how we were out numbered by so much. That is not the case anymore. You should get used to it.
Appeal to popularity and going with the crowd do do much for me. Anyway I’m quite used to dealing with Dawkinsites and people taking issue with me being an observant Jew.
I was in no way appealing to popularity or going with the crowd. I think it was totally clear what I was saying. In the past, religious ideas were almost never challenged, but now they are being challenged, because of the growing numbers of secular people. So you should get used to that. I think that was very clear.
And if you are “quite used to dealing with Dawkinsites and people taking issue with me being an observant Jew”, then why did you say that you didn’t know why I was saying (fuss) what I was saying?
Which is it?
Your points aren’t new in any way. The haskalah was almost two centuries ago.
True that! It’s not new. It’s been cooking for a while now.
I think maybe we have beaten this subject into the ground. What do you say Israel_B, should we Shalom this thing?
#לחיים
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