Guns

i can enjoy violent war films, stupid video games, misogynistic and violent rap and hiphop, etc, and not feel the need to own a gun, or at worst harm another person. and for as much proletarian Yiddish literature as I read (or bell hooks, who, like Rage Against the Machine, is so angry she could kill a man), I somehow don't feel like busting any caps in anyone's ass, or sparking a revolution any time soon.

i enjoy guns, have fired, assembled and cleaned them, but i still don't feel the need to own one.

and one can argue that yes, firing weapons is a skill, but the point of that skill is ultimately to hurt other people. i'm not saying that p...eople who like guns want to hurt others, just that you can't avoid saying guns are for anything else besides killing and violence.

BJ: ‎"just that you can't avoid saying guns are for anything else besides killing and violence." I agree. The very act of firing a gun (even at a target) is a violent one, meant to destroy the target and put the bullet close to the "heart" or the "brain."

me:

I aim for the knees. this is a tough conversation--i have to admit to myself that, to an extent, i am violent. it's my opinion that playing video games and perpetuating that culture indicts me in some way.

but yeah. i enjoy the argument...s that are like, "cars kill people, too!" Uhh, cars are for GOING PLACES. if you modify cars to kill people, ya got problems; no one has to modify a gun to kill a person.

Another Writing

"Latin! Dirty from the lips of idolators"-Edelshtein

Recently got in a debate with a conservative critic, and orthodox Jew, about theory. It didn't go so well. I finally realized I should not have been there: the rhetoric of the other side was so rooted in phallogocentrism that they could not conceive of another writing. Their judgments for literature are evaluations that I never consider. My relation to them is the same as Edelshtein's to Latin: not only do Others speak a different language, but it has a history of repressing minorities. So initially I am disgusted, and enter into debate; finally, thank God, I realize they do not inhabit the same universe of thought that I do.

Another thing:
I solved the conundrum to Conservative Judaism's identity crisis. Everyone got all crazed asking the movement to define itself, and to my knowledge no response from rabbis was issued. Good. There need not be a response. No form of Judaism needs to give a reason for its existence (There: I essentially summarized Mordecai Kaplan's entire corpus of thought!).

*Also if take the initiative to ask what the Conservative movement stands for in the first place, you could at least go on wikipedia before whining about it.

Gradations of Religiousness or of Culture?

Pretty neat article at Zeek on a new collection of essays about radical Jewish culture by some of its most prominent "proponents".

One of the contributors said: "I resist religion, so often deployed as a club to beat others, as a fundamentalist intolerance. That is, I am secular not because I am a bad or lacking or ignorant Jew, but because I think religions as social practices are basically retrograde, exclusionary, controlling, and morally—if not politically—supercilious. I am a cultural Jew not by default, but by choice.”

My response was this: "I think my only qualm is that the distinction between religion and culture is eroding, and I don't understand why some Jews are so quick to distance themselves from even radical forms of "religious" Judaism. Even Reform, the biggest branch in America, can be seen as more cultural than "religious" since it isn't halakhically based. Because of this, and other reasons, I've always considered "secular" a misnomer, an empty signifier for Jews. I don't see the binary, I don't see secularism--only a fluid dynamic of religiousness."

And then I realized another key which works in either the defense of this statement or one that counters it: the Bible! Since the Tanakh's permanence hinges upon the community's opinion and canonization of it, does that make it cultural or religious? It depends on the individual Jew, and whether he or she believes those books are the word of God, or written due to His inspiration; therefore, I am lead to ask if we are revering a cultural artifact with varying degrees of religiousness, or a religious artifact with varying degrees of culturalness?

Maybe this is just a stupid conversation, and these terms are ultimately useless. I will say that Schopenhauer, and many who still place culture and religion within a conflicting binary (like the quote above), are clearly wrong: religion and culture interact in incredibly complex ways, and are perhaps one and the same.