Reorienting Ancient Judaism

Towards Judaism

As China is the only country in the Far East world in which Jews have continually lived for over 1,000 years, "Chinese Judaism" -referring to the religious belief and practices of those Jews who had lived or are now living in China -is unique. Within this long history, a significant distinction must be made. Jews who came before modern times, before 1840, became part of Chinese society almost w...

The Approach of Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion as Exemplified in His Study of Ancient Judaism

Max Weber’s approach to the sociology of religion still poses a puzzle. Difficult logical-methodical and substantive issues are involved. As it is well known, he first dealt with religion in 1904/1905, in his essay on the relationship between ascetic Protestantism and the emerging ‘spirit’ of modern capitalism, which he regarded a study in the history of religion, confined to the post-Reformati...

Judaism on medicine.

Many religions, I'm tempted to say all religions except Judaism, are death cults. Religions deal typically with the problems of death and are attempts to bypass death, deny death, or distort death. The most obvious example would be the Eygptian religion, since, as we now know, the cult, the pyramids, the priest-craft, and the sacred texts were all designed to assure at least the Pharaoh of immo...

Behavioral and Phenomenological Judaism

Judaism and reproductive technology.

Reproductive technology offers a bewildering number of options for infertile men and women to have children, including ovary and testis freezing, transplantation, in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor sperm, donor eggs, stem cells, gestational surrogacy, genetic diagnosis of embryos, and, of course, birth control. These technologies cut to the very core of personal and religious belief systems. T...