Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Judaism

  • Remarks on Religion

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ____ By now, most readers know that I am an atheist, as I do not believe in the existence of God or anything supernatural. Readers also likely know that I am Jewish by lineage and culturally and that I think God is useless both as an explanation and as a moral…

  • Religion without Spirituality

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ [This essay first appeared on my original – now defunct – blog Apophenia. At the time, I was very involved with our local synagogue and Jewish community, and my daughter was on the cusp of her Bat-Mitzvah. While I am not involved in this way today and though I would…

  • Neither God nor Philosophy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ I was invited to contribute to an ongoing series over at Richard Marshall’s 3:16AM magazine.  The series is called “Finding Meaning” and is edited by Steven DeLay, who is a Fellow of Ambrose College, Woolf University. My contribution, “Neither God Nor Philosophy,” is the latest in the series, the entirety…

  • The Logic of “Jewish” Philosophy (more by way of a response to Robert Gressis)

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ For those readers who recognized that beneath my humorous essay on “Jewish” Philosophy was a serious point regarding our attitudes not just towards the professional discipline of philosophy but the subject itself, I want to add a substantial postscript. It is inspired, in part, by Robert Gressis’s reply to my…

  • Radicalism and Religion

    by Mark English Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, had been involved with a mystical form of Judaism (possibly Merkabah) before he joined the early-first-century Jewish sect which became (largely through his own writings and missionary activities) a new religion quite distinct from Judaism. Paul knew that his teachings were unacceptable to most devout…