No, no -- that's not true, and that point must be conceded: religion confers a 98% immunity to all communicable diseases. For the 2% who get ill, there's prayer, which is as good as a cure.

Dan, you may notice that the religious types are going after that Friedman asshole for his assholery. That's part of why the beit din is necessary; if someone's being an asshole, and the Torah and Talmud don't have answers, the communal elders can still bully/shame the asshole into doing the right thing.
There are plenty of not-so-nice things about the way the black hats practice Judaism, but this is a horrifically bad example. Friedman is going to be an asshole regardless of Judaism, and the religious figures are actually trying to FIX the situation. You've got valid points about the second two, but GTFO about the first.

Venomlash, I think the point is that without religious proscriptions on marriage, this conflict wouldn't be happening in the first place.

@4: But what Mr. Friedman is doing flies in the face of several millennia of Judaic culture and society. Judaism isn't the problem here; assholery is the problem here.

@3,4

You're missing a critical element: if all those "liberal" religious types didn't hold this guy's right to do this to his ex-wife sacrosanct, this wouldn't be an issue. There'd be no argument.

@5-- Us "liberal" religious types don't in fact hold his right to do that sacrosanct. There has actually been significant action across a broad spectrum of the Jewish community to take systemic action wrt agunot (the term for women in this situation.)

@5 if no one believed in this Iron Age mythology there would be no issue, because there would be no such thing as a "get" and there would certainly be no barbaric rule decreeing that a man must give his permission for his wife to separate from him (which must be really awesome in the case of abusive husbands).

Thankfully however, Aharon and Tamar live in a country with constitutionally protected rights, so that this idiocy can only affect them if they let it. It's still barbaric, especially when life-long isolation and dependence on a religious community can leave you vulnerable in practice even though you are legally protected.

Still, if I wanted an example of religious things causing unneccesary pain, I'd go straight to circumcision.

@8: Circumcision, really? A better example would be us Jews having our horns removed after our b'nei mitzvot.

The fact is that Mr. Friedman is allowed to do this according to whatever crazy religious beliefs he may possess. That said, one can either call his practices anathema and maintain the sanctity of his professed religious identity, whether utterly imaginary or material, or one can acknowledge the failings of that religious identity.

Religious, national, ethnic identity are constructs typically employed by the powerful to divide the world chorus and turn it against itself, thus deflecting attention from despots onto innocent others; it is impossible for despots to maintain their authority with deflection of scrutiny; every government employs this tactic, at least at the national level if not at every other. People, as a rule, ought to be international citizens first and foremost.

Venomlash and Balderdash (feel like I'm writing a Dr. Seuss poem),

Religion's ability to allow people to be gracious and kind is based on the same thing that allows them to be assholes like Mr. Friedman-- dogma. Nobody would be challenging Friedman in the first place if there weren't some kind of magical mechanism created by religion enabling him to be the kind of asshole he currently being. That's the problem in each of the three scenarios Dan is quoting here.

Eh, the asshole withholding the get would have been a huge asshole in the civil courts (though it does sound like he was) if he couldn't take it to the rabbinical courts. Assholes will always find a way to be assholes. Too bad religion is one of the many things that assholes use to be assholes, along with politics, business dealings, family matters...shit well anything that isn't innocent like "petting a cute puppy".

(but gets are totally, totally sexist and backwards)

It's so naive to think that religion is at fault. In fact, it betrays a fundamentally religious outlook to blame religion for this.

It's just stupid shit people do to each other. When I was a kid we created a club and made kids do stupid things to join and kicked them out for stupid made-up reasons. It was our club and we could do whatever we pleased.

Sound familiar?

That's right, the similarity I'm pointing to here is to the Communist Party under the Soviet Union. Oh no, sorry, I think the analogy is to the Freemasons. Oh wait, scratch that, I mean political parties. Oops, hold on, I think you get my point by now: religions are just clubs. The day we get rid of all clubs will be the day we get rid of religions.

But it won't happen. Even atheists join clubs and have stupid rules for joining and kick people out for stupid reasons.

So because religion is not the only institution that acts this way, that means it's not at fault? Interesting reasoning, Luke.

Why don't the bodyguards of Bill O'Reilly, Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh ever turn on them?

@13: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

Every citation about what awful acts "religion" has caused or allowed to happen concern fundamentalist religion. There are fundamentalists within every religion; fundamentalism is a personality type, not a theological belief. Not all wars have been promulgated by religious people; not all religious people are violent. What's true is that people are assholes; fundamentalists are bigger assholes than others, and fundamentalists of ALL religions have much more in common with each other than ordinary religious people do.

@13 Yeah, atheists have laws dictated to them by supernatural beings that render other human beings property all the time.

Everybody is not the same.

@13 Fwiw, I've never actually witnessed anyone getting kicked out of any of the "atheist clubs" I've joined, and the only rules I've ever heard about that could get you kicked out were proselytizing and being an asshole.

@9 Are you equating being against circumcision with antisemitism? I don't think that's fair if you are.

Mr. Friedman's ex-wife should get re-married in a civil ceremony and tell Mr. Friedman to shove his orthodoxy up his a$$. Though I do think the court-determined custody arrangements seem a little insensitive to his faith which, while I think is a little wacko like most religious beliefs, is nevertheless shared by millions of others.

Atheists don't turn on their own? What about the hue and cry arising from Sam Harris' attempt to bring science into morality issues?

Not all atheists, just the fundamentalists with the club.

@20, absolutely not. I'm very much against circumcision. I cite it as a better example of religious nastiness (though not just religious nastiness) than a get. After all a get is not legally binding and involves two adults who agree to abide by the decisions of religious leaders. I may think it's insane and deeply sexist, but they are adults and have the right to be as stupid as they wish. An 8 day old infant does not, sadly, have the ability to get up and say "you keep that scalpel the FUCK away from my junk, asshole".

@20, I lose sorry, I counted badly and thought the comment was for me. I sux at the numberzzz.

"All parties have said that Mr. Friedman is angry about the custody order, which grants him three weekends a month with his daughter, two of them in Philadelphia, beginning at 6 p.m. on Fridays. As a religious Jew, Mr. Friedman will not drive from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday — so he cannot see his daughter until Sunday. " (From the article in the above link).

Why so much sympathy for the wife? Sounds like she's being a pos about the custody arrangment, so he's digging in his heels about the get. Nobody's business but theirs.

On the bright side, Sam Harris will not run out of book material any time soon.

@venomlash (#9): Oh please: disagreeing with non-consensual, non-health-related surgery performed on infants is anti-Semitic, along the same lines as saying Jews are really horned devils? Give me a break. If people want genital surgery once they have some sense of self-identity and agency, power to them, but male circumcision* is only marginally better than the less-severe forms of female circumcision, and they're both forms of genital mutilation that inhibit sexual functioning later in life.

*I am referring to the variety that actually removes a significant portion of the prepuce, not to e.g. a small cut that draws blood but produces no lasting change in physiology as a symbolic gesture, although I don't think we should be cutting on infants even if it doesn't do permanent "harm", for lack of a value-neutral term.

@13: I don't follow at all. Religious thought isn't a club, it's a way of viewing the world that's fundamentally problematic in that it tends to turn things to shit, like Love, Lit, and Life. It's no less problematic if people exhibit these sorts of behaviorisms but don't call the object-of-worship "god" e.g. extreme nationalism like Nazism or an unwavering belief in The Free Market in the face of all reason. Yes, many (all?) atheists buy into these sorts of belief systems, but at least they have one fewer than the religious. The assertion "other people do it too" has nothing to do with whether it's problematic, and the argument that "things that aren't religion are problematic too" doesn't make religions any less problematic.

@17: Bullshit; almost NONE of these fucks are actually fundamentalists (in the sense that they believe in the same interpretation of their religion as when it was founded, or even the "fundamentals" from then), as it's almost impossible to be truly fundamentalist in a world with modern technology and pluralistic population centers. Some Mennonite communities may escape this, as may some of the darker patches of the various Islamic theocracies (where you WILL get stoned to death for walking around with your ankles showing if you're female), but even the abortion-doctor-shooting guys aren't killing their neighbors for working on the Sabbath or wearing mixed fibers. And what characterizes the "liberal" religious population is that what they believe/practice has less and less to do with their religion as it previously existed and/or as the holy book(s) describe it. Basically, the saner religious people are so because they're not nearly as religious. They're exercising their own socially-conditioned moral valuations and using them to reject the crazier parts of the "fundamentalist" flavors of their religions, which goes against the word-of-god conceit of every single organized religion. So bullshit. "Religion" is not-destructive to the extent that it isn't actually religion but instead an evidence-based valuation of things that are written in religious texts or proclaimed by religious leaders - the opposite of belief without evidence.

I personally don't think fundamentalism is good.

That said, I tend to agree that religion is a great source of human injustice, not the only source, and human injustice is the greatest cause of human suffering, in my opinion. I personally find being kicked out of the club, for failing to be a fundamentalist about any subject, a great blessing.

I don't disagree that religion is for the weak, simple, dependent, and stupid. But I don't think it should be opposed unless we can prove that it has done more harm than good. Looking to extremists is never the answer to that question. Highlighting the nutters is good for shock appeal, but a few people out of a billion are not statistically significant.

Just because crazy assholes kill innocent people with guns doesn't mean we hold the guns responsible. If the guns weren't available, the crazy assholes would have used knives or piano wire instead. Without religion to back them up, these extremists would just rely on political dogma or perhaps racism to justify killing of innocents.

I posit that religion isn't the causative factor of insanity. Instead of trying to do away with an institution that (while responsible for some reprehensible things) DOES do a whole lot of good for BILLIONS of other people on the planet, we should punish the nutbags who take advantage of it to hurt innocents.

Agreed, but don't feel bad about Tolstoy's odd interment, he wanted to be buried on his land in an unmarked mound:

http://www.yasnayapolyana.ru/english/mus…

(Not to mention he was deeply religious or spiritual or whatever-feel bad for his wife, man.)

@20, 26: Whoa there guise, you missed it. There's a long-standing myth that Jews have horns, based on a mistranslation of part of Exodus and furthered by a horned statue of Moses by Michelangelo. I was making a joke on that.
My dad actually had a small-town guy who went to college with him ask him what had happened to his horns. Seriously.

@28 I'd disagree with your hypothesis that the newer the cult, that crazier it's likely to be, Functional Atheist. I'd say instead, the newer the cult, the more odd it's likely to appear to contemporary people because it's had less time to suffuse through the culture. Sure being a Xtian doesn't seem odd these days, but really, a magical sky god that impregnated a virgin with himself so he could sacrifice himself to himself so he could "forgive" people for a "sin" they themselves never committed? I'll stack that up against the idiocy of Scientology any day.

And I'd wager that the gradation you see is a direct result of how long each of those cults have been around, and just how much they've been forced to adapt to more democratic and liberal cultures. I know there's a good Einstein quote about how he thought Judaism was one of the better religions, but only because Jews were always so persecuted that they never had the power to corrupt themselves like larger cults did. Israel's actions towards the Palestinians showing what will almost invariably happen when a cult does gain power.

Really liked your response to Rach3l though.

If he's such a religious man, then his temple dropping him from their membership for bringing so much negative publicity to them should make him reconsider his position, no?

@35: I dunno about that. The owner of the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago is a religious Sephardic Jew, and he's been under a lot of pressure from Jewish organizations to pay his hotel workers the wages that all the other hotels in the city have agreed with the unions on. But for about seven or eight years, he's preferred to hire scabs, keep news of the ongoing strike as hush-hush as possible, and tell the rabbis to keep Judaism in the synagogue and out of his business.

Billions? Religion does "good" for billions? Id love to see the evidence of this. Otherwise it's fairly ridiculous-sounding postulating. I would instead point to the countless levels of corruption where religion does nothing but retard the progress of human development. Sure- religion is just an excuse extremists use to commit horrible atrocities- and if you took it away they would find something else to justify their terrible crimes. But the use of religion as a means to cling to outdated beliefs and regressive ideas is not the bastion of the fanatical. Even the less-extreme followers often use what their religious texts say as an excuse to avoid thinking for themselves or to justify their own prejudice or racism. It may not be as violent but it is just as common. So yeah- gonna have to laugh at that "billions" bit.

What's the deal with Tolstoy, Dan? The Orthodox church did not disown him, he disowned the church -- prublicly, prominently, throughout his all later life. He never made amends with it. If someone put a cross on his grave, Leo would turn in his coffin! Why not respect his wishes?

@30 Amazing! I was raised atheist, too, and that's exactly what I attribute my equanimity vis-a-vis religion to. In other words, people who are raised religious and become atheist tend to bring the religious worldview/paradigm to their atheism, and spend all their time shitting all over religion. They used to think that religion was 100% good, and now they think it's 100% bad. It's neither. It's just one more thing in a long list of crazy shit humans do. It does as much good as harm, so how can people credit it or blame it for anything in toto?

I got kicked out of an atheist group (well, I was told to "come back after you've given a lot of thought to your atheism"(?)) when I got in an argument with the leader of the group over whether religion causes wars. I told him to name a single conflict in human history whose sole cause was religion, and he couldn't (mainly because he doesn't know history that well, which is true of most atheists who blame religion for war) and it pissed him off, and he kicked me out.

@40:
people who are Aryan ARE one fourth as likely to be gassed in concentration camps.

compared to Jews who are- what is the figure now- OVER 9000X as likely to be gassed and incinerated?

perhaps the cure for whatever is ailing Jews is to be found in Nazism after all....

THIS THREAD IS NOW GODWIN. (But yes, the metaphor is accurate, if hyperbolic.)

@42: Thank you, I'll be here all week.

People like @3 are missing the point. Yes, Friedman is being an a-hole, but that's not the problem. The problem is that his religion is empowering his a-holery! If it wasn't for the requirement that his wife have the "get" in order to remarry, then he would have no power over her. Even now, church leaders could decide that in this case (or in every case) a "get" is no longer needed. But instead they cling to their superstitions and patriarchal institutions.

Most of the time, the "get" requirement is not a problem because most people are not a-holes. Most women are lucky enough that the men in their lives choose not to use this power against them. But that doesn't change the sexist nature of the practice, or the power it gives Orthodox men over Orthodox women.

@48:
Heterosexuality Poisons Everything

it breaks up families.

it causes mental illness.

it drives it's adherents to suicide.

it gives those who practice it AIDS and ANAL CANCER (ouchie!)

(All of those are true, by the way. Families are often sundered by one parent running off with a new lover, backlash from a breakup can cause underlying problems to blossom into full-on depression or mental illness, plenty of people an hero over unrequited love, and STDs are transmitted through straight sex like wildfire without proper precautions.)

@51: Nah, my mental illness is due to my analytical capabilities developing so quickly and to such a great degree that the resulting imbalance with my social capabilities unbalanced me. But not to worry; I'm perfectly harmless unless you come between me and a mother bear's cub.

@Venomlash, It's amusing to hear that your father was asked where his horns were, the same thing happened to my father when he left New York and went to college in podunk '70s Portland. And god, it hurt like a mutherfucker when they took my horns. At least when we get our horns removed we get to keep them for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur- the mohel doesn't make a tip off those.

Move to North Korea or Cuba, religion is banned in both places. Communism = Liberalism = The death of 150 million people in the 20th century.

@54
Basehead = stupid = more stupid.

Beer exists. Beer is used by some in a way that causes death and misery. Therefore, Beer poisons everything.

That is the logic at use in the blog post.

There may be some things that are inherently evil in a way that its use always produces evil. Religion is something that doesn't meet that definition. While there are those that use religion to tear down and destroy, there are those that have used religion to cure the sick, free people, and generally improve society.

Religion is. It's people who use religion to poison things.