Went to the movies tonight. And saw an amazingly powerful movie: the Counterfeiters. (Oh, before that I took an econ midterm — Booooooring). I wont reveal much about the film, but just say that it was one of the most thought-provoking films I’ve seen about the holocaust. Particularly, I thought, because it focuses a lot on individual choices. How and why does a person make the choices he/she does when it comes to matters of life and death and ideals? Definitely recommended!
The film made my friends and I engage in a heated debate over dinner (I love sushi more than Popey loves Olivia). When can something be justified because the person behind that action truly believes in the goodness of it?
That again (via mysterious detours) lead us into a discussion on Jewishness. I ended up stating (and I’m actually quite happy with that statement) that I believe in two things: biology and constructivism. Everything will, according to my revolutionary theory, be one or the other. Jewishness (as ‘Christianess’ and ‘Muslimsness’ and ‘atheistness’ and all other believes, as well as nationalities, taste in movies, ‘evil’ and ‘goodness’ and most other things) fall into the latter category (i.e they are purely social constructs). That goes against what many Jewish people and many Muslim people believe. That is, they believe you are a Jew or Muslim by birth and that you cannot revoke that . I completely disagree and am still waiting for someone to ‘prove’ (or just logically explain) to me that there’s is anything inherently Jewish about Jews or inherently Muslim about, well, Muslims. I simply don’t understand (maybe that’s the problem?) what exactly it is that is passed down through either the mother or the father’s blood line? Is it the genes? If not, why can it not be revoked? I’m really trying to understand, but I just cannot accept that something is the way it is (and can never be changed) just because a group of people think that is so. Either it must be a biological fact (i.e Jews and Muslims have different genes than other people) or it must be something that is just a point of view (i.e it can be changed and will be true or not according to whom you ask).
I’m in no way diminishing the faiths or the believes or traditions connected to either religion. (I hope religious readers will not find my writing offensive — it’s certainly not meant to be!) My point is solely that religion is something you choose. Most things are! I would be truly offended if someone came by and told me he found out I was Muslim because my grandfather was, or that I was Jewish because my mother’s mother was (or that I was marxist because my father was). Hmm, I’m ranting on. But it really was an interesting discussion (and one that Richard Dawkins also discusses in his excellent book ‘the God delusion‘. The same discussion can be applied to “ethnicity” all over the world (fx Tutsi, Hutu, Mende, etc. How is being Jewish by blood different from being tutsi by blood? In fact, that will be the continuation of our discussion).
Ahh, how I love a good discussion! Compare it to econ and stats and my life suddenly seems rather sad…
Thought I would post on the fun, fun party at Clea’s the other day. It involved drinking whiskey ’til 6 in the morning and discussing the upcoming election in Spain and other exciting stuff. But I’ll stop here.
If you’re reading this, please do cross your fingers for me on Monday when stats exam goes down.
Tamba