James Caruthers wrote:Nec_V20 wrote:
The image which I am not allowed to reproduce reminds me of something which almost caused the complete bankruptcy of Microsoft.
Back in the day when Windows 3.0 was first released there was a lawsuit to recall every copy world wide because of three letters and those were:
NYC
What does NYC mean? Well the most famous recipient of that initialism (not acronym) is "New York City".
New York is the city with the biggest Jewish population in the world. There is no city in Israel with more Jews than New York.
Now if you type in NYC into any application (such as Notepad) and then convert it to the standard font "Wingdings" you end up with:
Skull&Crossbones, Star of David, Thumbs up.
The case when to the New York supreme court where it was dismissed because it could be argued that any agglomeration of letters when converted to a symbol font could an probably would cause inadvertent offence.
I am sure that you were only trying to take the piss out of me and not the family of my grandfather's two brothers who were a part of the "final solution".
I am also sure that you do not wish that my grandfather, and his daughter who was my mother, should have been included in that solution and that I am only alive because Hitler did not go far enough.
I really hope that you did not mean that.
[youtube]iHM_PHKpKyU[/youtube]
Big swing and a miss there.
My grandfather had converted from Judaism in the early 1920's when he as the oldest sibling (his older brother had died in the WWI) was tasked with burying his mother and the rabbi refused to bury her according to Jewish rites because he considered her not to have been an observant enough Jew.
The rabbi literally said to my grandfather, "Who does not participate in the circus should not await the applause" (Wer den Zirkus nicht mitmacht brauch fuer den Beifall nicht zu sorgen).
My grandfather had dug the grave himself of his own hand as prescribed under Talmudic law. but he was left with a dead mother and a hole in the ground and nothing between her and their God.
My great grandmother had to work on the shabbat for instance because she had lost her husband in WWI and my grandfather as the oldest at that time was about 14 and he had a younger brother and sister which she had to feed.
A Lutheran minister approached my grandfather and said that he would be willing to bury my great grandmother according to Jewish rites an rituals because as he said, "God is one and he speaks through many" and knew my great grandmother as a good person.
My grandfather converted to the Lutheran faith a year or so later because the rabbi had caused such a schism in his faith.
Technically through matrilineal descent I am an Ashkenazi Jew because the woman my grandfather married, although professed Roman Catholic, was from a matrilineal jewish descent.
It is one of those, "once you sign up they have you forever" deals.
My grandmothers family had converted from Judaism because of the very same fanatical observance laws.
They liked God, they just couldn't be there for Him all the time at the whim of some rabbi.
I am German, but personally as a German Jews did unto me and my family long before my country did unto them.
Sure the obscenity of the Holocaust was a devastation, but I know of a 14 year old Jewish boy that could not get his mother buried in Germany because of Jewish religious zealotry. Which was more devastating to whom?
When you talk about trauma I remember when my grandfather died, at the funeral service my uncle telling me about a time when he, as a 12 year old at that time, getting the grown ups to make him collect rocks. They took him to an overhang of a temporary camp for those being transported onto their final destination, and then having a rock placed in his hand by a grown up and the hand propelled by that grown up onto the people fenced in but still in throwing range of that vantage point.
He had been told to throw the rock but he could not see why and the "adult" had put the rock in his hand and thrown it for him. To the day of his death he could not say whether he had hit and killed somebody or not.
I am an atheist, but I am not you. I won't endorse you nor will I embrace anyone else.
Accept me or reject me. The "other" side was at least honest - as were you - when they banned me. The only reason why I can still post here is because you are less fanatic than they are - you are not however any better.
You are as far as I can ascertain two sides of the same coin and what you want is some kind of observance without mentioning "God" but the mechanisms are the same.