Judaism

I'm an Orthodox Jew. Put another way, I subscribe more-or-less to the Jewish view of the world as it's existed for thousands of years. In my religion, God is very simple to please: all you have to do is follow 613 biblical commandments, 7 rabbinical commandments, and several thousand different rules and regulations connected to each commandment. The Jewish religion is a very easy religion to follow, since it doesn't make demands of you that you can never hope to achieve. As a practical matter, it doesn't even require you to believe in God. (Yes, it's possible, at least in theory, to be a religious Athiest Jew. I've never heard of any such animal "in the wild," though.) Every single one of our commandments is based on the fundamental "yesod" (foundation) of the entire Tora (normally translated as "Bible," although it really just means "learning material"), "veahavta lereacha kamocha" (literally, love your neighbor like [you love] yourself; practically, you follow the principle by never doing something that affects somebody else without first thinking how you'd feel in that guy's shoes). I also believe my religion is rather unique in that not only do you not need to believe in God to go to heaven, but you don't even need to be Jewish. Perhaps the best part, if you're not Jewish, is that you're probably already keeping most of the seven commandments that my religion claims will earn you a guaranteed place in Heaven. (They too are based on the fundamental "yesod" of the entire Tora, but the connection can be a bit harder to spot at first glance.) People sometimes think of our religion as seriously outdated, and they may be right or they may be wrong, but at the end of the day, it's the only religion I've found that doesn't attempt to contradict everything we learn about the world around us, so to me at least it seems more modern than any other religion. In many ways, it's timeless, just like our universe may very well be. Any religion always has something to say about a variety of topics. Here's the list of topics I can come up with, off the top of my head, in no particular order:

Science

Judaism doesn't say a whole lot about science, since most knowledge of science is not strictly necessary for performance of the commandments. (Where a bit of science is required (in the case of the new month, for example), it's explicitly given, in as much detail as necessary, but no more.) However, eating from the tree of knowledge has made us partners with God in taking care of his world, and as such, the better we understand it, the better we're able to do our new job.

Hell

Hell is just another word for Heaven.

Heaven

Heaven is a place where you review VHS tapes (or perhaps BetaMax tapes?) of your time in this world, with God at your side. If you've completed your piece of the puzzle or rendered your piece impossible for you to complete, you get to stay there permanently; if not, it's just a staging ground, where you take a short break before going back out to our world, for another try.

Reward and Punishment

God doesn't normally go out of his way to reward good or punish evil; he doesn't have to. He set the system up to ensure that what we perceive as reward or punishment is just a natural consequence of our actions. Being able to experience the consequences of our own actions (what we call "Physics") is a gift from God; it makes it easy for us to tune our behavior towards our goals, by using empirical techniques.

Evolution

Answers to questions concerning evolution aren't necessary for keeping the commandments, so the Tora doesn't bother to go into them. If we care about the answers, it's our own responsibility to go out and find them. That said, the Tora does go around dumping all sorts of little clues here and there; we're free to use them if we want, but one always needs to be careful of blindly trusting that a book says XYZ without knowing the book intimately, so if you're looking for clear answers, applying your brain to the questions tends to be more useful than trying to decipher the Tora. The best information we have today indicates that God created most of our world by a process known as evolution: basically just allowing the laws he used as the foundation of our world to take their natural course. This is also highly consistent with our ancient teachings that there were only ten things that God created outside of the laws of Physics: by implication, therefore, the rest would have to have been created by (cosmic, geological, biological, etc.) evolution. (Curiously, man himself is not one of the famous ten either, implying that the so-called "missing link" from primates to ourselves must also have been a straight case of evolution. We might hit some interesting surprises, though, since apparently the only difference between a dumb blonde and Albert Einstein is a so-called apple (which might well have been a citrus fruit, in reality - "apple" was most likely just a faulty translation/interpretation).) I've stumbled into an interesting essay that expands my paragraph here into 57 pages, and offers a curious alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution as an added bonus. My personal belief is that Darwin is still correct (and indeed, twenty years have passed since that piece was written, and while the Superstring theories are still Real Soon Now (TM), macroevolution has not only found some missing links and explained the unfindability of others, but has even produced evidence that the difference between two "species" may simply be the difference between juveniles and adults from the same species - "too close" for purposes of finding missing links ... although the essay makes a point of emphasizing that the two theories may just be two different ways (which now makes three, if you add the literal interpretation of Genesis into our mix) of looking at the same process), but as we both point out, the Physical answer to that question is none of Judaism's concern.

Faith

Judaism's approach to faith is pretty simple: Question everything for the sake of knowledge; question nothing for the sake of ridicule. Basically, if you care about your answer, you are not permitted to swallow your question, but if you don't care about the answer, you are not permitted to ask the question. However, if somebody asks you a question, you have no right to assume the latter upfront (or ever, according to the interpretation I follow). (I guess this is the Jewish version of the "turn the other cheek" principle?)

Judgement

A person has a responsibility to judge himself constantly ("every instant that he lives"). Judging somebody else is only permitted "after you've reached his place," which according to most interpretations is nearly impossible (and according to some, impossible) to happen.

Waste

Wasting anything is prohibited in Judaism. Waste is defined as depriving anything that has a use of its God-given right to be used.

Animal Rights

A number of commandments deal with animal rights. For example, if you want to take the eggs of a bird, you have to first send the mother away before taking the eggs, to avoid causing unnecessary grief to the mother bird. Another example is our laws of butchery, which are designed (among other things) to avoid hurting the animal a whole lot. It's prohibited to wear many furs, because of the way the animals are skinned while still alive, and without the meat being eaten. (That last part is curious: prior to the great flood, killing animals was under the category of murder. After the flood, God gave us an exception: we may kill an animal for any useful purpose, including in self defense, for food, for shelter (the hides, for example), for protection from the elements (say, fur), or for any other useful purpose that's hard to serve otherwise (but see Waste above). (This was all really just an extension of God making us partners in his world, after we ate from the tree of knowledge. We showed our commitment to taking care of his world by saving a couple of each species from the flood, and so God gave us some more freedoms in his world after the flood.)

Human Rights

Judaism is actually not quite a rights-based system, technically speaking. (In fact, it's more of a responisibilities-based system.) However, when society as a whole takes upon itself the commandments, the result is suspiciously similar to what one might expect to find in a rights-based system.

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Copyright (C) 2006-2008 Dave Cohen; permission granted to modify and/or redistribute subject to the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later