Nadine, there seems to be a lot of smoke around the issue of who is allowed to marry whom, and not just when the Catholic priests start waving their smoke machines around during superstitious rituals, to scare the bogeys or whatever they are doing.
Knowing how rabid religious people are and how intolerant and how bigoted and how irrational and how unfounded their religions are, I am certain that the Jewish zealots build a lot of barriers, both social and legal, to miscegenation.
I doubt that my ideas about human rights and anti-chimpoid behaviour come from "scripture". Ideas don't occur in only a single person. They arise spontaneously in many people at around the same time because of social and scientific and other experiences which swarms of individuals living at the time process in their ponderings and discuss and 'independently' come up with.
The scripturists would merely have co-opted ideas, such as "Thou shalt not steal". That's not a religious idea. It's a social context idea. It doesn't take many millennia of living with property to figure out that if stealing is acceptable, social mayhem and lack of competitive position of the alpha males with neighbouring tribes would result. They need orderly, progressive societies, with property and production. The smarter societies even figure out that the alpha males stealing isn't all that smart either, so they protect private property against alpha males. Unfortunately, no states yet have figured out that protecting private property against the state is a good idea too, but that'll come and some states are aware that it is an issue to be managed to avoid killing the geese laying the golden eggs.
So I think I'll keep 'scripture' in the wacko cult box. If some of the ideas expressed make sense, [usually very superficial cliches and slogans rather than suitable operating manual instructions for a complex heterogeneous society], that doesn't mean the other stuff does too. Any con-man knows to include liberal sprinklings of truth to make the deceits palatable.
Your wild generalisations about whether Jews or Arabs make better spouses as though they are all clones are silly. I bet there are plenty of Jewish men and women and Arab men and women who would be fine spouses for each other. If you add the religious part it would cut down the numbers a lot.
The whole point of marriage is the filtering of human DNA and cultural attributes to produce likely success. The job of young people is to carry out that process. They seem to be wildly enthusiastic about their task, whether Arab, Jew, Moslem, Jewish, man or woman. [Maybe there's a separate name for Jew the religion and Jew the DNA - I don't know what it is].
From what Jacob and Bilow write, there does seem to be a lot of smoke in the Israeli marital anti-miscegenation laws. I didn't realize the USA only got rid of such extreme racism in the 1950s. The USA still has lots of racist laws.
I think we'll have to ban New Zealanders from marrying them since Chuck Swindells has got issues with New Zealand [needs a separate rant]. We don't want miscegenation with America. Hu Jintao is coming to NZ in a week or so. Maybe he'll be more friendly and not try to force weapons of mass destruction into our harbours. If the USA doesn't love us and want to marry us, maybe China will.
Mqurice
PS: Unfortunately, NZ is producing racist laws as fast as the USA these days and trying to build a brand new apartheid system based on the absurd and racist Treaty of Waitangi, which assumed that young people would never hop the fence. Which they've been doing since before the treaty. Unsurprisingly. |
