Loosen my religion

Photo credit: Susan NYC

With apologies to Msrs Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe.

The first story concerns the burgeoning scene of Muslim punk, which goes by the name of Taqwacore after the novel by Michael Muhammad Knight. I posted a story about this on my Facebook a few months ago (before I’d resumed blogging), but it’s doing the rounds again for some reason. Not directly relevant to our blog, but bear with me.

I was reminded again of this while reading this article on ‘New Jews’, or “Judaism 2.0″ (more on that last in a sec). This article describes the “New” Jews (primarily Gen X-ers in their 30′s) who are determined to wear their Judaism in a way that suits them. These might include devout punk, Lesbian Jewish weddings, hip magazines or micro-breweries (“HE’BREW”). Sarah Lefton founded G-dcast, a series of weekly, downloadable animated cartoons as a way of making learning about Judaism less stuffy. I’m not sure I’d call this new Judaism “Judaism 2.0″, not only because the whole “x 2.0″ thing is so horribly daggy, but also because that term would surely suit post-Temple, Rabbinic Judaism better.

Next up we have the recent tightening of restrictions on Sabbath use of lifts by observant Jews. As Jews are not allowed to work on the Sabbath, and rabbis decided that pressing a button constitutes work, lifts in buildings used by many Jews were altered to automatically stop on every floor on the Sabbath. A recent ruling by a group of prominent Israeli rabbis, however, could change that, leaving many elderly Jews in high apartment buildings up… -stairs without a lift. The sticking point has always been whether the lift uses a sensor to gauge how many people were inside it, thus turning the lift into one big button. I’m not exactly sure why it would need to do this: surely, if it’s stopping on every floor it doesn’t matter. It couldn’t stop altogether when it’s empty, because then you’d need to press a button to call it. Unless the area outside the lift on each floor had its OWN pressure pad… Rabbis, I don’t envy you.

Lastly, we return to the “.0″s with the recent self-description of many atheists, disenfranchised with the current pack of “New Atheists”, as “Atheism 3.0″. These atheists admit there may be a place for religious belief in the world, and refuse to see it as the single source of the world’s ills. This nomenclature works slightly better than “Judaism 2.0″, although I worry about the lack of any definition of what exactly constitued “Atheism 1.0″. Can’t people think of better names for things?!

Linkography:
Kate Shellnutt ‘Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion‘, Chicago Sun-Times (20/9/09)
Jessica Ravitz ‘“New Jews” stake claim to faith, culture‘, CNN.com (30/10/09)
Paul Vitello ‘Another Landlord Worry: Is the Elevator Kosher?’, New York Times (9/10/09)
Daniel Burke ‘Atheism 3.0 Finds a Little More Room for Belief‘, beliefnet (//09)

Tagged as: Atheism, elevators, Islam, punk, Taqwacore