david f,
Whatever the motivation behind the Balfour declaration it was, as with ‘self-determination’, more an idea - both are valid and both subject to the possibility of corruption. The declaration’s stated purpose was that the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine shouldn’t “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Ironically, anti-Zionist Jew Edwin Montagu, caused a dilution of the declaration’s original form – i.e. “ALL of Palestine is to become a national Jewish home”, to one of, “…the establishment IN Palestine …”

The Balfour Declaration was not a formal and binding commitment in any sense. It did not even promise that there would be a Jewish national home. It only stated that the British government "view with favor" such a home and would use their "best endeavours to facilitate it." I also doubt, as do you, that all of the reasons behind this declaration were purely altruistic. People in the British government are likely to have supported the Balfour Declaration for their own reasons. The most potent among them seems to have been guarding the Suez Canal, blocking French ambitions and personal commitment to restoration of Jews both as a religiously motivated policy and because the cause was thought to be popular in Britain. Had there not been a fusion of sympathy for Zionist aspirations with hard-headed calculations of national self-interest, a Jewish homeland under a British protectorate certainly would not have come into existence.

Interestingly enough, Lord Balfour shared some agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, where they believed the Germans of the Mosaic faith were an undesirable and demoralising phenomenon. He differed, however, on his diagnosis and prognosis of the ‘problem’.

I guess it is also true that for anyone who denies the Jewish character of Israel undermines the rationale for its continued existence. Barack Obama undoubtedly had this awareness by saying, “The idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience".

Relda wrote:

I guess it is also true that for anyone who denies the Jewish character of Israel undermines the rationale for its continued existence. Barack Obama undoubtedly had this awareness by saying, “The idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience".

Dear Relda,

As long as Christianity and Islam exist anti-Semitism will continue. Anti-Semitism is almost unknown in countries outside of Islam and Christendom. During WW2 Japan, a German ally, was a place of refuge for Jews who could get there.

I believe there is a necessity for the state of Israel at this time because of the existence of Christianity and Islam. I do not believe there can be justice in the Middle East for both Jews and Palestinians. All we can hope for is a minimum of injustice.

There are actually at least five groups with different interests in the area. Palestine is two entities: a West Bank majority, nominally led by the Palestinian Authority—but really by a secular business and professional class in Ramallah—and an Islamist minority, centred in Gaza, run by an arguably pragmatic but unarguably totalitarian Hamas.

The slim secular majority in Israel, a Hebrew-speaking republic centred in Tel Aviv profits increasingly from links with the outside world. It is vaguely committed to democratic norms and therefore to a peace process. It can imagine a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.

Israel's second state is a huge Judean state-within-a-state: anchored in Jerusalem, largely theocratic, and deeply implicated in the ongoing West Bank settlements. Judea is less educated than its Hebrew cousin and instinctively more tribalist. They see a return of Palestinian refugees to Greater Jerusalem—as the end of their way of life.

The fifth group is the Arab Israelis. A poll in 2008 showed, 77 per cent would rather live in the Jewish state than anywhere else. However, they would eliminate the Jewish character of the state.

david f,
I wouldn’t imagine, even for a moment, you believe that John Lennon’s utopia, one without religion, heaven nor hell, will in reality ever occur. Whilst heaven and earth remain, there is every likelihood a state of Israel will continue to exist – just as the religions of Islam and Christianity will remain. Ironically, it seems that the Jewish state, which would not have been possible were it not for the secularising of Jewish life, may possibly return to some form of pre-Enlightenment Judaism.

The much younger antecedent religions spawned from Judaism, Christianity and Islam certainly have shown an historical and deep antagonism toward the Jews – but I think your surmise is a little too simplistic. As you’ve noted in a previous discussion, I hold no illusion to historical Christianity or Islam for that matter. Jews, first and foremost, were branded with the most devastating of charges - Deicide. They were accused, of the stubborn refusal to accept Christ's Godhead and His sacrifice, which is all the more damning because they were of His very blood. They were pictured as consumed with a detestation of Christianity and defilers of its rituals and symbols. They were the agents of Satan and the future allies if not the progenitors of Antichrist. Their ultimate aim was to destroy the one true faith. The Judeophobia of Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers, however, attacked Jews for supposedly having certain characteristics, such as greed and arrogance, and for observing customs such as kashrut and shabbat. Secularist thinking is prone to loathe an exclusivity that cannot accompany their reason.

Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society - in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. That is the tension – however, a common humanity can never be achieved by destroying unique languages, or by annihilating separate peoples, or by cutting down cultures.

Dear Relda,

I do not believe that John Lennon’s utopia without religion, heaven nor hell, will in reality ever occur. However, I can believe that in a 100 years Christianity, Islam and Judaism may be no more and replaced by other faiths. I can believe people will find other superstitions to replace a belief in heaven and hell. Heaven and hell are not present in all religions. Buddhism does not contain those inventions. Religions like nations are human inventions. Manichaeism was a religion that once spread from Spain 
to China. It lasted 1,500 years to the eighteenth century. but it 
is almost forgotten. Perhaps by the year 2,100 Christianity will be 
a forgotten curiosity like Manichaeism. There might not be a year 
2,100 AD as the calendar might date from a more significant event 
than the birth of the mythical Jesus. It might be superseded by the 
year 195 AE, 195 years after Einstein came out with the scientific 
papers that revolutionized physics. In the heyday of the Roman Empire it is reasonable to assume few thought it would disappear. Antisemitism will disappear with the disappearance of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and they will all disappear.

You wrote: a common humanity can never be achieved by destroying unique languages, or by annihilating separate peoples, or by cutting down cultures. I don’t think a common humanity will ever be achieved, but languages arise and disappear, as do peoples. The Goths, Burgundians and Incas have all arisen, had their day and disappeared. According to Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, a language is considered endangered when it is no longer spoken by children, moribund when only a handful of elderly speakers are left, and extinct when it is no longer spoken. The numbers vary by source, but even the most optimistic estimates are alarming, with half of the world’s languages struggling to survive. Some sources declare 5,000 of the 6,000 total in some state of endangerment.

Time passes. Human constructs arise and disappear.

"Time passes. Human constructs arise and disappear."

- and rightly so, but let it be done with grace, in a gradual, organic manner. Humans are frail, their days are short, their troubles and worries overwhelming as they are: see what nature is doing right now in Victoria - humankind has suffered enough, we do not need to add revolutions on top.

On another note, the common calendar is not based on Jesus' birth, but is a creation or Rome. Jesus is believed to have been born sometime between 2-7 A.D. (were he to be born in the year 0, King Herod would no longer be alive!), so please... we had enough hassles with Y2K - what need have we in another revolution of all computerized systems?

david f,
Of all the great ideas, the idea of God has always been and continues to be the one that seems to evoke the greatest concern among the widest group of people, as well evidenced by this forum. It is misleading, however,to suggest a strict correlation between superstition and religion, at least if one is to abide by empirical standards.

Recently the Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity - "What Americans Really Believe." From the empirical data, a conclusion was drawn – one not to be taken merely on faith: The New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it, it might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people attending a house of worship more than once a week did.

The above study is nothing new. Skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner in 1983 ("The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener”) cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.

Without attempting an oversimplification of the data, the direct inference gained is: Increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, whereas higher education doesn't.

G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character makes the ingenuous statement that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are." The simple and naïve (childlike) believer simply has more ‘protection’ than the sophisticated and highly cultured non-believer.