There is a lot of rationalization trying to overcome the inferiotity complex of Christians and Moslems in relation to Jews. I am not Jewish.
The problem can be fixed only by abandoning Christianity and embracing human reason as the only rational way to deal with the mosteries and wonders of nature, with ethics, civil life and everything else.
That is what the Ancient Greeks did and that is what empowered them and that is why they left behind the rest of humanity of the time, Jews and Persians included.
That is why the Greeks developed democracy; rule by us, by the people themselves, not by any god or gods or holy books.
The Greek and Roman gods did not come close to the Jewish (Christian and Muslim god), they had many and each occupied a limited parcel of life; god of the home. Of war, of the sea, etc.
The Greeks and Romans treated their gods only as slightly superior to humans and they had a kind of dialogue, a transactional relation to them
This can be seen in the way they prayed and offered sacrifices not to ask for forgiveness for sins like the Jews did and, later Christians and Moslems, the Greeks and Romans sacrificed an animal to get something from a particular god.
Greek: “O Zeus, grant victory to our army, and accept this bull as offering.”
Roman: “Jupiter, if we follow the auspices and perform the ritual correctly, grant peace and prosperity to Rome.”
Jewish: “Hear, O Lord, our prayers, forgive our sins, and guide us in Your ways.”
Christian: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name; Your kingdom come.”
Muslim: “O Allah, guide me, forgive my sins, and bless me and my family.”
Praying postures also reflect the self image of each: Greeks and Romans prayed standing and seated. On rare occasions the Romans prayed kneeling. Never prostrated
Jews prayed standing, kneeling and sometimes prostrated.
Christians prayed standing and frequent kneeling.
As for Moslems, you can see how they pray.
It is obvious by how they looked at god or gods that Greeks and Romans had a much higher esteem of humans and thus they had gods with very limited powers.
They never looked at the gods for moral, ethical or legal guidance, they had to figure out what was the right thing by themselves.
That is why they rely on human reason as the essential tool to deal with everything.
That is why the Greeks developed democracy as rational way to govern: “ we think, we debate, we vote to decide”, no divine kings, no high priests, no god, mo holy books”
The other peoples of the time, Jews, Persians, Egyptiians or the more distant Indians of Chines or anybody else ever came close to the Greeks.
Democracy empowered the people and the individual. No wonder the Greeks thought about everything without fear of violating any dogma, holy book or “revealed truth”.
No doubt the concept of an all powerful god ruling over humans made no sense to Greeks and Romans.
Neither probably make sense to Greeks and Romans to have exclusively male divinity, they had goddesses too, which shows women were held in much higher regard than in Judaism and the latecomers Christians and Moslems.
That is why the Romans ruling over the Jews did not force them to vonvert to Roman beliefs and respected Jewish beliefs, except when Judaism became political. Romans did not care much for Judaism as religion but cracked down on Jews and destroyed the temple because Jews rebelled against Roman rule, a serious miscalculation but not the first in the long history of miscalculations by Jews, although one can not deny that, overall, Jews calculated even better than the Greek and Roman political entities.
However, Greek and Roman thought came back from the dead and are in the process of prevailing over Christian, Jewish and Moslem thought since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which pushed religion and god to the sidelines.
Somehow, a number of Middle Ages Italians and orhers decided to bring back freedom of thought and democracy.
The rest is history; the number of people abandoning religion, not because they hate religion or god but because it no longer makes sense in view of the advances of Greek thought-based science in all fields, including the spiritual.
The efforts of the Church to shoehorn Christianity into Greek thought, or viceversa have been an abject failure, just a bunch of intellectual pirouettes. If the Ancient Greeks could read what Thomas Aquinas and others did, the Greeks would have seen them as irrational; Greek ideas about everything were very diverse but all the product of human thinking, not of revealed truth, that would be an absurd concept to them. In fact, they knew of Judaism but did not make sense to them. How could it? For the Greeks, man, not the gods are the measure of all things.
In fact, that is what Protagoras stated some 2600 years ago.
The greeks did not execute him for pushing gods aside, an indication of how civilized they were.
They did no go after him either when he stated:
“Concerning the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or not, or what they are like, because of the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.”
Neirher did they go after Democritus who, at about the same time stated that
All things consist of atoms and void.
Reason is the tool to understand the World. Knowledge, perception, and reason are central; the gods (if they exist) are irrelevant to natural processes.
Thought is the result of the activity of the atoms of our head, not of any soul.
Look at how differently the Christian treated Galileo when he put forward rational evidence that Earth was not at the center of the Universe, they practically killed him. Or what the Jews did to Spinoza in the 1600s.
Not to mention what Moslems even today do to non believers or apostates…
Let me say sometjing about Marxists and Atheists who hate and fight the idea of god; they are as irrational and primitive as those who persecuted Galileo or Spinoza, or the deranged Moslem Supremacists of today.
We have not completely left behind dogmatic magical thinking, otherwise we would not have Marxism, Fascism, Nazism or all the religions.
But we will bevause science proves that many religious beliefs make no sense, that absolute thinking is irrational when applied to nature and thought, perhaps mathematics is the exception.
Marxism, communism, socialism, religious fascism like Iran’s are much worse than just religious beliefs.
Religious thinking is contrsry to democracy too because absolute truth. Faith, is incompatible with freedom of thought. Fortunately, most Christians have acvepted to separate religion from politics and laws. Most Jews in Western coyntries too, but not the Sionists. As for Moslems, they are stuck in pre Galileo times.
One big step all countries need to take to catch up to the Greeks is to bring final authority to decide laws and policies to the votets and remove them from elected politicians. So far, only the Swiss come close.
