Jews don't believe in God

From the General Social Survey (years 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1998, 2000):

GOD 369. Please look at this card and tell me which statement comes closest to expressing what you believe about God. 1. I don't believe in God. 2. I don't know whether there is a God and I don't believe there is any way to find out. 3. I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind. 4. I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others. 5. While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.. 6. I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		RELIG
		1 Protestant	2 Catholic	3 Jewish	4 None	Row Total
GOD	1: Don't believe	1.4 65	.9 18	2.4 4	13.8 107	2.5 194
	2: No way to find out	1.8 86	2.1 42	22.6 37	18.7 145	4.0 310
	3: Some higher power	6.0 290	6.2 125	15.9 26	23.5 182	8.0 623
	4: Believe sometimes	3.3 160	4.6 93	11.6 19	6.2 48	4.1 320
	5: Believe but doubts	15.1 728	20.8 417	20.7 34	15.5 120	16.8 1,299
	6: Know God exists	72.4 3,483	65.3 1,307	26.8 44	22.2 172	64.6 5,006
	Col Total	100.0 4,812	100.0 2,002	100.0 164	100.0 774	100.0 7,752

72% of Protestants and 65% of Catholics know that God exists. But only 27% of Jews know this. Jews answered more like people with no religion at all than those who profess membership in a religion.

Why do Jewish people even bother with their religion if they don't believe in God? My father would say "GUILT! It's GUILT!" So there we have it, Judaism is a religion based on guilt and not on belief in God.

I recently observed that Jews don't feel God's presence. Because God has choosen not to make His presence felt to the Jews, it's only natural that Jews don't believe in Him. (The alternative explanation is that feeling the presence of God is a pyschological illusion predicated by belief in God.)

Comments

[Peter]

Could many of the people who identified themselves as Jewish for the GSS be using the term in an ethnic rather than religious sense?

[JewishAtheist]

Yes, look at me. :-) Depending on how the question was worded, I might answer "Jewish" or "atheist."

[David Alexander]

Could many of the people who identified themselves as Jewish for the GSS be using the term in an ethnic rather than religious sense?

It's true in that aspect. I know plenty of atheists who'll always assert their Jewish heritage and defend the existance of the state of Israel, but have no connection at all to the religious aspects with the exceptoin of fasting for Yom Kippur.

What's interesting is that if any of them were ever to become Christians or followers of some other religion, despite their ethnic Jewishness, they'd no longer be Jews, they would lack a real ethnic group for self-identification.

[SFG]

Basically, yeah. It's hard to be an ethnic-only Jew because the thing that defined the ethnicity from others was religion. A taste for kugel and writing pro-Israel letters to the NYT doesn't cut it.

As I've said before, anti-Semites who want to get rid of the Jews should just sit down and shut up. Assimilation is whittling away their/our numbers a lot faster than anyone besides the German dude with the mustache. Of course what the Stormfront crowd REALLY wants is a second Holocaust. But I don't see that happening; America can't even get mad at the Arabs, and they blew up two buildings full of Americans. You're going to goad the American people into a genocidal frenzy over smutty movies and snotty newspapers? And besides, Hitler wasn't even good for Germany. They got razed to the ground and had to pay loads of money to Israel after the war. German pride? they couldn't even sing their national anthem in public!

There's a reason they called anti-Semitism the socialism of fools.

[rater]

I would not speculate around history or cultural issues. The fact is that Jews are more intelligent than other ethnic groups. They are consecutively also better educated and better-off in general.

For these three reasons they believe less in the existence of a personal god amongst monotheist ethnic/religious groups. IQ correlates negatively with religiousness almost universally. The only major exceptions among nations are the U.S. and Poland, but this does not make the trend unsignificant.

[ChrisV82]

This is off-topic, but there's an article in the recent Philadelphia Magazine about Philly-area yuppies converting to Orthodox Judaism because it's the next "in-thing," like yoga or wine tasting.

It would be funny if yuppies ruined religion for religious people. That would leave me amused.

[MichaelSantomauro]

Hello Friends,

When it comes to spatial reasoning, significantly, Jews score lower than Gentiles. (It shows with the Jewish leadership in this culture.) If you subdivide Gentiles, with Aryan roots, Gentiles score higher on average than the nation of Israel. If you exclude the Sephardic element, the IQ mean is almost the same, for Northern Europeans and eastern European Jews. Slightly higher for the Aryan element.

Historically, if you subdivide the nation of Italy, the Northern Italian outperformed the average eastern European Jew. The Swedes which are I/2 the US Jewish Population outperform in educational attainment than the average eastern European Jew. But not German-Jews.

The problem of comparing Gentiles, with a much smaller group such as the Jews, is that the research lumps all white Gentiles together.

If there were just as many Sephardic outside of Israel the average Jewish IQ would drop to the average "all" white IQ. And lower than the Aryan populations. In Israel 45% of the population is Sephardic.

As the best selling author, Rabbi Kushner, would say: "Jews import better than we export." It is not the pure Ashkenazi DNA strain that helps the group, but the import of other European genes.

The true Hebrew DNA strain are the Sephardic.

On a personal note, the two times the answers to the school Regents were stolen in New York State, the tests were canceled due to the cheating of the Yeshiva High Schools stealing the answers in advance of the test.

I was a victim of one those years, back in 1970s, when I was prepared to excel on the exam and pass algebra. Instead I was the best math student in summer school.

Of course, most people never take into account economic culture. Or expensive tutors and cheating.

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
253 West 72nd street Suite1711
New York, NY 10023

http://www.tadp.org
212-787-7891

All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher, 1788-1860

Dear Friend,

Remember the New York magazine cover story: "The Jewish Brain: Are Jew's smarter?"

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478

Oct. 19, 2005
Re: Are Jews Smarter?

Dear Ms. Senior:

Why is it okay for white Jews (Ashkenazim) to sub-divide themselves from the Sephardic lower IQ? (Forty-five percent of Israel's population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.)

And it is not okay for other White ethnics to be able to do the same when reporting IQ scores? For example, at the very minimum, it would show Northern and Western Europeans to be comparable if not slightly higher than the Jewish-white IQ, when you eliminate the Eastern European IQ. In some categories the European-White IQ is way higher, such as in spatial reasoning, even for all White ethnics including the Eastern European. This is rarely reported in the mass media. I wonder why? It reminds me of a joke from the Jewish comedian David Steinberg, who is married to an Italian-Catholic: "Whenever I go to family gatherings, the Jewish side breaks things, and the Italian side fixes them!"

In folk psychology and folk sociology, when it comes to E. Q., even my Jewish supremacist acquaintances and friends will think they have been culturally short changed, thinking of themselves as an unhappy lot.

In aesthetics Jews "seem" to have an inferiority complex when it comes to physical aptitude, which I have argued with my Jewish friends, is absolutely uncalled for! For instance, in "folk talk," my Jewish girlfriends believe what is often said (even by Bobby Fischer) about Jewish men in the "below the belt" department, that they have been short changed from all that inbreeding.

And what about Jewish women? Again, referring to David Steinberg's promulgation of the joke: "What moves more Jell-O or Jewish women in bed". The rate of Jewish men running away to marry "shiksa's" for the under 35 age category is as high as 35-50%, depending on which data you want to embrace.

Are we to make a correlation from any of this?

The point being, it is hard to define what is a "Jewish brain" in the secular world. You mention the high percentage of Jewish Nobel Prize winners since its inception in 1901, yet about two-thirds of the Jewish winners come from inter-faith/inter-ethnic backgrounds. For centuries before 1901, the portion of Jewish contributions to the high sciences is almost void.

To refer to chess master Bobby Fischer (another one of those 1/2 Jews), is slanderous to Jews. Your readers should be aware that he hates Jews with a fervent passion, and blames virtually any bad that is happening in the world on world Jewry.

You wrote: "Of course, there's another side to this shining coin. Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia."

The implication here for your readers misunderstanding is that anti-Semitism is the result of Jewish intellect. Historically it has been as a result of resource competition, belief in a moral and intellectual superiority and a fierce policy of non assimilation with the host countries which initially offered you admittance with friendliness. Anti-Semitism is not in any way a mental illness.

Western Civilization is a European-white accomplishment and Judaism has always been an appendage. Not the other way around. We are a better world today because Western Civilization took the road to Athens over the road to Jerusalem.

If we had a proper scientific study involving IQ tests that are not skewed to fit one group in particular (by, for example, including musical intelligence tests that are currently excluded because some people "don't believe in" musical intelligence) then all this Jewish intellectual narcissism would disappear up its own arsehole. Which is precisely why we will never see such a thing, for it would be truly "anti-semitic".

As long as we're playing with racism and stereotypes, where do Jews rank in the greed and power scale? Or the bad landlord scale? Or the cause of social inequality, war and exploitation of lesser people scale?

One last thing, it's too much of a reach to think that Charlemagne "lured" Jews there to lend money. Give me a break!

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
RePorterNoteBook@aol.com
253 West 72nd street #1711
New York, NY 10023
212-787-7891