I find it kind of funny how Jewish boys like my dad and other Jewish guys I know tend to marry Catholic girls. What is up with that? Is it the shiksa-peal or something? Lol

@Auty89 Having been raised Catholic and trying most of the Christian sects, I was a "Messianic" Jew, and then converted to Judaism halachically while suspecting my heritage was Jewish. A DNA test later revealed this to be true. I used to attend a Conservative congregation and then some Reform synagogues. Anyway, having been both, I would have to say there are more similarities between Judaism and Catholicism than either religion realizes. Now I vacillate between agnostic theism and agnostic atheism. I am humanistic and a free thinker. I like to think about Einstein's conception of a Higher Power. Judaism is a thinking religion, and there are many atheist/agnostic Jews. Anyway, that's my background, and how I got here. Many Catholics convert to Catholicism, and vice-versa. There's a well-known nun named Edith Stein who converted on her own during the Holocaust(she died regardless because we know Hitler didn't really care if you were an atheist Jew or a converted Jew etc. and someone must have narced she was a Jew.) She was a great thinker and very philosophical.

Thank you! Someone else gets it. Btw, are you Jewish?

So is it possible to be a Catholic Jew? If it was a culture it would be possible.

@Kojaksmom, theoretically, yes. But that's kind of like asking if there there's such thing as an Islamic Jew... It's very unlikely.

Just wanted to see what it was like to be skeptic from another Jew's point of view.

Well, I'm mainly referring heritage. Which I guess would include ethnicity and culture.

Interesting. What were your beliefs and what did they shift to?

I am Jewish on my dad's side even though I didn't think to put that in my bio. Furthermore, my dad was a missionary to Jewish people in NYC.

Well, if you're of Jewish descent, then that counts. It's a heritage. Not just a religion.

judaism is a religion. jewishness is a cultural identity. someone just called me racist for saying that. i am not saying jewishness is a race. (physically there is no such thing as race; it's a social construct.) i am saying it is an ethnicity and a culture -- more than one culture, actually, since the sephardic jews and the ashkenazic jews have quite different customs. i am jewish. i believe there are no gods. therefore it is possible to be jewish and an atheist!

g

by the way, don't feel ignorant. lots of people don't understand this. i met an evangelical christian who didn't even know jews don't believe jesus is divine and that judaism has nothing to do with jesus (i didn't explode her head with the possibility he never even existed). i will add to what i said above that although jewishness isn't a race, there is a disease that only jews get, so there is definitely a genetic component at play, at least for ashkenazic jews. it's called tay-sachs disease and it's a real thing.

g