Uniface wrote:Jews have remained identifiably Jews no matter where they've gone.
Digit wrote:No they haven't. You would not know me as Jewish if you met me with out me saying so.
Your mentality identified you before you acknowledged it.
I recall (because it illuminated a principle) one noteworthy identification of a forgery in the Louvre : "This piece incorporates every feature of Sumerian art its maker was aware of, and every feature of nineteenth century French art he was unaware of."
Similarly here. Because something is off your screen doesn't mean that it doesn't register on someone else's, Dig. It's the same reason why Englishmen who spoke passable German weren't successful as spies during WW II. Their Englishness (invisible to them, but obvious to locals there) made them stick out like sore thumbs. Just as people don't ordinarily "hear" their own regional accents while others do.
The rest of your rant is willfully myopic. To be sure, birds/animals taken from their parents and raised by humans grow up to be confused, dysfunctional (in the natural world) adults. The outcomes of whimsical adoptions, similarly. Even the children of mixed unions who grow up with one parent (i dealt with them for years in the juvenile reform setting) have some real issues with their identity. But such a situation is un-natural -- even
anti-natural, and its existence is no refutiation of the underlying natural laws that become only too apparent when they are violated.
The seeming plausibility of your position hinges on, actually, a standard (and I am not out to be personally obnoxious) gambit, advanced by Jewish intellectuals for Goyish consumption : that children are "blank slates" --
tablae rosae -- that become what they are only through being written-on by their environments. Having selectively bred the merchant prince's daughter to the rabbi's son from time out of mind (when not the rabbi's son to his first cousin), and institutionalised genetic selectivity/exclusivity by every means at its disposal, Judaism's belying its own interior values in this rings patently hollow. And while Judaism is anything
but a monolith where individuality is concerned, bringing flagrant exceptions to this easily to mind, in the main, I've fairly stated the case.
If you're wanting a seeing eye dog, or a shepherd, or a retriever, you do not go to the animal shelter, pick one at random, and
teach him his job -- a job he's likely got no aptitude for, and lacks the requisite temperment for into the bargain.
The caricature of this, that "Biology is Destiny" is patently fraudulent. I'll agree with you on that. Biology only opens and closes doors to possibilities. Exceptional athletic ability, musical aptitude, intellectual capacity and so on
tend to run in families. In Germany, "Bach" was synonymous with "musician" for 200 years. And not by coincidence.
It's not that what I'm saying is obscure, Dig. That mentality and temperment tend to run along genetic lines is easily established by a two-week tour of Europe. It's no more moot than saying that you'll not have much success trying to magnetise silver.
Once you've reduced everything involved to an abstraction, you can manipulate your conclusions from them to your heart's content. But while this works well in the inorganic realm (mass, energy, inertia, specific gravity), in the natural realm it is dystopic. As evidenced by every "ism" that's come down the road and gotten control of people's lives. The problem isn't that they aren't beautiful systems. It's that the view of human nature they take as their point of departure is fraudulent : abstract. As opposed to organic.