JUDAS: A Modern Journal

The Israel-Palestine conflict is an incredibly complex issue at the intersection of religion, politics, sociology, and economics - an ever evolving affair that is both multifaceted and extremely hard to comprehend, let alone attempt to resolve. I apologise if this month's instalment is the Frankie Robinson anthology is a little downbeat, the conflict is an incredibly serious topic that I am very passionate about. This article is not supposed to be non-partisan or non-biased - I have bias that is very obvious: I'm pro-Israel, I identify as a Zionist, I observe rabbinical and Talmudic scripture on the topic, and I am ever aware of the conflict mostly from the view of Israeli media, and Jewish news outlets. There are plenty of very compelling pro-Palestine arguments in the aether, and I'll be pushing for one of our own writers to release a contrasting piece on the topic, to balance me out. With that out of the way, let's begin.  Firstly, a Rabbinical/Talmudic argument for ...

Yesterday, on my regular post-school depressing Twitter scroll, I came across a repost of an article entitled "Mormons Aren't Nice People: a bitter victims [sic] deep dive into very old theology." Firstly - brushing past the fact that victims is misspelled because I'm not an educational classist - I'd like to point out how incredibly generalised this statement is, just in the title. This author, that's 'Sadie Lee' on Medium, isn't looking for a resolution, and place to unload, a resolution, or even an apology. She's looking for conflict. As a rather devoted agnostic, I'm not known for running to the rescue of horribly oppressed theists, but I will argue against the public slander of a really quite legitimate belief system.  Ignoring the inflammatory title, and proceeding to the main body of the article, I found out that Lee is actually a survivor of a lot of shame, trauma, and hard times at the hands of people who just happened to be member...

Sitting at my desk, checking emails, waiting for a pot noodle that just won't cool down fast enough, the faint sound of Lady Gaga's Artpop  filling the air, I come across an email from the Jehovah's Witnesses. I signed up for their mailing list along with a couple others - The LDS, The Messianic Jews, and The Quakers. I just like to keep up with what the smaller denominations are doing. I think their whole sitch is really quite cute, and I love an underdog. I opened up this email from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and it had a link to an article on their website. It was really a very generic blog promotion email, that I doubt was even authored by a human, but I clicked on it anyway as the article's title hooked me, it was titled "Why Did the Holocaust Happen? Why Didn’t God Stop It?" I must admit, I was rather curious as to what spiel of apologetics the Jehovah's Witnesses were going to spin around this, and I wasn't pleasantly surprised in the slightes...

So, in the 17th Century, the Portuguese were really into God. This meant that people were also really into being buried at their local church, cathedral, or other Christian-flavored places of worship. Over time, these place's cemeteries became full of bodies, and most churches resorted to stuffing skeletons behind the walls, underneath the floorboards, or just deeper into the cemetery. This meant that after a while, Iberian churches were just absolutely full of bodies, which wasn't exactly sustainable. Skeletons aren't exactly known for being that decomposable, even if their flesh vanishes pretty quickly, which led to churches literally overflowing with bones. During times of disasters and plague, churches would have to bury thousands of bodies at once, which left little room for other bodies.  The solution for this, the Portuguese Catholic establishment concluded, was bone houses, which became charnels in English. They're also known as Ossuaries in Latin, from the Lati...