The Weile Woods

allacharade:

just-shower-thoughts:

Jewish people who type the word “god” as “g-d”: Do you think you can fool the big man upstairs with a technical work around? When he goes through your emails/texts/facebook posts after you die, you don’t think he’s gonna see that dash and think “this sneaky fuck here, enjoy h-ll.”

this thought comes from someone who has no idea how Judaism works, but okay.

People avoid writing out God’s name, because you aren’t ever allowed to destroy or desecrate something with God’s name on it - you have to bury it instead. That’s what a genizah is. The most well known is probably the Cairo Genizah. It’s a box where Jews can put anything with God’s name on it to ensure that it gets buried.

So obviously Jews do write out God’s name. In fact, it used to be traditional to mark the top of pages with God’s name as a kind of blessing or mark of honesty. That’s why there are so many miscellaneous texts in genizahs.

Judaism reads “do not use my name in vain” pretty literally as a command to revere and respect the Y-H-V-H name of God.

Most rabbis agree that this commandment only holds for the hebrew, so not typing out God is more something people do out of respect or as a nod to this tradition. Some people use G-d because they want to parallel the fact that the tradition was put in place for people who would be speaking and writing in hebrew or a very near identical language like Aramaic.

It’s a matter of respect, not a matter of “don’t do this or you will be punished.”

Besides, Judaism deals almost exclusively with punishment in life and Judaism very explicitly doesn’t have a clear and codified notion of עולם הבא (the world to come). And there is certainly no notion of hell.

Also, Judaism is not nearly that harsh in response to small mistakes. We have a holiday every year explicitly devoted to the idea that we all fuck up and that we need to ask forgiveness from each other and God (and during which God does all the judging - God doesn’t wait until after we die. It’s an active thing that can be constantly adjusted).

Maybe world religions is not the best topic of contemplation during your shower.