On Organized Religion
Given that we started taking Birdie to Sunday School (or at her age, preschool/daycare at a synagogue), it's a probably completely unsurprising step that we are now officially members of that synagogue. This is the first time I've officially been a member of a synagogue since whenever I officially dropped off the member roles at my childhood synagogues once my parents stopped including me in the membership. That's true of M as well.
When I was growing up, virtually everybody I knew at least made the pretense of going to church; North Dakota was for many years the state that had the highest percentage of people who attended services weekly. There were never EVER school activities on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights to avoid conflicting with the two church school nights.
I moved to Cleveland and never left. Now relatively few of my friends belong to organized religious groups. I've got a couple of Catholic friends who attend mass regularly, and pretty much all of my Jewish friends who have kids go to synagogue. Aside from M's sister and her family, if I know any observant non-Catholic Christians they have kept very quiet about it.
As far as life events, when I look at the list of wedding invites I built back in 2008 (note to self: build list of weddings attended post 2008), while some were religious ceremonies, most were not in churches. The Jewish friends consistently were at least having religious ceremonies, regardless of whether they were in synagogues.
I don't know how much of this is "I moved to a city and people in cities are less likely to do religion because they have social options" versus "people everywhere are less religious than they were 30 years ago" versus "most of my friends are relatively highly educated and educated people tend to be less religious." It's probably all of these things to some degree that varies by friend. I do find it unsurprising that my Jewish friends are mostly not particularly strong believers in G-d but are consistently the ones making sure that their kids grow up going to synagogue in some form or other. It's almost like being a tiny little religious minority in a sea of Christianity really focuses the mind of maintaining traditions and culture, something that I'm pretty sure my Christian friends and relatives don't really grok at the same deep level that say, my circle of North Dakota Jewish friends do.
I think it's pretty clear that I am finally going to need a judiasm tag for life events and such going forward. Naturally, I went and used it on a few obvious past posts that jumped to mind, mostly in the in my mother's kitchen series.
When I was growing up, virtually everybody I knew at least made the pretense of going to church; North Dakota was for many years the state that had the highest percentage of people who attended services weekly. There were never EVER school activities on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights to avoid conflicting with the two church school nights.
I moved to Cleveland and never left. Now relatively few of my friends belong to organized religious groups. I've got a couple of Catholic friends who attend mass regularly, and pretty much all of my Jewish friends who have kids go to synagogue. Aside from M's sister and her family, if I know any observant non-Catholic Christians they have kept very quiet about it.
As far as life events, when I look at the list of wedding invites I built back in 2008 (note to self: build list of weddings attended post 2008), while some were religious ceremonies, most were not in churches. The Jewish friends consistently were at least having religious ceremonies, regardless of whether they were in synagogues.
I don't know how much of this is "I moved to a city and people in cities are less likely to do religion because they have social options" versus "people everywhere are less religious than they were 30 years ago" versus "most of my friends are relatively highly educated and educated people tend to be less religious." It's probably all of these things to some degree that varies by friend. I do find it unsurprising that my Jewish friends are mostly not particularly strong believers in G-d but are consistently the ones making sure that their kids grow up going to synagogue in some form or other. It's almost like being a tiny little religious minority in a sea of Christianity really focuses the mind of maintaining traditions and culture, something that I'm pretty sure my Christian friends and relatives don't really grok at the same deep level that say, my circle of North Dakota Jewish friends do.
I think it's pretty clear that I am finally going to need a judiasm tag for life events and such going forward. Naturally, I went and used it on a few obvious past posts that jumped to mind, mostly in the in my mother's kitchen series.