Steve - Just because I joked about my personal notions of Judaism doesn't mean I haven't done my homework. Compare ancient Israel to some of its most well-recorded regional contemporaries: Athens & Sparta. Both subsisted on economies driven by slave agriculture, limted citizenship, and militarily enforced tribute. Or the mass slave-armies of the Persian empire. Judaism was never big on slavery, having experienced the receiving end. That's a big step towards equality for its time. And no, I didn't use superlatives on purpose. But a little credit for effort and regional innovation. Again, we didn't have advance notions beyond an unrelated innovator we'd never heard of. That's like saying that native hawaiians weren't such great sailors because they failed to invent the trireme. They got to Hawaii. Good enough for me.

You don't have to be the spearhead of change for it to be a core notion of your identity. It's good enough to be a good solid spear-shaft. Sure, Massachusetts got gay marraige right. But 100 years ago they were prosecuting sodomy laws. For someone with a fixed notion of law, you have very fast expectations for the time-frame of a major shift in community norms and acceptance. We're certainly beating the Southern Baptists on this one.

You close by saying that that the Judaic notion of right and wrong is neither objective, modern, nor socially just. Are you then saying it's irrational or purely historical? The former I refuse to accept as a governing principal of my life of religion (and yes, this lack of blind faith may be what you equate with chicken soup & neurosis Judaism, but I'm fine with that), the latter has a Turtles Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down). At the bottom must lie something. Or more precisely some things, many of them evolving norms rather than fixed principals. And one of them is social justice.

Not going to have time to respond again, but thanks. It's been interesting. I'll leave you to "Mobius."

- dan

PS - References to my hubris & lack of humility don't strengthen your argument. I promise. They're well known facts. Kavod habriyot, as you might prefer I put it.