the problem with religious people is the moment you start questioning anything about what they believe or inject some humour into it they take offence.
i have managed to offend everyone.
but my point is this, if you believe something based on faith and some one laughs at that belief or questions it, and your response is to get upset or angry, how strong is your faith in the first place.
my family are so different from me, we are miles apart and i am finding it very difficult, they take their holy books at face value, they cannot understand that there are deeper esoteric meanings to stories and tales, they cannot perceive metaphor and any line of questioning results in anger or some emotional response from them that is totally over the top and unrelated to the question, in fact it defies any logic what so ever.
i am being told to respect something that they have faith in yet i do not, yet i do respect their belief in it but it is apparent any line of questioning that is to difficult to answer or controversial results in an attack upon myself.
while i can be humble enough to know when to retreat, i am smart enough to know when faith is based upon something that is a weak constructed framework. just like financial systems and political systems religious ones are very weak.
now i quite like a lot of the esoteric meaning within judaism, it's quite remarkable and my knowledge of it extends way beyond most people who deem themselves religious, but the bottom line is it is no different from any other traditional religion. people have taken the surface and called it an ocean, yet the richness and wisdom is under the surface.
i think sometimes my family fear my intellect, i think it threatens them and i feel very depressed about this. however the general attitude my mother has had about me has changed, there's a distance which is better than the awful emotional blackmail and bitterness that existed before.
i can see martins loathing of me sometimes, it a hostile and resentful glare that says much more than he may think. he thinks i don't respect the traditions or the beliefs but he is mistaken, i do.
so there it is the vast distance that lays between us as a family, me and them. always the outsider, the son that left to live in australia. truth is i was always leaving england, before australia i left to get away from my family, a bit of space helps.