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I posted this response to the supposed 'emptiness' of a secular life, on a different sub:

Try reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/0345539435/

The universe is an astounding place- just our galaxy has hundreds of billions of suns, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. It is mindbogglingly huge.

Life is astounding. Evolving on our planet for a billion years, from single cells to human consciousness, trees, insects, whales, birds, dinosaurs, and countless millions of life forms in between.

Have you watched David Attenborough's Planet Earth series? It is so beautiful it will make you cry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02544td

Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the MOMA in NYC, or your local art or natural history museum?

How about laughter? Comedy brings me great joy. I watch the Daily Show, Bill Maher, and have enjoyed other series over the years, but I realize comedy is highly culture-specific.

Exercise? If you are feeling down, going for a jog or workout is a great natural endorphin rush.

Food! Do you like to cook? This is another wonderful joy in life.

Do you have friends? Even if you are in an isolated place, with mostly fundamentalist religious people, perhaps there are others you can talk to, and if not, be glad that we live in 2018 and you have the internet!

I wish you luck. It takes great courage and strength to acknowledge that your previous way of life was based on a collective delusion, even if it was a comforting one. But:

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” ― Flannery O'Connor

Go to your local drug store and buy a Gilette Mach3 or similar and some shaving gel or cream. You can also get some aftershave lotion; personally I've never found one I really like so I usually go without it, but it can help with irritation or dryness.

With your skin wet, squirt some gel into your hand and rub it onto your face. It will lather or foam up a bit. Don't be shy here, get a good amount on.

Take the razor and drag it slowly across your skin along the direction of hair growth. There will be a good bit of shaving cream and hair stuck to the razor after each stroke, so rinse it off frequently. I find I usually have to use my finger to push some of the hair out from between the blades. Repeat until your face is clean. You can also pull the razor against the grain for a closer shave, but you're more likely to cut yourself doing this. I'd recommend shaving along the grain for the first few times until you get a feel for it.

If you do cut yourself, just tear off a tiny piece of toilet paper and stick it to the cut.

When you're done, dry off with a towel and apply aftershave if you want. Make sure you dry off your razor blades too, it will help them stay sharp and last longer. Replace the blade whenever shaving becomes more difficult or painful, roughly every couple of weeks depending how often you need to shave.

Good luck! When you're ready for more advanced technique, check out /r/wicked_edge.

was this on your mother's side or your father's side? Given that most cultures give you a last name based on your father's side I'm going to assume father's..in which case most jews would not consider you jewish since judaism is 'passed down' through women, but not men. There are some groups that consider judaism as "passed down' from both women and men but only if you yourself were raised jewish (which clearly you weren't). Anyway this doesn't mean that you might not want to learn more about judaism given you still have jewish ancestry but you should be aware....

Also ashkenazi's aren't a tribe per se, more of an ethnic group that means your anscensters were european (mostly central/eastern european) jews. There is another group called sephardis that are descended from jews in spain/the iberian peninsula (and many from north africans who moved there after the spanish expulsion of jews), and then there are mizrachis which are descended from middle easterners. But all 3 groups are supposedly descended from the original group of jews who lived in Israel and were expelled by the romans (and moved to different areas afterwards and developed somewhat different traditions and foods and stuff, but were still pretty similar).

If you are interested in learning more about judaism and how it is currently practiced, I would recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Literacy-Revised-Ed-Important/dp/0061374989 although it's kinda like an encyclopedia so might be boring AF at times.

You may be better served posting this in r/judaism , this page is more for people who grew up as religious jews and no longer keep the religion.

It is silly, but I don't see it as sillier per se.

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Christian theology doesn't see any of it as God's mistake, but as man's mistake that man made of his own volition. You see, Unlike in Judaism, God is believed to have created both the humans and the angels with free will.

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So, Christians believe that Satan, and 1/3 of the angelic host (who were initially holy) rebelled against god, and God "justly" exiles them from heaven, and then Satan entices Eve to sin.

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All of the Christian view of Sin can be traced to developments of the concepts like Nephilim as the offspring of fallen angels (as found in 1 Enoch.)

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https://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Hermon-Watchers-Forgotten-Mission/dp/0998142638

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(this book, though written by a Christian fundie does a great Job of thoroughly seating their ideas in Near Eastern and Jewish Appocryphal literature.)

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The sad thing I have realized is that Judaism in some form or other already had all the ingredients in it to create my former religion, despite Judaism hating its guts for seriously legit reasons.

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The rabbis say its Avodah Zarah, but if it is, I have always said, I believe it was a home grown Jewish form of it.

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Take the virgin birth. Why would anyone claim this is necessary from the Torah when the book clearly shows you the clear need of a continuous male line?

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Because no claimed lines of descent to David today are traced father to Son. All the lines of descent we can examine are actually Matralineal if you look into it.

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The Mystical BS reason is Because the Messiah is supposed to be like Adam Harishon, but done right without making his mistakes. Adam was made by God's own hands, so likewise the messiah must be made that way. Why born of a woman only?

From the source of the sin must come its rectification. Eve was Disobedient, and caused the fall, so a righteous woman must rectify that disobedience.

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I saw a Shiur once where a rabbi said that in Olam Haba a woman would have children without the need of a man, based on Jeremiah 31:22. (COULDN'T BELIEVE A RABBI SAID THIS, EVEN ALLEGORICALLY.)

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Mysticism is crazy man. I mean, the rabbis could have demolished Jesus overnight, just by saying "we agree with the Sadducees! Resurrection is not taught in the books of Moses. Because really, it is a doctrine thoroughly built on allegorical readings of like 5 different verses.

Here's a simplified summary of a number of sources, detailing the polytheistic roots of Judaism and the complex authorship of the Torah:

• A History of God
  
  One of the primary sources for that video is a book by Karen Armstrong, A History of God
  
  Regarding the multiple authors of the Torah, there's a book called Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliot Friedman. In Bible scholarship, the explanation for the authorship of the Torah is called the Documentary Hypothesis (or the DH). Basically, there are four primary authors identified, and how they created a patchwork of each book. While there's a lot of debate around the DH, it's still the best explanation of the origins and sources of the Torah.
  
  The next book is, The Rocks Don't Lie by geologist David Montgomery. This book will conclusively explain how incompatible the Noah's Flood story is with the geological record. What's interesting about this book is that the author isn't simply trying to knock down the story from Genesis, but is trying to understand how it might be an exaggerated account of a localized flood event.
  
  The next one is The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finklestein and Neil Asher Silberman. Dr. Finklestein is one of the leading archaeologists in Israel today. In this book, they explain a history of the Jews and Israel based on the archaeological evidence rather than on the Bible. Here is a 90 minute video based on the book. There is a longer multi-part documentary on YouTube (about 6 hours), but they get so deep into the details it's a tough watch. :D
  
  Finally, there is a Yale online course on the Introduction to the Old Testament, that's well worth the investment of time.
  
  Not everything presented in these materials is agreed to 100% by scholarship, but these collected works do represent where the majority of Bible scholars and historians stand on the history of the Jews and Israel. It's also important to know that scholars who believe in the literal truth of the Bible are in the minority.

I think a popular one is All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen. Was a really good memoir. Other than that I liked A Seat At the Table, which I liked a lot when I was in high school, 7 or 8 years ago, and I dunno what it'd be like now.

This is a slightly off-subject, but you should really read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I read it and found that he was articulating many ideas that I had in my head.

Just watch out for his militaristic approach. You don't want to turn into a knee-jerk/circlejerk atheist like some of our friends in /r/atheism...

You make an excellent point.

I have heard the argument made--although w/o any evidence--that the endless introduction of new technology actually intensifies the attraction towards "Truth" and other Permanent Things like religion. If you're interested, it's laid out in the last couple of chapters of this book.

A lot of it is borrowed from surrounding ancient cultures and adapted to tell a Jewish story.

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The mabul was a popular story. It shows up in the Epic of Gilgamesh and other places. But where in Gilgamesh, the gods bring the Flood because people are noisy and annoying them, in the Torah's version it's a morality tale.

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Shimshon = Heracles, right down to the lion skin he wears.

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The Gan Eden story is borrowed from a story about the god Enki and the Goddess Inanna, in which Enki becomes sick after eating forbidden plants in Inanna's garden, and Inanna created goddesses to help heal him, including Ninsurtu, the Lady of the Rib.

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Yetzias Mitzrayim probably really did happen - sort of. Not millions of people leaving after ten plagues and all that, but there were Semetic slaves in Egypt, and small groups did occasionally escape. Many of them went to the Canaanite highlands and joined a group known as the Habiru. It's possible that one such group had some sort of religious experience in the desert, and that was the seed that grew into the story we have now.

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I go into a lot of detail on Yetzias Mitzrayim in my book, if you're interested, though that's not the focus.

https://www.amazon.com/Reasonable-Doubts-Breaking-Second-Son/dp/1690831723/ref=sxts_sxwds-bia?keywords=kuzari&pd_rd_i=1690831723&pd_rd_r=9bf82796-c25c-4830-ac4a-5751bd71b17d&pd_rd_w=etflI&pd_rd_wg=YKhwe&pf_rd_p=1cb3f32a-ccfd-479b-8a13-b22f56c942c6&pf_rd_r=8Z3EGTQSGS3SR2Z1W1N3&psc=1&qid=1573922229

I read Unchosen at some point and really liked it.

Rabbi Dovid Meisels : Shabbos Secrets, Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur Secrets, Succos Secrets, Seder Secrets, and Shavuos Secrets.
https://www.amazon.com/Shavuos-Secrets-Rabbi-Dovid-Meisels/dp/1931681902/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

This book: How to Get More Out of Being Jewish Even If:...

Dude that's just the plot of a children's book: https://www.amazon.com/House-Roof-Sukkot-Story/dp/0823422321

Three favorites of mine:

• Sam Harris: The End of Faith
  
  
• Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman: The Bible Unearthed
  
  
• Julian Young: The Death of God and the Meaning of Life
  
  For mythology itself, the works of Joseph Campbell.

If someone feels confused or angry about serial killers, psychopaths, etc. I highly recommend Robert Sapolsky's book BEHAVE (link to Amazon).

Most people's confusion and anger regarding these topics are possibly from two misconceptions:

Firstly, they are working with a mistaken model of non-deterministic "free-will," which makes no sense, or secondly, they are exhibiting emotional reactions such as anger, fear, or vengeance, which, while being understandable given our ape-biology, is simply not rational.

I also highly recommend his fascinating interview about the criminal justice system with Alan Alda, linked here.

Feel free to ask more questions if you have any! Hope you enjoy.