Wake up!

You are so confused it is hard to know where to start. I'll just go in order...

1) What you term "religiosity" is not a base impulse. Gasping for breath after being submerged in water is base impulse. Eating when you're hungry is a base impulse. Protecting your children from attack is a base impulse. Maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain are base impulses. Having sex whenever your hormones demand is a base impulse.

Saying a blessing before eating is about delaying your base impulse (to eat when hungry) in order to thank G-d for the food and acknowledge that this is His creation. Wrapping tefillin every day, an inconvenience for which there is no "rational" explanation, goes against the base impulses of a human being.

Your "wherever my heart sees fit I will go" humanism is much more base than "religiosity". I don't know about other religions. We Jews have 613 commandments to follow. They haven't changed in 3000 years. Only an ignoramus would say that complying with them - a challenge every Jew struggles with daily - is a "base instinct".

Eating food without acknowledging G-d is a "base instinct". Animals, for example, don't say a blessing before eating, and they are not instructed to do so. It takes much dedication and personal refinement to achieve a state of sensitivity where you realize that eating without a blessing to G-d is a crass state of being.

Judaism is about elevating an individual above nature, above the animalistic "base instincts", to connect with G-d, and to transform nature in service of G-d.

2) In ages past, you and I probably *would* have to be killing one another

G-d forbid, why would you say such a thing?! Where is this anger coming from? Why do you wish to kill me? The only one mentioning violence, over and over, is you!

3) You are not well read on the story of Hannukah. I'll have to break down your points into several portions:

a) The Greek Hellenists were not atheists, they were polytheists. The Jewish revolt came not because of "atoms", but because the Hellenists started erecting shrines to idols throughout the land, even in the Holy Temple!

The Hellenists were religious. They accepted the Jewish G-d. Their point was, you Jews are right, there is a G-d of gods. But there is also a god of the earth, and a god of the sun and a god of the trees. They were willing to accept the Jewish G-d, as long as the Jews accept all their gods in return. Moreover, they enforced their polytheism with military force!

It's true, some Jews were lured to hedonism and polytheism at this time. Yet the Jewish nation did rebel, starting with the Maccabees. They weren't the Taliban of their time! They were fighting a war to preserve the spiritual integrity of the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.

b) You chose the wrong person to BS with the "atoms" argument. The philosophers of antiquity had no modern understanding of atoms. Atomism deals with abstract, philosophical notions of a building block of reality. Epicurus, for example, believed that the difference between gods and humans was that the souls of gods adhere to their bodies without escaping while the forces holding human atoms together cannot hold the soul forever.

This was not the Bohr model or Molecular Orbital Theory! These people had no idea what they were talking about.

Furthermore, reading traditional Greek philosophy, after being acquainted with Jewish mysticism is like getting a Ph.D and going back to kindergarten. The questions Greek philosophers raise are not only answered by our tradition, the very premises on which those questions are made are invalidated by even a Jewish child's understanding.

It is only your ignorance and arrogance that holds you back from learning the basic tenets of your own, incredible heritage, which has withstood 3000 years without a single successful challenge to its foundation, and which grows, from "strength to strength", year after year, as the sun rises and falls on all others.

It is an injustice that you, as a Jew, spend time with this nonsense of people playing guessing games about the nature of existence when your own identity is interwoven with the fabric of creation!

600,000 Jewish heads of household, along with families numbering in the millions, stood Mt. Sinai and mutually witnessed an event unparalleled in the history of humanity. Nature itself bent on one knee. Not for one man did this occur, not in a dream; the entire world knew, in life, that the Jewish people were born! Fear descended upon the world of the Jewish people, for the knew that we carried the name of G-d.

Through our own mistakes, expulsions, dispersions, pogroms, assimilation and genocide we have survived, not just as a people, but as a nation united with our heritage and our inheritance. What other people have this history? What other people can claim such miracles? Wake up!

Your ignorance of your own people, your own inheritance needs to end. It's time to grown up and take responsibility for your own learning, for your own yiddishkeit.