I think French Catholics aren't really religious anymore. That's my impression anecdotally, and Wikipedia says that 44% French people identify as atheist or agnostic, and that only one in 20 French Catholics goes to mass regularly.

You've nailed it on the head for me. I've been a non-praticing catholic for - well, since I graduated from high school - and though I get into a number of arguments with my overly religious and sanctimonious family members, I still would very much like to raise lil (currently still being baked) hollawalla as Catholic.…

It would be nice if Gawker framed the article from this perspective as, as an ashkenazi Jew, I've known for years that I may or may not be semi-related to Jews of European ancestry, and I think a majority of the Ashkenazi diaspora is aware of this. Which brings me to this question: What's the motive behind posting…

Many of us do not return. I went to Catholic Schools and much of my family is still catholic, but I will NEVER expose my children to the woman-hating, gay-hating, hypocrisy that is the catholic church. It is an evil institution that brainwashes and exploits for money - Vatican a$$wads pretends as if they "hear"…

I was raised Catholic by Christmas-and-Easter Catholic (but nonetheless very socially conservative, killing abortion doctors is God's work, etc.) parents. Personally, I don't want my future kids raised in that environment. I still have so much I'm getting over from having that upbringing that just messed me up…

In general, I think the trend in American religion is that people are raised with the church, leave it as adults, and come back to it when they have their own children, because they want their own children to be raised in the same tradition as they were.

One day someone is going to do a research poll on people who were educated in Catholic school(s), who were Catholic at the time, and see if they are still Catholic after leaving said school(s). Because I am going to say the return rate in my 8th grade class of 14 was quite low.

With US Catholics the most liberal of all Catholics, and their children more liberal still, I wonder how these institutions are able to maintain the fiction that their faculties and student bodies represent the views of a bunch of old men in red robes.

Exactly, that's why studies like these are important. Not only can many Jews trace their ancestry back to the middle east, but they can also trace their ancestry back to other Jewish groups. "Virtually all the Jewish groups we've studied tend to be quite closely related to one another," Ostrer said. "It would seem for…

This requires knowing someone in favor of intermarriage in order to confirm... Usually arguments AGAINST inbreeding are more common and are often directed specifically at European royalty several hundred years back and the embarrassing results they yielded for various monarchies.

Do you know the name or basic location of the town? If you do, check out some of the online archives of Yizkor books - the New York Public Library's, YIVO Institute's and JewishGen's immediately come to mind, but I know there are more out there.

I worked for a genetic testing company and we would test autosomal DNA and match you with people that shared a certain amount and higher, about the 5th cousin level and higher. It was pretty accurate....as long as you are not related to the person on multiple lines within the last 5-6 generations. Jewish people…

I'm of Ashkenazic descent, and oy, was it ever true in the old country. There was at least one first-cousin marriage among my great-grandparents, and from what I can tell it was hardly the first.

Based on the genealogy my cousin (grandfather's sister's son) has done tracing our entire family back 8 generations (!!?!??!) this surprises me not at all. When everyone had very large families and kept marrying Jews, it's only inevitable that we're all related. By marrying an Irish-Catholic, I'm probably now related…

"The findings bolster the mainstream view that the ancestors of European Jews were people from the Levant and local Europeans. An earlier, 19th-century theory posited that the core of the Ashkenazi Jewish population is descended from Khazars, from the Russian steppes, but the genetic evidence makes that even less…

I'm going to put a trigger warning for (consensual) violence and abuse on this (thus guaranteeing that this won't be the winner) but here's mine.