If you hadn't noticed, a major theme in the Jerusalem Post over the past year or so when it comes to Judaism is how Judaism need more converts and we need to make it easier to convert, and less requirement intensive, and so on. They go on and on about it.

Jonathan Rosenblum wrote a wonderful response, and here it is:

MY SECOND entry in the non-sequitur sweepstakes can be found in a recent Jerusalem Post opinion piece ("Thus Spake Zarathustra," September 15) by the paper's former managing editor, Calev Ben David: "Any religion in the modern world that does not make an effort to welcome, or seek out, new converts, is fated to diminish."

As a matter of elementary logic, that statement is false, unless one is discussing the Shakers and other celibate religious communities.

Religions whose members marry and reproduce at a rate in excess of 2.1 children per family will grow. The rapid growth of Muslim populations all over the globe owes little to conversion, and a great deal to high birthrates.

Or let us take a happier example: Orthodox Jews. A close friend of mine in his early '70s already has a 100 grandchildren plus or minus. With a little more such fecundity, all the hair-pulling about the disappearance of the Jewish people would cease, even if not one more convert entered our ranks.

Indeed demographers predict that by the middle of the century the decline of the Jewish population will bottom out and reverse due to Orthodox growth.

As Jack Wertheimer, provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary, never tires of pointing out, American Jewry is disappearing because Jewish women tend to marry, if at all, at a later age and have fewer children than any other religious or ethnic group.

In place of the sentence quoted above, I would offer a far more defensible rule: A religion whose foundational texts and basic tenets are unknown to most of its members, whose rites and practices are observed by few, and which is of so little significance in its members' lives that well over 50% marry members of other faiths is fated to diminish.

Such a religion, by the way, will exercise little appeal for converts. The heterodox branches of Judaism could hardly be more welcoming to converts, and yet the rate of conversion among gentile spouses of Jews continues to drop.

Now how about a moratorium on silly statements about religion?

I couldn't have said it better myself.