levite

Well played, sir! A fine rejoinder! I see you are a very well-educated person. Yes, of course the cornerstone of Rabbinic Judaism (that is, post-Second Temple Judaism) is that we don't understand the Written Torah in the absence of the Oral Torah, which includes all the thoughts, commentaries, explanations, and exegetical materials set forth by the Rabbis, since the time of the Talmud, to this day. And yes, absolutely, those things do and must have an effect on my faith. But, as I was just discussing in a Jewish Law class the other day, all the authorities are very clear that the Torah is designed to be interpreted (for example, in Tractate Pirke Avot of the Mishnah, Ch 5, mishnah 22, Ben Bag-Bag, a rabbi of the early first century CE, is quoted as teaching, "Examine it [The Torah], and re-examine it, for every thing may be found within it." This is universally taken to mean that the Torah contains infinite levels of potential meaning, and thus not only is the most literal surface reading not "the only reading," it is the duty of each Jew to seek for what the newest, deeper meaning may be); and in the matter of how one is to interpret Jewish Law, one need not be a rabbi, or consult a rabbi, merely be learned in Torah and halakhah (Jewish Law). The initial convention of legal interpretation is that in the absence of reasons to re-examine the interpretation and decision in a certain matter, one follows the most recent authority upon whom one usually would rely. However, most authorities are very clear that any rabbi may, if they see any legitimate reason, re-interpret the law, even if it means overturning precedents of long standing, even if it means overruling widely respected decisors, like the Rambam (Maimonides) or the Shulchan Aruch (R. Yosef Karo). Only Torah and Talmud may not be overturned, although these may be on rare occasion reinterpreted so radically as to turn the meaning 180 degrees from its origin.

My point in saying this is that yes, Judaism does indeed encourage the use of other and previous rabbis as authorities. But ultimately, it is a cornerstone of halakhah that any Jew who has taken the trouble to educate himself in sacred text may decide the interpretation of their religious practice for themselves, and even for others, if others should ask them.

To put it another way-- personally-- I was raised Orthodox, and then became an agnostic (verging on atheism) for many years. When I began questing for spiritual fulfillment again, Judaism was not the first place I looked. I actually had an excellent chance of ending up a Druid instead of a rabbi. What brought me back was not simply a matter of this being the faith of my family, it was a decision that I believed in God, but I wanted a spiritual system of certain spiritual and rational characteristics to help me frame my interaction with God and the universe. Judaism was the system that stood out to me as being the most promising happy medium between a communal, formalized system of theology, spirituality, and moral/ethical guidelines without having a hierarchical, rigid leadership, or an inflexible, simplistic way of looking at sacred text and theology. But it was a choice I made, consciously, for very careful reasons. And at all times I was aware that I was committing myself to a system that, while arational at its basis, nonetheless is dependent upon dedicated education.

I continue to think that we cannot gauge accurately the real effect of religions on humanity as a whole until the practitioners of all religions actually educate themselves and practice truly informed religion.

I believe the problem here is precisely what you don't say. The majority of Christians don't believe in evolution, you say. But if I have done my reading properly, I believe you mean the majority of Christians in the United States. The last time I spoke with a European Christian, he was, to be quite frank, aghast at the state of Christianity in America. The problem, he pointed out-- and I confess, though I am an outsider, from what I have seen, I would tend to agree-- is not that American Christians are bad people, or even necessarily bad Christians. But they are woefully uneducated about Christianity, tending to adhere to whatever their own priest or pastor tells them, and refraining from questioning or confronting. I personally chalk this up to the majority of Americans being woefully under-educated about everything, although I am sure that one could no doubt find well-educated fundamentalists-- some people just crave inflexibility.

I stress again that I believe the problems you cite are not inherent to religion. They are inherent to ignorance. I believe in the possibilities of the former; the latter, I would be only too happy to eradicate.

I don't disagree-- no Jew is going to defend the Crusades, believe me. But I would hope it is not merely blind optimism to say that we have progressed since the time of the Crusades, and with continued education and eradication of social ills, such things will be ever less likely to recur. But at the same time, I continue to believe that in the absence of religion, anything else would have-- and often did-- serve as a rallying cry. How many Americans, for example, are currently putting their lives at risk, coming home short of limbs or in boxes, and killing others, all in the name of "freedom" and "democracy?" And yet, because those terms are being misused to justify pointless war, does not mean I would say they are meaningless terms, or that we should dispense with the ideas they represent. On the contrary: we should, I believe, work to reclaim those terms, so that they once again (or at least come to for the first time) mean what we wish them to mean. Even so, what we ought to dispense with is not religion or God altogether, but the misuse of religion and the abuse of God's name (so to speak).

No worries, I assumed it was an accident.

Look, I won't lie and say that there are no verses in the Torah which seem problematic. But many of those, we are taught by the Rabbis of the Talmud, do not mean what they seem to mean on first reading. And yet, I would be dishonest if I said that the verses in the Torah regarding the conquest of the Land of Israel, and the elimination of the idolatrous tribes therein were not originally intended to be taken literally. However, we have at least understood that there are mitigating limitations on them. According to Rabbi Shimon ben Meir (commentator and halakhist, Provence, 13th century), and many other authorities, the command to conquer the land and eliminate the idolatrous tribes therein was a one-time occurrence. He explains that we are forbidden from taking those verses as legal precedent to do further violence to anyone else: they were a special case, and could be elucidated at the time by virtue of Moses and Joshua being prophets of high rank, who could ask God directly for clarification. Rashbam (R. Shimon's acronym) says that until we have such a prophet among us again (i.e., when the messiah comes), we are forbidden from any wars that are not conducted in self-defense.

And as regards the many sins and trespasses for which the Torah prescribes capital punishment, the Talmud teaches us that in most of those cases, such a punishment was either not enforced, or it was "mita b'yedei shamayim," "death at the hands of Heaven," meaning that if the punishment were to be enforced, it would not be by human hands, but by God striking down the transgressor: if God did not do so, that was His business, not ours. But even in those matters that were considered capital crimes, it is a well-established matter of Talmudic law that no death penalty could be meted out by a Jewish court without the eyewitness testimony of two witnesses, who would have had to have verbally warned the defendant "this action you are about to do is forbidden, and carries the death penalty;" and the defendant would have had to respond to them, "I know, but I will do it anyway," and then do the action. Without such testimony, the death penalty was not enforced. The Talmud cites Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest of the Sages of the time, who noted, "A Sanhedrin [court of capital jurisdiction] that executes one man is seventy years is called a 'bloody court.' If I were sitting upon the court, no man would ever be executed, for who could ever be certain?"

Obviously, I cannot answer for Christianity and Islam: I do not understand their texts and history well enough to either respond for them or judge them. But at least according to how Jews perceive their covenant with God, God does not actually want death, and has asked for it less than a surface reading of the Torah might seem to indicate. And while I can't speak for Christianity or Islam, or what God may or may not have said to their prophets, I personally do not believe that the God I know and believe in would desire needless bloodshed. There is a famous midrash (exegetical parable) concerning the incident of the parting of the Red Sea, when God caused a miracle to allow the Israelites to cross the sea on dry land, and then caused the waters to flow back after them, drowning the Egyptians who were pursuing them to re-enslave them. The Israelites danced and sang on the shore of the sea, and-- this midrash tells us-- the angels in Heaven wished to rejoice with them. But when they began singing and dancing, God ordered them, "Be silent! Do not rejoice when my creations are dying in the sea!" The well-known lesson that comes from this midrash is that God may or may not sometimes understand that violence may be necessary. But he doesn't like it, and no one should ever make merry in it, because even if it is required for self-preservation or justice, it is a terrible thing when God's creations are killed.

Yes, I'm sure nobody has ever gone on a jihad in Einstein's name. But I think you know that what I meant was that reason can easily come up with any number of substitute causes or goals for which to kill people. And, indeed, have we never seen those who would kill the helpless, or the disabled, or the impoverished, in the name of "progress?"

Fair enough.

Right, but as I've said to many others, if you're reading Genesis to learn about cosmology, biology, geology, or any other kind of science, you're reading Genesis for all the wrong reasons. There is an old and well-established rule of thumb for exegetical commentary upon the Torah, set forth in the Midrash, and in the Talmud: "Dibra Torah k'lashon b'nei Adam." "The Torah speaks like people speak." Or, to put it differently, the surface text of the Torah is couched in the style and at the level of those to whom it was initially given. Also, the Torah may be revelatory (i.e., the information in it may have a Divine origin) but it was given through human prophets, who attempted to pass on as best they could what they were told. But prophecy isn't like a phone call from God. It's subtle, visionary (so we're told), and probably confusing. The prophets had to interpret using the language and ideas that they were familiar with. By today's standards those ideas and linguistic choices may seem antiquated. That is why we are taught not to be satisfied with the surface meaning of the text, but to constantly re-examine it, looking for new and deeper meanings.

But also-- and I don't mean to be offensive to you or anyone else-- I have noticed that many people who are dissatisfied with the Bible are expecting things from it that it was simply never designed to give. The Bible, at least as I was taught to understand it, is not there to be a science textbook, or any other kind of textbook. It is there to be a foundation-- not an end in itself but a beginning-- of a system of how to formulate rules and boundaries in society in order to live ethically, and to promote spirituality in order to draw closer to God (deeply interconnected with the former usage, as God, we are taught, loves ethical behavior). If you are learning science out of it, you're not using it correctly. And that's hardly a novel idea: the Rambam (Maimonides) once pointed out that, if the Torah seems to be saying something that contradicts all common sense, and everything that we know about how the world works, both from our own experience and from our studies of science, then we must not be understanding the Torah correctly, and we should go back and search for the correct meaning, which will not do this.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)