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... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.
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Now that I think about it, your screen name should have been a dead giveaway that you were legit. C'est la vi.
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Originally Posted by levite
Well played, sir! A fine rejoinder! I see you are a very well-educated person.
/snip, we are told, by Jewish law, to interpret it for ourselves
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Actually, many religions try to make the idea of interpreting scripture for one's self clear, but unfortunately that lesson often disappears. Not only that, but having formerly been a part of a flock I feel I understand just how defensive one can get. That 4 week argument of mine with my Bio teacher is a good example. Ustwo will tell you I'm still stubborn, but I made the determination right after that magnificent debate that my own stubbornness cannot get in the way of me believing what's true or doing what's right. What that eventually meant was that I needed to be honest with myself about the arguments for the existence of god or gods.
Maybe I should ask this: why do you believe the Torah is right?
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Originally Posted by levite
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.
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Maybe it's the fact that I'm in the middle of the problem that's ruined my global objectivity. I see the American Christians every day. I'm even related to a few. I'm not exposed to this "European Christian". I should really speak with one. I should tell you, though, that Creationists are not necessarily uneducated about religion. My father is getting his doctorate in divinity and he is actually wrestling with the question of evolution. He is among the most respected spiritual leaders in his synod. He is also considered to be somewhat progressive, even though he condemns gay people as sinners and such.
I should say that imho believing that evolution is wrong is about the same as believing that the universe has a creator. I don't see a difference. All I see is a suspension of logic in order to facilitate in the belief in a faith.
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Originally Posted by levite
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).
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There really aren't a lot of atheists in the military, though (in the US). 15% of Americans are atheists, but I remember reading that less than 4% of military officers are atheist or are non-religious. I'm not sure if it's because an atheist is less likely to be swayed by appeals to emotion or appeals to (insert fallacy here), but it's interesting. And it's not like it's political, either. Ustwo and I could not be more different from a political standpoint, but were are both atheists. We have a fundamentalist president calling Iraqi's "evil" and talking about god... it's hard for me to see the crusades and the "War on Terror" as distinct.
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Originally Posted by levite
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.
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I must say, looking at your first response, wouldn't it be easy for a Jewish person to read that and interpret it literally, as it is their responsibility to interpret scripture for him or herself? I wonder this when I see reports of bulldozers in Palestinian settlements destroying the homes of civilians. I don't say this to by anti-Zionist or whatever, but rather to illustrate my point. While you or I may read the Torah and see messages of peace, understanding, and harmony, someone else may see something different altogether.
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Originally Posted by levite
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?"
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This is true. I'll actually give you a bit of ammunition by mentioning Stalin, but I would have to expand just a bit. Marx wanted Communism to be atheist. He was of the opinion that man should be the supreme being (the proper name is Humanist, but he predated that term) because man could be reasoned and explained, whereas god existed in an absence of reason.
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Originally Posted by Karl Marx
"Take paper money to a country in which this use of paper money is not known, and everyone will laugh at your subjective representation. Go with your gods to a country in which other gods are worshipped, and you will be shown that you are the victim of fancies and abstractions. And rightly. Anyone who had brought a migrant god to the ancient Greeks, would have found the proof of the non-existence of this god, because it did not exist for the Greeks. What is the case in a certain country for certain foreign gods, takes place for god in general in the country of reason: it is an area in which his existence ceases"
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( Frammento dell'appendice della dissertazione dottorale, in A. Sabetti, Sulla fondazione del materialismo storico, Florence 1962, p. 415
Unfortunately, Stalin was a madman who was obsessed with power and actually managed to make a pseudo-god of himself. He erected statues and used catechistic language in his speeches. He was a victim of his own lust for power combined with his religious upbringing (he attended Russian orthodox seminary).
I apologize for making an argument for you and taking it apart, but I've been meaning to address Stalin in this thread for a while.
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Originally Posted by levite
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.
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You should get a prize for using Greek on an internet forum.
Christians and Muslims are usually taught that the words of their respective texts are the exact word of god, though. I'll admit that I've definitely not studied Judaism as much as you, but I have been to temple many times and I don't remember ever hearing that. Is this common knowledge among Jews?
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Originally Posted by levite
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.
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Now that I feel I understand the Bible, I am satisfied with what it delivers. I see it along the same lines as I see Homer's Odyssey. It's an ancient book of stories. When I was a Christian I was expecting it to be a mirror for me and a wikipedia article on god. It worked out most of the time, though OT god scared the shit out of me. |