Moderate members of organized religions must necessarily reject a sizable chunk of official doctrine, and then we look weak to people on both sides of the religious debate, who accuse moderates of "cherry picking." I can find no way around the cherrypicking conundrum.
There is no way around it. The dilemma is untenable: If you’re picking and choosing which divine truths to accept, you are asserting your own judgment over a supposedly divine source. Cloaked under the veil of “interpretation,” or to a lesser extent “translation,” this is a major contradiction.
If, on the other hand, one grants oneself the authority to pick and choose from the holy book, then the validity of the entire book is called into question. From this we get clever explanations such as the premise that the Bible was written in the vernacular of people who lived centuries ago, so as to be
comprehensible to them, but it is still not enough to overcome that fundamental dilemma: Either the book must be taken literally, or it must be taken as just another book.
Consider a hypothetical Earth where a religion arises to claim that Star Trek depicts the actual future that will meet us in the coming centuries. Let’s say that Gene Roddenberry, “The Great Bird of the Galaxy,” who created this future, is that religion’s god. Now, when looking for truths about this future, one will look very closely at the Episodes of Trek, and may notice confusing or inconsistent things about it. For instance, the infamous Klingon forehead ridges. The Klingons didn’t originally have them, because of budget constraints. Much like a biblical self-contradiction, this would no doubt cause much spiritual conflict for the Trekkerites.
They would be tempted to extrapolate or deduce an explanation. (Much like occurred on the show Enterprise several years ago.) Perhaps the Klingons displeased the Great Bird and were punished with disfiguration. Or perhaps the Klingons seen in the original Star Trek were a different racial branch than those that appeared afterward. Perhaps the Klingons had ridges all along, but those were left out of the original Star Trek for divine reasons.
Yet surely the trouble with this is clear: None of those explanations has any canonical support. They’re all guesses, in the end, however well they answer the question.
You see, when it comes to the claim that a book is divine and therefore is the source of validation for one’s whole religion, one mustn’t—
mustn’t—put one’s own interpretation into that source at all, because to do so implies that the work in question
is open to interpretation, and thus is not a literal truth. Any divine source must be taken absolutely literally. For instance, one cannot simply make up the notion that the Klingons of the original Star Trek did not have forehead ridges because the people of Earth in the 1960s would have been distracted or confused by these, and thus put off from the Great Bird’s message. To introduce even one ambiguity of interpretation is to open up the entire world of Star Trek to “death by interpretation” via charges of fiction, metaphor, and ambiguity.
Religious moderates—or religious extremists, or any religion person, really—when attempting to reconcile their own attitudes with the rules, guidelines, values, and tenets of their religion, must indeed cherrypick, because the practical considerations of life require it. Nevertheless, in so doing, they undermine themselves logically.
Not that they care. After all, religion is believing that you’re right about the Most Important Thing. Overlooking one tiny logical error, however grievous, is not a problem for the devout.
'Big Bang', though an excellent theory (and likely fact) is a how, not a why. It is no different than saying 'why am I sitting here? Because my legs are bent in this position, becauase my but is on the chair' (to borrow roughly an example from Plato)... but no, that's the HOW, not the why. And that's something the Big Bang doesn't give. It doesn't say why it happened. Now, I admit you can say 'it just did.' But is that an acceptable answer?
I wrote an essay on this a while back. The bottom line is that “Why?” is a question that only applies to events or conditions that were brought about at least partly out of
willful intent. For instance, why did the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor? Because they wanted to develop and protect their access to natural resources, and the US Pacific Fleet was a threat to that. But ask, why are there hurricanes? There is no answer to that. It is a nonsense questions. Ask
how, and the answer is climatological, but “why” has no place.
This is, at least in part, a fault of English. We often ask “Why?” when we mean “How?” and it leads us to presume that “Why?” can be applied to any possible phenomenon, when of course that is not true.
Another way to put it is thus: All
created knowledge can be queried with “Why?” but no
discovered knowledge can be so queried.
Thus, to seek to apply “Why?” to something like the Big Bang, whose occurrence has no known component based in intent, is an impossible quest. It is perfectly acceptable for the universe to have mostly no whys, because only willful minds can create intent, and the universe was in short supply of those when it began. Indeed, it is a needless complication to impose a value of intention on any given phenomenon, unless there is demonstrable cause to do so. If the universe simply began, then why bother postulating a beginning mechanism? Because time and space “break down” when evaluated to the earliest moments of history, there are no eternities and no causalities that we are yet competent to consider.
I would also check you on your lazy usage of the terms “fact” and “theory.” In science, a fact is simply a piece of observed empirical data. A theory is an attempt to explain a phenomenon by following the scientific method. A good theory will be supported by a collection of facts, and will be both testable and falsifiable (and thus verifiable) by making a quantifiable prediction which can then be evaluated on the basis of its consistency with the corresponding facts.
In science, facts are nuts and bolts while theories are great machines. A good theory will do a lot of hard work in terms of explaining the operation of (some part of) the universe.
Maybe to you. But then you've set up some idea of what a first cause is, and that is no less complex than the idea of a single entity who put it into motion. Occam's razor, in fact, in this very matter, is used to show how God is the simpler explanation.
I wasn’t aware that Ockham made that particular argument. (I think you are mixing up Occam’s razor with the cosmological argument for the existence of god.) But if he did make that argument, then he violated his own principle…which I suppose is understandable, given the limited knowledge available to him in the 14th century.
You're making the mistake of over-romanticising ancient Greece and its philosophy.
I may not be a Grecophile like you, but I know enough to know that it would be difficult to overstate classical Greece’s contribution to the world. That much should be obvious to anybody who has studied the first page of its surviving architecture, artworks, mathematics, literature, and philosophy. Granted, you were addressing Zeppy’s romantic casting of Greece, but, romantic or not, I think some glorification is certainly in order.
Atheism isn't a force, it isn't a dogma, it isn't some lifestyle. It is a completely blank slate. It is whatever you want to do. You can be an atheist and kill millions of people, and you can be an atheist and save millions of people.
Well put, and worth repeating. Atheism is simply the rejection of a very specific premise. It says nothing else about the person making the rejection. I have encountered very few religious people who understand that.
Antireligiousness is not the same thing as nonreligiosity. Anyone who conflates the two—regardless of who they are—is committing a language error.
Anywho, I am rather heavily biased against math (despite the fact that I actually excelled in it in school with great ease) so I am in no way well suited to debate the merits of it, but just to explain my own disliking.
The Radical Dreamer was right. Math is true in a sense that few things are. When free of human error, it can describe any conceivable relationship. Math is the language of the universe. It does not exist in the sense of having physical form, and it can certainly be misapplied as you described, or it can simply be botched. Moreover, our understanding of math is simply our own interpretation, right down to the symbols and rules. Yet however written, and however perceived, mathematical truths are fundamental. What exactly is it that you are biased against?
No, I am NOT a sexist though.
We all are. Even me. It’s built into the culture. The precedent is in our very genes. Accept it, and become a better person for it.
You are probably thinking of a “sexist” as some kind of villain, as if the person in question deliberately chooses to be a sexist. That is true often enough, but, even more often, people simply do not realize that some of their attitudes and behaviors are sexist.
Sexism—both misogyny and misandry, but especially the former—are ubiquitous in human society. And yet the very day humanity rose out from its animal past and began structuring its behavior rationally, the
justification for sex-specific behaviors evaporated. As humans became sentient, we developed the ability to desire for ourselves our own destiny, at the individual level. All classifications of people are problematic in some regard or another, but none is more odious than the crass sexual division of the human species right down its middle.
I will tell you something important about the differences between the sexes: Males have sperm, and females have eggs. Put ‘em together and you get a new human.
There. That’s all you need to know. That’s the only reasonable sex-specific limitation on human behavior. (And even
that won’t last for long!) Any other judgments on how a person ought to behave or live their lives based on their sex are pure rubbish.
Yet these other judgments persist. We have gone so far as to formulate hypothetical classes of people—men and women—based upon the construct of gender (as opposed to biological sex). Through this vehicle we have our vaunted “gender roles,” which have been the source of so much misery I can’t even tell you. The very idea of a “woman” (or a “man”) gives us a lens through which our worldview becomes sexist automatically. We are all sexists.
The only way out is awareness and self-discipline. It gets easier with time, though. But first you have to admit that you, like the rest of us, are vulnerable to sexism.
Like Gloria Steinem said, the truth will set you free…but first it will piss you off.
There's so much "vacuous truth" here it's not even funny.
I call bullshit on your self-righteousness. While there is certainly no lack of untruth and mistruth in this thread, your remarks insinuate a judgment that I do not think you are qualified to make. Consider this:
As such, there have been a lot of personal claims that go something like this: "You are this ... I would know." That's complete bullshit. This is an internet forum; despite the validity and realism behind these in-depth conversations, the fact that one would claim to understand how someone works and acts and thinks through this forum is a joke. That is a pure fallacy and you are jaded to believe it (just a reminder: this REALLY isn't towards anyone in particular; look through the past eight pages and you'll see a lot of it going on).
Now, it’s nothing personal, but if you honestly think there is nothing to be learned about a person from what they write down, and how they respond, then you are laboring under a false assumption.
Remember that learning is not as simple as going out and collecting truths. True learning is haphazard by nature. I don’t think any of us could claim to fully and absolutely know anybody else here, but neither has anybody made such a claim. You are now the second person in recent posts to suggest that there is no middle area in between totally knowing a person and knowing nothing about them.
Foolishness.
I grant you that the various assessments of others as seen in this thread are of varying actuality. ZeaLitY is probably a safe example of someone who doesn’t perceive other people very well. Krispin is also a good example. Thought is much better at it, and so am I. Each of us, of course, is limited by our own judgment when we attempt to determine whose assessments are pretty good and whose are not so good, and thus I understand the spirit in which your protestation is made: Why cause such a mess at all by presuming to know about other people?
Fair enough; that’s a legitimate complaint in the cases of certain people. However, your energies would be better spent focusing on the parts of the discussion that benefit you. Folks like me will do the same, and the result is a larger discussion, of which portions may not be suitable for everybody.
We westerners typically associate the hijab with misogyny (hatred of women) but I see within it a subtle and dangerous misandry (hatred of men). If women are forced to be segregated from men and disguise themselves in public, it is because the host society expects men to be animalistic beasts who can't handle themselves around the feminine form.
That’s the line, isn’t it. You’ll find the same thing in Christianity and Judaism. “Men are weak, so we’ve got to oppress women.” That’s garbage, and it’s such a bald-faced lie that I can’t believe people actually get away with it.
What is true is that, in the past, authorities had a harder time keeping the peace, and had to impose much stricter social controls than we would accept today. To cut down on perceived crimes, many of which were sex crimes, strict controls were imposed on people according to their sex. Males, being in charge of the society, naturally applied most of the penalties to females than to themselves—not necessarily out of malice, but out of ignorance, out of a lack of understanding for the other party’s humanity.
All of the Abrahamic religions tend to suffer from sexism much more extremely (and harshly) than many other religions. I needn’t go into what life is like in much of the modern Islamic world. So, too, do you probably know of many of the abuses in our own Christianized society. To those I might add that, in Judaism, females are also disrespected and disenfranchised, serially. To name just one of so many examples, in orthodox Jewish practice, males and females aren’t even allowed to sit together at worship. The females are allowed to see the males, but not vice versa. It’s the same premise as the hijab, but less punitive for females. (No less sexist, though.) One of my brothers builds the actual partitions that allow one-way vision.
What it all comes down to is a simple, ugly truth, which I propose to you know: Blaming males for being weak is an excellent rationale for mistreating females. It diverts attention. The best contemporary example are those vile people who blame females who wear revealing clothing for being raped. “Oh, that poor man was tempted! He couldn’t help himself! Stupid whore deserved what she got.”
If so, I think it's curious -- placing the blame for sin on the first man, whereas Judaism and Christianity place the blame for sin on the first woman.
Judaism is far less obsessed with the concept of sin than Christianity is. However, like you say, Eve still gets the blame for ruining humanity. Now, our good friend Thought has a different take:
I actually discussed this matter rather recently with an Orthodox Jew. According to him, like the above, Adam, not Eve, was blamed for original sin. Indeed, women in general are supposedly seen as morally superior to men; numerous laws that apply to men do not apply to women since men are the ones who need the guidance (and women are more likely to naturally do good).
As somebody who was raised in the Reform (i.e., socially progressive) tradition of Judaism, and who knows and is family to a number of Conservative (i.e., traditionalist) and Orthodox (i.e., fundamentalist) Jews, I can confirm that it is often proclaimed, both casually and formally, and especially in the more conservative branches of Judaism, that females are morally superior or somehow more “pure” than males. Jewish females are even granted a marginally higher status than their Christian and Muslim counterparts. Also true, females are not expected to pray as strictly as males are (although they are expected to pray). Additionally, they are not held to many of the civic requirements imposed upon males, such as earning a living, participating in government, leading the people in worship.
However, do not be fooled by any of this. All of that supposed moral superiority does not translate into meaningful freedom. Females are still regarded as the weaker, less competent sex. The discrimination against Jewish females is quite intense and should not be neglected just because Christian and Muslim females have it so much worse. What Jewish females’ alleged “higher status” mostly boils down to is that they are supposed to be treated better by their husbands and male keepers than are females in the other two religions. They are not granted anything like autonomy or sexual parity. They are not required to earn a living because they are not allowed to have that degree of independence. Ditto participating in the government and leading the people in prayer. (In the Orthodox community, for instance, the bat mitzvah—the female equivalent of the bar mitzvah—is more of a celebratory time than a religious event.) In Orthodox Judaism, unrelated males and females are encouraged not to be together alone, and are not allowed to touch each other, even to the point of a handshake. Females are declared “unclean” for half the month because of their periods. Females are not allowed to share in the mastery of their home; they are subordinate to their husbands. They were, until recently, expected to marry and submit to this dominance. Every morning during in-house prayer, males recite a prayer to their god that specifically states: “Thank you for not having made me a woman.” (Females recite, “Thank you for having made me according to your will.”)
That pretty much sums it up.
Now, as for the notion that, in Judaism, Adam committed the original sin…I’ve never heard it. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t out there, but I am inclined to suspect revisionism. Like other religious fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews find themselves in a rapidly liberalizing world, and feel defensive about their customs as ordinary people move further and further away from them in ideology. Just as in Christianity there have arisen many apologists who justify Christian abuses against females by blaming
males, so too are there those apologists in Judaism who pursue the same tactic. There are rabbis, scholars, political figures…everything we see here in America. Change the names, and it’s all the same.
For what my information is worth, no mainline tradition of Judaism has ever taught that Adam was the original sinner. That premise, to the extent it existed at all, was always on the fringes of Jewish orthodoxy.
For more information I am afraid you will have to read the Mishnah, one of the major pillars of Talmudic literature. I might direct you to Nashim (the title literally means “women”), a section of the book detailing the role of women and many related domestic issues. Absolutely you should not take it as the full representation of Jewish attitudes on females, but it makes a good starting point for understanding the perception of females in Jewish society, and the Mishnah is usually not well-known outside of Judaism, excepting Judaic scholars.
As for direct commentary on the original sin, you should really pick up a good annotated copy of the Torah, for starters, including the Haftorah. Some of the commentaries are very insightful.
In fact, for a better understanding of Judaism in general, not only historically but contemporarily, and for a Jewish perspective on many elements of Christianity and Islam, heartily recommend Plaut, which I received as a gift from the synagogue at my Bar Mitzvah.
Check it out here, or you can even
buy it.
