Baal Habos
i never had a problem taking off my uncomfortable and silly tzitzit.
> i never had a problem taking off my uncomfortable and silly tzitzit.
This is a don't ask don't tell blog!
But I'd still much rather hear about your tzitit than Jacob Stein's extracurricular 4 am activities -
http://www.haloscan.com/comments.../?
src=hsr#44943
What happens when you lose faith in Darwin?
> What happens when you lose faith in Darwin?
What does that have to do with my post? Either way, I'll spell it out for you one last time. My skepticism about OJ is firmly rooted even without any support from Darwin or Evolutionary theory.
And about the deleted comments, I ask mechila from you before Yom Kippur about those 
"What does that have to do with my post?"
That's basically what happened to me. I lost faith in the evil cult known as atheism.
> I lost faith in the evil cult known as atheism.
Like a say to all believers, 'if God works for you zulst zein gebentcht'.
What I love about religion is that it's self correcting. I used to believe in evolution, I found out that was wrong and now I believe in God. I love being proven wrong, unlike some dogmatic, closed minded scientists.
> What I love about religion is that it's self correcting. I used to believe in evolution, I found out that was wrong and now I believe in God. I love being proven wrong, unlike some dogmatic, closed minded scientists.
ROFL. What I love about religionists is that they love to co-opt the scientific lingo and attempt to adapt it. Yes, religion is self-correcting in that it changes (evolves) in reaction to it's surroundings, but then distorts the past to make it appear that it was always that way. That's not self-correction but adaption.
I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is for atheists to claim to be open minded truth seekers while anyone believing in God is a close minded bigot. Could possibly the opposite be the case? There are hundreds of people from secular societies escaping to Judaism.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/or...rsiontojudaism/
I agree with you on both counts!
A) But please show me where skeptics or Atheists claim that anyone who believes in God is a closed minded bigot.
B) I can't blame anyone who is secular who seeks any sort of spirituality. Secularity is not comforting like dancing on Simchas Torah or walking your child down the chupah or even saying Kaddish. Secularity can be quite sterile.
We're at least delusional, if not just liars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D...h?
v=DMqTEfeqvmM
Of course, I have my own opinion about atheism.
http://jewishphilosopher.blogspo...n-
nutshell.html
OK, you can have the last word (above), since we're not going to get anywhere.
Baal you say you are more of a skeptic now. While I do not know what fully motivated you into skepticism I do know that you eventually swallowed your skepticism for the sake of conformity and accepted the JEDP hypothesis as well as Evolution and do not wish to be wrong about your skepticism or more accurately your alternate belief system. If you are more skeptical you will examine each case on its own merits.
Also strictly speaking science is not self-correcting. It is scientists who when open to correction will be. There are no guarantees. They are not preprogramed robots. They deserve praise for their accomplishments.
Since being away from the skeptic blog world I have seen the real world. In the artificial bubble of the skeptic blog world arguments make sense depending on who is dominating enough. Without anyone in the real world to bounce off your ideas to make sure they're not crap you can appear to make sense to others with arguments that are nonsense to regular skeptics let alone believers. The overthrow of that TRex theory proceeded along lines that make no real sense according to your worldview. A well accepted theory should have according to you been proof enough. This was no minor TRex theory. Anyway Gmar Tov.
Maybe I will reply back and forth wth you and maybe not.
Good wishes from a tired but happy Rabban Gamliel I can't believe I am even writing. Ok click publish now before I change my mind.
RG! Welcome back, to what will probably be my last post for many months; except for my goodbye post, of course. You're right, there really is no sense in these debates. Have a Gmar Chasima Tova!
Hi guys. There's two parts to any worldview: explaining your affirmative beliefs and explaining your negative beliefs.
I think the skeptical debates are inherently more interesting, especially for those in the Orthodox world. But what about the other half. What do you affirmatively believe about Judaism. What practices do you practice, and why? How is this meaningful to you?
XGH seems to have partially shifted in this direction and seems happier. He has not deleted his blog in months. I have tried to strike a balance between the two. Little Foxling seemed to have focused exclusively on the negative side and got burned out.
Maybe try blogging this way for a while and see if it works. (And Sukkot is a good place to start.)
Shabbat shalom, v gmar tov.
>What do you affirmatively believe about Judaism. What practices do you practice, and why? How is this meaningful to you?
Very little. I mean there are good messages in there, but when I'm stuck in a Chareidi-like community, there is no meaning in any of it. It's truduging off to Shul numerous times (a day?), hearing ever increasing Chareidi rhetoric. Bah.
Gmar Tov, though.
"RG! Welcome back, to what will probably be my last post for many months; except for my goodbye post, of course. You're right, there really is no sense in these debates. Have a Gmar Chasima Tova!
Baal Habos"
It's a pleasure exchanging a few words with you! Gmar Chasima Tova!
how nice to see an exchange of a few pleasant words.
"there is no meaning in any of it"
What meaning would you find in atheism either?
You're born. You scratch yourself. You die.
That's about it.
>What meaning would you find in atheism either?
As usual, you miss the nuance here. Believe it or not, despite all my reading about God, as unlikely as God is, I still have a "wishful thinking" attitute about a God. It's Orthodox Judaism that I am stuck in, despite it's obvious falsity. My situation, stuck in a chareidi-type of neighborhood and lifestyle, does not permit me to even explore other facets of spirituality such as Reconstructionism or Buddhism.
I'm afraid I don't understand it. To stand up every week in front of your family, hold the cup of wine and say
"Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, has desired us, and has given us, in love and good will, His holy Shabbat as a heritage, in remembrance of the work of Creation; the first of the holy festivals, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. For You have chosen us and sanctified us from among all the nations, and with love and good will given us Your holy Shabbat as a heritage. Blessed are You, Lord, who sanctifies the Shabbat."
and not believe a word of it.
How is that different from a priest who celebrates mass while not believing in God, because he doesn't want to lose his job?
It's just hypocrisy.
>It's just hypocrisy.
Agreed. And that's life. I have our closed-minded society to blame for that.
A) I don't want to lose my family and social circle.
B) I can say with almost 99.9999% certainty that my family is happier with the hypocrisy than if I'd come out and tell them and the world of my heresies. It would wreak havoc, much worse than an OTD child does in a frum family. I regret telling my wife. It was a moment of weakness on my part. The bottom line is that you make kiddish to please some invisible entity in the sky that may not even exist. My making kiddush pleases my wife and family. Which is the bigger Mitzvah?
Now if I could turn the clock back, that would be a different story. But I can't. So when I'm working with lemons, I make lemon-juice.
Make lemonaid.
You can say it AND believe it if you adopt a non-fundamentalist view of God and commandments.
If someone says "God says don't steal", you tend to focus on the verb, the act of "saying." You have an image of a deep booming voice saying "DON'T STEAL!"
But suppose you think of God as more ephemeral. This of God --- at a minimum --- as the abstract standard of Goodness. So it becomes "Goodness says don't steal." It is trivially true, and the focus now shifts to the relationships between goodness and not stealing.
And the focus partially shifts to how you can bring this goodness into the world. And this is not limited to moral goodness. It includes all kinds of goodness. (Think Plato's form of the good for a helpful but imperfect analogy.)
So when you say kiddush, think about goodness sanctifying you with commandments. Not in a literal sense of commanding in a deep voice on a mountain with smoke and fire, but in the persuasive sense of providing a path, a derech, where you can bring goodness into the world. Still small voice, and all. And you are with your family, and maybe some friends, and you are having wine and bread and dinner, and you are shutting out the outside world and focusing on your intimate relationships and enjoying yourself. This is what life is about. And --- if you do it right --- goodness is in fact sanctifying shabbat.
The problem, in its most general sense, is that modernity has given traditional Judaism, a serious body slam to the floor. If you keep thinking in pre-modern (i.e., medieval ways), you will continue to encounter problems. Judaism needs to move forward, not backwards. And the simplistic fundamentalist views of things are not sustainable or credible for many people (including me). But there are lots of babies in that bathwater.
"I don't want to lose my family and social circle."
Unless you're so old and feeble that you can't get out of bed, there is no reason you can't start over again in your new, enlightened world, where ever that is. Shouldn't you be much better off in the "open minded", "honest" secular world?
"my family is happier with the hypocrisy than if I'd come out and tell them and the world of my heresies"
According to you, it's not heresy. According to you it's the "obvious truth". If it's really so clear to you, why do you imagine everyone else is so delusional? And if they are, isn't that their fault not yours? So what do you have to feel guilty about? [Besides the fact that an athiest should never feel guilty anyway.]
This is why I suspect your entire story is fictional, to be honest. It just doesn't add up.
Jacob, we're going over old ground. Again.
Bruce, I hear you. It's something for me to aspire too. 
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