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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s&feature=player_embedded

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Maybe the psalmist didn’t really mean it. But he allowed the verses to be preserved, and they were eventually written down and made canonical. That’s just one tiny example out of many where religions – ours no more or less – are blood thirsty, murderous and preach destruction to the outsider.

It’s not a Jewish thing. It’s a human thing. When we create gods in our own image they usually don’t represent the best of ourselves. My rant about “Deep Idolatry and the Mirror in the Ark” is one for another time. Suffice it to say there’s a reason the mystics say the most insidious form of that particular sin is making an idol out of your religion.

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I must take exception to your depiction of this verse. As far as I know, scholars consider this an emotional outburst, not to be taken at face value. It is regarded as antithetical to biblical theology. If the Psalmist (or editor) were into contemporary political correctedness, he would surely have removed it. In fact, Rav Oshry utters this statement in his sefer in reference to a horrific Nazi act, and his translator has wisely chosen to remove it. Nobody thinks Rav Oshry genuinely wished to see innocent children, even children of Nazis, being bashed against walls. Such statements are an outcry of a heart so anguished, it can barely endure the pain. To portray it as if this is truly what the Bible wants is deceiving.

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“Blessed is he who takes their babies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”

“Leave not one stone upon another.”

Kill the cattle, the men, the children, but leave enough captive girls to rape.

“Kill them all. The Lord will know his own.”

“Burn them. If their words are in the Quran they are redundant. If they are not in the Quran they are blasphemy.”

“They ought to know the yoke of perpetual enslavement because of their guilt. See to it that the perfidious Jews never in the future become insolent, but that they always suffer publicly the shame of their sin in servile fear.”

Multiply by ibn Wahab, the pogroms, stone-throwing charedim and so on.

You really don’t want to go there. Trust me.

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When I see something I don’t understand my response is “We don’t know what happened here. Let’s figure out what happened and why.” Every explanation starts off unproven and continues that way until the weight of evidence and the quality of the explanation are sufficient. And even then it can be changed.

As for God, I believe, as I said, for reasons which are sufficient for me. But it is nothing on which I would ask anyone else to base his or her faith.

Your position is somewhat different. Every unknown starts off as a miracle. “God did it.” Any other explanation must first pry the facts away from a fallback position to which you are emotionally attached rather than intellectually convinced. It is based, as you say, on “I believe because I believe.”

I believe because I believe is not just weak intellectually. It makes for a weak and immature faith as well. “Just because” is the protestation of a child, not the mature and grounded faith of a spiritually mature adult.

Belief doesn’t just spring up from nowhere. It comes from somewhere, from what your parents taught you, from learning Torah, from trust in people who tell you things, from experience, from still small voices and burning bushes. An inability to recognize that makes any progress or even meaningful conversation difficult. If the source of a belief is wrong it makes it impossible to identify and correct it or even to figure out where it rightfully applies.

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“If it turns out Mumbo Jumbo God of the Congo was really in charge the whole time we’re all screwed ”
Oh yes we are!!!

“The mileposts are the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, Stalin, the Klan, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and the Taliban.”
I am actually surprised you included Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung – some of the authors of the greatest wars in history – yet not religious (more like communist). And I’ll raise you Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler. Lets not make believe that all wars are in the name of G-d. Definitely not the “Jewish” G-d.

It seems your only concern is with the “approach to the truth.” I maintain that if the scientific path does not lead to the truth anyways, it makes no difference if the approach was done with an open mind. It might not be inferior to, but it definitely does not trump the religious approach.

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This may come as a surprise. I am not an atheist. I believe in what is beyond our comprehension, the numinous, that which still is when everything we have made up is stripped away. I see its fingerprints in the spin of atoms, the deaths of stars, a lover’s touch and the colors at the edge of shadows. My reasons for belief in the One I believe in are personal and to a great degree subjective, so it would be wrong to ask anyone to take them on faith. On the other side pure mechanistic materialism is an act of faith just as much as pure theism and just as unprovable.

Did God do it? Ultimately yes, I believe in that which we call God. But it is just belief. It is not knowledge. That belief can change as we learn more. If it turns out to be wrong, if the boundaries of what we must abandon include everything we thought had to be Divine that’s fine. I will have been incorrect which is the ultimate fate of every explanation. If it turns out Mumbo Jumbo God of the Congo was really in charge the whole time we’re all screwed

When anyone, even the wisest, draws an eternal line and says “On this side is what we can explain. On that side we say God did it,” it leads in one direction. The mileposts are the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, Stalin, the Klan, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and the Taliban. They are written in the blood of prophets and of the little child who said the Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes.

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You claim that it is more logical to live your life based on science because at least there is a methodology to its teachings. Yet we all agree that it is highly probable that many of those teachings will be deemed irrelevant or false in the future.

Don’t get me wrong – I always live my life based on what science tells me. I just think it illogical to say that science, because of its tested methods, always trumps religion – after all, we are but living for 100 years in a universe billions of years old. There is enough subjective logic to live your life by the word of an unproven G-d than to live by the word of an inevitably false science.

You write:
‘“Beyond this point you shall not question. Past these walls you may not look. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” When your fall-back position for everything you can’t understand is “The gods did it” instead of an honest “I don’t know. Let’s find out”’
What is wrong with saying that G-d did it? This is an answer that can explain everything, but it is only used to explain everything by fanatics. I believe G-d wants us to use our intellect to discover the hidden secrets of the natural world and this is the role of science. You falsely assume that science contradicts G-d while the opposite is true – it enhances Him. Science can explain many things – but what it cannot, there is nothing wrong with saying that it is by the hand of G-d. Science can explain a lot, for everything else there’s G-d.

It all boils down to the basic foundation of faith – do you believe in G-d or not?
But please don’t ridicule those that believe.

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