Comment author: HonoreDB 22 March 2012 03:13:42AM 18 points [-]

Thank you for continuing to engage.

Genocide is the correct term for what the Jewish people do in Numbers 31. After the war is over, Moses discovers that the military commanders have spared the women and children, and is wroth. Or, from the New International Version:

Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle. “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

This is meant as a destruction of their ethnicity to prevent them from tainting the Israelites, following commandments such as that in Deuteronomy 7:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.

There are plenty of other passages where the Israelites are described as killing "all the men, women, and children." Numbers 31 is notable to me because it makes it clear that this was not commonly accepted practice--it was something Moses had to specifically instruct. But really this is also demonstrated by the way that these sort of genocidal injunctions feel the need to spell out that mercy is not to be shown to the women and children.

If you'd rather not use the word genocide, we can of course substitute "killing a girl's entire family in front of her, then enslaving her," and multiply it by, in this case, sixteen thousand.

Comment author: Balofsky 23 March 2012 03:12:06AM 3 points [-]

I'll concede the use of the word genocide, since you're right: substituting "killing a girl's entire family in front of her and then enslaving her" sounds just as bad.

The accounts of wars recorded in the books of the Prophets and Writings often describe women and children being killed in war by surrounding nations, such as Babylonia, Persia and Assyria; it was, revoltingly, a common practice. The rule of war laid down in Deuteronomy 20:14 only allows the Jews to kill adult males in the course of war, and forbids the murder of women and children. The exceptions to this rule were the Canaanite nations and the Amalekites; wars against these nations made no exceptions for women and children. This is why Moses needed to give a specific order concerning the Midianites: the Israelite soldiers assumed that the women ought to be spared, in accordance with Deut. 20:14, and Moses basically informed them that the adult women who attempted to sexually engage with Jewish men in pagan rituals should be killed as any other enemy combatants. It should also be noted that Deut. 20:10 requires the Jews to always offer a peace settlement before laying siege or running into battle, including the Canaanites and Amalekites (Numbers 31 describes them doing this with the Midianites), and forbids the killing of any men, women or children if the peace offering is accepted. In the event the offer is turned down, it is still forbidden to surround the entire enemy camp, and anyone who wishes to flee must be allowed to flee unharmed.

I'd be lying if I were to claim to be entirely at peace with all this: I am not. But evidence for the assertion that the Torah views violence and war as okay, rather than something to be diminished gradually, still seems lacking. The hope for the eventual abolition of war, and for peace between nations, is repeated far too frequently and clearly in the Prophets for the assertion to hold, and the assertion clashes with how most Jews have historically felt about unnecessary violence, beyond their very early, formative period of their history.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 20 March 2012 03:11:26AM 14 points [-]

There's too much here for one man to refute all the wrong stuff, so I'll just take a whack at one chosen at random, and leave the rest for others.

First, it is only inevitable that ontological reductionism leads to ethical and existential nihilism. There is no materialistic reductionist approach to human nature, whether it is transhumanism, utilitarian hedonism, or Marxist sociology, which is capable of avoiding this problem.

This is not correct; or to the extent that it is, it applies equally to religious justifications of morality. The assertion that your god is the source of moral rules merely puts the question at one further remove: Why do you choose to obey the god? It cannot be because you fear punishment if you don't; that may be a pragmatic reason to obey, but it is not a moral one. So immediately we're back to individual choice: You choose to obey this particular moral code. Bing, nihilism.

Comment author: Balofsky 23 March 2012 01:33:28AM 1 point [-]

I think you're partially right. If a certain ethical code is chosen simply because it is regarded as having a divine source, there would be something necessarily nihilistic in giving the said source a positive weighting. However, it would only deny rationality itself as having any intrinsic value: but if the super-intellectual divine has absolute, intrinsic value simply as a part of its definition, the ethical code deriving from it would as well, and certain actions would become intrinsically desirable.

My point here is that there are many people who regard themselves as abiding by material reductionism as an overall worldview, but who simultaneously admit that the core of morality is essentially non-rational (Ex. the "void" described in the 13 Virtues of Rationality), and this is not internally consistent. My criticism is that attempts to answer ethical questions from a purely rational standpoint usually yield incorrect conclusions, when questions concerning the nature and origin of that non-rational component are removed from the equation.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 March 2012 04:53:03AM *  10 points [-]

Second comment, since the previous one got much too long. You can't quote the Kuzari as useful evidence for what members of the Sanhedrin had to study. He's writing about a thousand years after they dispersed.

And if you want to talk seriously about science claims, then we can have fun pointing to the sections of the Talmud that support Flat-Earthism, or the sections where proof-texts supposedly win out over empirical observations. While there are individual Taanaim who are willing to do experiments (Shimon ben Chalafta and Rav are both examples), you also have the example attributed to Rav where he works out that snakes must be pregnant for 7 years before giving birth based on a verse in Genesis. And there's a version of this story in Yalkut Shimoni where it is portrayed as a great triumph over a secular "philosopher" who spends seven years observing snakes while Rabban Gamliel knows the correct answer already.

The claim that Judaism had an either pro-empirical or pro-science attitude is just not historically accurate. Some Rabbis had such views, many others did not.

Comment author: Balofsky 22 March 2012 02:28:30AM 1 point [-]

-Regarding Maimonides, it should be noted that he considered such negative knowledge to be the product of positively acquired knowledge; it's the same as what I mentioned in the article on yedias hashelilah. This is why he cited 25 propositions from Aristotle in the Guide for the Perplexed, as supports for his negative theology.

-I cede your point about many rabbis not being pro-empirical; the Rabban Gamliel example is a good one. However, I'll add that very few Gaonim or Rishonim were willing to flatly deny clear empirical evidence, and were generally just fine admitting that many of the Talmud's scientific claims were incorrect. Also, I'm not aware of many rabbinic authorities who have poskened on halacha on the basis of non-empirical scientific claims.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 March 2012 04:45:48AM *  10 points [-]

n contrast, the historical Hebrew claim is this: that when Moses received the Law on Sinai, the Ten Commandments were communicated to him through direct prophecy, and further, the first two of the Ten Commandments (“I am THE L-RD” and “No idolatry”) were communicated to the entire mass of 600,000 Israelites through prophecy as well. Therefore, there could be no doubts that Moses was a prophet, for not only did they all see and hear him receive the Law, and hear the ‘Voice’ he heard, but each one of them individually received the Law through prophetic communication as well, as a public body. BAZOOM! Proof. Further, the historical Hebrew claim is that this experience constituted proof for succeeding generations as well. This is why the Code of Jewish Law quotes Devarim (Deuteronomy) in stating, “G-d did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, who are all here alive today.” This line, quoting Moses, was not addressed to the Hebrews who were slaves in Egypt and who stood at Sinai, but to the 2nd generation, after the 1st one had passed away in the desert. It was to this generation, who had never been there, that Moses said, “G-d did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, who are all here alive today.” As the 1st generation could surely have never faked such an event, even if they had wanted to, and as such an event could never be realistically fabricated by an individual and promulgated to the masses of Canaan (we were all slaves just 200 years ago, but then we all forgot, but luckily, Ari and Mendel rediscovered all this…), an indisputable historical tradition is treated in traditional Judaism as equivalent to a personal divine revelation, as far as proof is concerned.

What you have above is the Kurazirtic argument. It is an argument that is massively undermined by the Biblical and Talmudic texts themselves. There are occasions by the text's own description where the entire tradition has been narrowly confined to a small set of people. 2 Kings 22 strongly implies that the entire Torah was essentially forgotten until a copy of the text was found hidden in a way. That doesn't jibe with the claim of mass generation by generation transmission. There are similar (although not quite as extreme incidents) in the Talmud.

The Kuzaritic argument is interesting in that every major religion has many of the same apologetic tactics, and then they each try to use a small set of what they consider to be very strong arguments to flavor their apologetics for their own religion. The Kuzari's argument is somewhat akin to the Trilemma. Neither is particularly persuasive and for surprisingly similar reasons.

It might help to ask how a divine being could actually demonstrate with a decent chance that it was actually some sort of genuine divine being to future generations. Of course, the most obvious is just intervening in later generations in an equivalently blatant form. But let's say for some reason it doesn't want to do that. There are still a lot of solutions. Here's one example: Define a prime number and a power of 2, and then assert that 2^n-1 is prime for n= 2,3,5,7,13,17,31,61,89,107,127,521,607, 1279 and for no other n below 2000, and then include a really difficult to verify detail like the claim that the 35th such n is n= 1398269. That's about a paragraph worth of stuff, and far more informative than long lists of begats, and has the obvious advantage that as the mathematical ability and computers advance, more and more of the sequence can be verified. By the time one gets to the last few claims one has to already be at an advanced enough technology level that one will presumably have a record that the text predated any advanced computers.

Of course, this isn't the only option. Other options include things like saying "the sun is a star" or other similar claims. Yet curiously, no ancient deity, not the YHVH or Zeus or any other deity feels a need to try this approach.

However, though Judaism does not posit any intrinsically incomprehensible Mysterious Answers that are incapable of being logically deduced

If you think this, you may need to reread the Guide to the Perplexed. Maimonides certainly disagrees in the context in which his approach to talking about the divine revolves around negative theology. While he might have been controversial 800 years ago, for the last 600 or so, his philosophy has been dominant, and I don't think you are likely to about to reject Rambam. (Edit: Oh, I think I see what you are trying to say here. It still doesn't fit a lot of classical Jewish philosophy, but discussing why would be a very large digression.)

As to your comments trying to defend Jewish understanding of slavery and the eventual rejection of slavery, the problem here isn't that later texts had more of an objection to slavery. The bottom line is that the basic texts are ok with it. And even the Talmud doesn't outlaw slavery, it just lessens some of the effects (and not even that much- whipping slaves is fine according to the Talmud). The claim that the most basic revelation of God didn't bother just including a blanket "oh, and that slavery thing is wrong" or even just not discuss slavery but rather actively gave rules for slavery, including a procedure for forcing marriage on captured women.

Comment author: Balofsky 22 March 2012 01:52:32AM 1 point [-]

I'll put my comments into two parts, too:

-The reference in Kings II to the "Scroll of the Law" being rediscovered in the ruins of the Temple, refers to the Torah scroll that was considered to have been written by Moses himself personally and placed in the side of the Ark, described towards the end of Deuteronomy. The rediscovery in the Temple ruins by Hilkiah refers to this scroll having been hidden away by King Menashe in an earlier period, and its acceptance is similar to symbolic acceptance-ceremonies (for lack of a better word) scattered throughout the Tanakh. There is nothing in the text to suggest that it is anything more than this, and If the episode had been referring to the entire Torah as a published document and tradition, the compiler of Kings II probably would not have included the brief episode in Kings II in the first place, and it would probably not be nearly so brief as it is.

Further, while it is true that every major religion attempts to flavor its apologetics with unique claims, most of them still suffer from a common element, in that they are all inevitably be reduced to lone individuals performing acts that are easily falsifiable. Muhammad, for instance, cited his own illiteracy as evidence that he did not produce Quran on his own; but pretending to be illiterate, or secretly hiring a scribe to write for you would be fairly easy. Likewise with C.S. Lewis' formulation of the Trilemma argument. The argument that Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or genuine, and that the first two options are unlikely, is weak (Lewis, for his part, thought it was obvious that the first two options were ludicrous), and even very few Christian theologians ever abide by it. In contrast, the Kuzaritic argument has been accepted by the mainstream of Jewry for most of their history, since it is taken from the Torah's description of the Sinai event, and was of practical legal use in determining the statuses of prophets in ancient Israel. The Kuzaritic argument of mass generation by generation transmission is, I think, tougher to argue against, and I am not aware of any scholars of ancient Near Eastern history who have developed a good, internally consistent historical theory for how Judaism arose that really trumps it.

-True, a recurring blatant intervention would seem to be easiest, but such recurring intervention would have to violate the rule of yeridas hadoros, a principle of which is that Divine intervention becomes less-and-less obvious generationally (Ex. [Ten Plagues:Menorah Oil Lasts Really Long:We Had To Rebuild Our Own State Ourselves = Very Obvious Intervention: Moderately Obvious Intervention: Less Obvious Intervention]).

Further, for the Torah to state something like 2^n-1 along with a long series of possible outcomes, would only be accessible as a proof to the minority of individuals who would have the acumen to comprehend such a formula for themselves. The general, mass population would not understand it and would therefore not be convinced by it, unless they were to rely on mathematicians who do understand it, and then take their word for it, which would still require a leap of trust anyhow. Such a proof, though it would probably be genuine, would only be intellectually accessible to an elite; everyone else would have to take those elite at their word, and so would only constitute real proof for a minority of people.

In contrast, the prophetic announcements in the Torah and in Isaiah concerning the moral decline of Israel, the future suffering and persecution of Israel in legendary proportions, their exile from their land, the promise that neither they (as a national entity) nor their religion will ever be destroyed until even their Messiah comes, and the promise of an eventual return to their land, have always generally been a much more convincing form of proof for the later generations, given that these are all events that have been experienced by the whole group. These pronouncements cannot be taken to refer to the Babylonian exile alone; the pronouncements as they are articulated in Isaiah clearly refer to the whole span of history, leading up to some sort of Messianic redemption. It also compensates for the continuous lengthening of the gap between our generation, and the 1st generation's experience at Sinai: the list of experiences keeps growing (Ex. the end of the physical exile from the land of Israel in the 20th century).

Comment author: pedanterrific 21 March 2012 10:24:20PM 1 point [-]

As an example (and I don't mean this to be below the belt)

Why would this be below the belt? If "greater consciousness" is what you value, it seems self-evidently true.

and I don't think such methods of reasoning are appropriate for the discussion of such issues.

Is there a reason for this other than disapproval of the conclusions?

Comment author: Balofsky 21 March 2012 11:41:32PM 0 points [-]

-I say "below the belt," because I imagine that there are individuals of the Less Wrong community who strongly support SIAI's work and goals concerning AI, but who simultaneously would not consider such AI creations to be of greater moral value than humans, and I didn't want these individuals to think that I was making an assumption about their ethical opinions based on their support of AI research.

-Yes, it is largely because of disapproval of the conclusions, but I disapprove of the conclusions because the conclusions are not rational in the face of other intellectual considerations. The failure to see a qualitative difference between humans, baboons and computers suggests an inability to distinguish between living and non-living entities, and I think that is irrational.

Comment author: HonoreDB 20 March 2012 06:52:26AM *  54 points [-]

1) The author makes precisely 3 statements regarding Halacha (Judaic law), each of which is demonstrably incorrect.

Well, no. He makes those statements about the Old Testament, not actual Jewish law. It seems blatantly obvious that the rulings and commentary you cite are indeed "apologetic glosses on a defective primary text." The fact that they were written when scientific knowledge was still rudimentary is immaterial--clearly, they patched the locust thing when they finally got around to counting its legs.

2) The author asserts that the Tanakh (Old Testament) “doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe.”

Again, in trying to refute this you cite texts that were written much later. If the Old Testament actually contained references to a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe you'd be able to quote it. I think the closest it comes is a sense of despair and humility at the incomprehensibility of the universe.

3) The author asserts that historical Judaism defends the authenticity of the Torah without accounting for Bayes’ Theorem.

I think you've simply misunderstood, here: this is close to the opposite of what the author is saying.

4) The author asserts that contemporary religionists justify false opinions by claiming that their religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.

You don't really dispute this, you just sort of argue that it's okay. It's not. If something like "the nature of good and evil" does not describe some aspect of human experience, then it's vacuous. If it does, then it is subject to scientific analysis.

Given all of this, the popular contention that the Torah endorses slave-ownership is difficult to defend.

The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.

The passages you quote, brutal as they are, concern only Jewish slaves. The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went? Imagine you're a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You've barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he's already bashed your brother's brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.

Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily? She'd have to be chained up at night, I bet, or else she'd slit his throat. She'd have to be beaten half to death before she even considered accepting this man as a master--the man who killed her family in front of her. Would the soldier sell her to another Jew? It might not make much of a difference: these would still be the men who destroyed her entire civilization. Would she be sold to outsiders? Sold, as a young, virgin slave, to outsiders who aren't bound by all those ethical Biblical rules? Yeah, that's going to end well for her. What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying "amen" as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people's genocide.

At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. "They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option." I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator's heritage as your own?

The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She's watching you kiss it. She knows what's written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?

Comment author: Balofsky 21 March 2012 11:06:14PM -3 points [-]

Secondly, the story of the young Midianite girl is still not good evidence that the Torah considers mass slaughter to be morally okay, and it is not good evidence that historical Jewish ethics have considered it okay. But as hard as it is to say, both economic oppression and war are difficult to uproot, in a way that nonmarital sex is not. War is often a necessary evil, and so is economic inequality, even nowadays; the gradual elimination of both, as horrid as it sounds, probably is more pragmatic. I don't think the mere fact that permission was granted, in the very beginning, is enough to claim that the Torah treats sex more harshly than economic oppression and war. Both, along with violence & militarism in general, are condemned in the Prophets (especially Jeremiah & Isaiah) repeatedly, explicitly and harshly, over and over again, much more so than any of the other societal ills of the time. This is especially significant when one considers that the Torah does not differentiate between general economic inequality on the one hand, and slavery on the other- the laws that regulate treatment of slaves and treatment of workers are grouped together in the same sections of Deuteronomy.

If slaughter and war were morally okay in the Torah's view, this notion would have continued on into the Prophets & Writings, as well as the Mishna, and it doesn't. The general idea expressed in these texts is that war is morally vile, but also often necessary. The defeat of the Greeks was barely mentioned in the way the Channukah story was told, to avoid the celebration of militarism. Where would such an attitude towards war have originally derived from?

Your use of the word genocide is not accurate, anyhow. Genocide is the systematic murder of an entire nation or race, and it is militarily one-sided. The Torah does not describe genocides, it describes wars between mutually opposing armies, and the evils of war do not obviate the fact that it is often practically necessary (this includes tribal war practices of the 13th c. BCE). I am not arguing that genocide is justifiable, I am arguing that war is justifiable, and it is important to use correct terminology. If one were to argue that the Jewish laws defining a just war are defective, then that is a separate discussion, but to argue that Judaism is violent by telling a story about the everyday horrors of war is not reasonable. War is condemned far too clearly, frequently and harshly in the Prophets, and the glorification of warrior-culture and hero worship is far too absent from both the Tanakh and commonly accepted history books on Jewish history, to be able to argue that Judaism is okay with even militarism in general, let alone senseless violence.

Comment author: HonoreDB 20 March 2012 06:52:26AM *  54 points [-]

1) The author makes precisely 3 statements regarding Halacha (Judaic law), each of which is demonstrably incorrect.

Well, no. He makes those statements about the Old Testament, not actual Jewish law. It seems blatantly obvious that the rulings and commentary you cite are indeed "apologetic glosses on a defective primary text." The fact that they were written when scientific knowledge was still rudimentary is immaterial--clearly, they patched the locust thing when they finally got around to counting its legs.

2) The author asserts that the Tanakh (Old Testament) “doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe.”

Again, in trying to refute this you cite texts that were written much later. If the Old Testament actually contained references to a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe you'd be able to quote it. I think the closest it comes is a sense of despair and humility at the incomprehensibility of the universe.

3) The author asserts that historical Judaism defends the authenticity of the Torah without accounting for Bayes’ Theorem.

I think you've simply misunderstood, here: this is close to the opposite of what the author is saying.

4) The author asserts that contemporary religionists justify false opinions by claiming that their religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.

You don't really dispute this, you just sort of argue that it's okay. It's not. If something like "the nature of good and evil" does not describe some aspect of human experience, then it's vacuous. If it does, then it is subject to scientific analysis.

Given all of this, the popular contention that the Torah endorses slave-ownership is difficult to defend.

The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.

The passages you quote, brutal as they are, concern only Jewish slaves. The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went? Imagine you're a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You've barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he's already bashed your brother's brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.

Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily? She'd have to be chained up at night, I bet, or else she'd slit his throat. She'd have to be beaten half to death before she even considered accepting this man as a master--the man who killed her family in front of her. Would the soldier sell her to another Jew? It might not make much of a difference: these would still be the men who destroyed her entire civilization. Would she be sold to outsiders? Sold, as a young, virgin slave, to outsiders who aren't bound by all those ethical Biblical rules? Yeah, that's going to end well for her. What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying "amen" as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people's genocide.

At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. "They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option." I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator's heritage as your own?

The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She's watching you kiss it. She knows what's written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?

Comment author: Balofsky 21 March 2012 09:26:13PM 1 point [-]

I'll break this down into two response, because of the length.

-Assuming the locust-thing is an apologetic gloss doesn't seem warranted. Locusts have been a common food source in many parts of Asia and Africa for thousands of years, and the fact that the Torah permits the consumption of certain locusts strongly implies that they were being eaten. It seems fair to estimate that the people eating these locusts would have known how many legs they really had, regardless of illiteracy and poor knowledge of animal biology.

-I'm not claiming that the Tanakh itself contains clear, obvious passages expressing wonder at the universe, in fact I pointed out that the text itself generally doesn't. I'm claiming that the legal tradition that derives from it necessitates the study of nature and makes it inevitable, and that the study of nature became a part of Jewish oral tradition as a consequence. While I used the Kuzari for easy citation, the necessity for scientific study can be seen from the text of the Mishnah. How would the Tannaim have fixed a calendar without studying astronomy, established rules for identifying sick animals without studying animal disease, established rules for eruvin without studying plane geometry, etc? Simply reiterating that the written Tanakh itself doesn't express much wonder for the universe, ignores the fact that both oral tradition and written law had an equal stake in how Judaism began, and in how it developed. It also ignores the fact that Judaism has always been much more concerned with the morality of concrete, physical activity than with scientific speculation, the latter having been appropriately subordinated and sublimated to the cause of the former.

-You're right, I am admitting that certain aspects of Jewish thought occupy distinct magisteria. What I am disputing is that rational, scientific methodology is synonymous with reason itself. Many schools of philosophy utilize methods of logic other than the scientific process. As an example (and I don't mean this to be below the belt), one could claim, as Peter Singer does, that an adult baboon has more utility and moral value than a human infant, since the baboon would have a more developed brain and therefore greater consciousness. By extrapolation, one could similarly claim that a super-intelligent computer would have more utility and moral value than a contemporary adult human, since the former would have a more developed mind and therefore greater consciousness. If ethics are to be understood through the prism of the scientific process as we know it, these ideas could actually be argued for pretty effectively, and I don't think such methods of reasoning are appropriate for the discussion of such issues.

Comment author: beoShaffer 01 March 2012 02:27:58AM 1 point [-]

I'll probably never need in real life.

Have you tried Anki?

Comment author: Balofsky 13 March 2012 01:59:45AM 0 points [-]

Interesting, I'll look into it. I didn't meant to retract my introduction, by the way- hit the wrong button.

Comment author: Balofsky 01 March 2012 01:57:42AM 2 points [-]

Hi!

I'm Balofsky (keeping first name blank), and I am a 24 year old undergraduate student in St. Paul, Minnesota. Interests include anything liberal art-ish, Judaism, politics and memorizing random facts I'll probably never need in real life.

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