70 comments so far, and none of them, "Holy Shit! I'm talking to Archimedes!"

... which I suppose he would hear as "Ye Gods! I'm talking to Plato"...

My morning coffee hasn't kicked in... I wonder what the significance is that no voting system can be "perfect". Is it a fluke of math, or does it say something about the coherence of our value systems as they pertain to electoral systems?

I should also express my view that a plurality voting system that allows only two parties to thrive in practice is probably the worst of all worlds where it concerns voting systems. I believe the polarizing effects of a system that requires exactly two parties are a large component of the set of difficulties that make it so politics is the mind-killer.

Oh - this is a veiled critique of conciliatory attitudes toward religion? I though it was a direct critique of conciliatory attitudes toward political ideologies - and I was going to disagree with it. I think I detect a dark side to lumping all political ideologies together under the category of "poltitical ideology" and ignoring the specific reasons why political ideologies can become harmful or anti-rational.

Now that I see that this was a veiled critique of religion (or a specific religious grouping?) I think my reservations still stand.

What would it look like if we neglected the fundamental differences between religions - or even between sects of a "single" religion, such as Christianity? How would that distort our view of sects that never adopted doctrines like Biblical inerrancy and instead focused on an altruistic message embedded in an ancient narrative? Would we make the simplistic assumption that these sects viewed the Bible in the same way as the more reactionary sects except that certain passages were to be taken as "metaphorical"?

Would we have any hope of coping constructively with the bewildering array of beliefs, epistemologies, ethics, meta-ethics, values, emotional responses and activities that can loosely be regarded as "religious"?

Worse yet, would we fail to notice the mechanisms by which some religious (or political ideologies) become especially prone to bad belief and bad behavior? Will we believe that something magical about the name "church" or the activity of counting a rosary has some sort of harmful essence of itself? Will we be unable to constructively suggest to people who find value in religion that they are better served to divorce religion from dubious orthodoxies and to reconsider any rules they may be following which limit the freedom to inquire critically?

-"But science can and does prove that such agents just don't happen." To fix your argument: science proves that such agents don't arise under ordinary physical law. Any number of elements of rational thought make the existence of such an agent improbable, but that doesn't make it specifically anti-scientific to believe in such an agent.

If you step outside ordinary physical law, you lose your firm objective ground to stand on. What's the point of considering the question when the answer is "You can't disprove me because God is magical and can do anything." ? Unless there's firm evidence towards those events happening (which consistently have been disproven historically), then why waste your time?

Yup. Thank you for finding that quote; it pretty much proves my point. He hates the Western version of freedom, and wants to destroy it to replace it with the iron boot on Islamic rule (and seems to have missed that in order to implement sharia law, there have to be people doing the implementation).

This struck me as an odd position for a Christian apologist. I know that if I didn't see us all as idiots, I might think we all deserved to die -- oh, wait.

-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

This is a common apologetic claim. It both doesn't fit with the text and isn't actually relevant. No claim is made in the text that it is a Sefer Torah from Moses. The priest just shows up with a book he says was found, and it is clear in the text that neither Josiah nor Shaphan have any idea what this object is. Shaphan refers to it just as a sefer not hasefer, it is a book, not the book. Neither Josiah or Shaphan seem to know much about it at all. How good was the tradition when neither the King nor one of his major scribes knows even what the text in question is?

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

And the episode isn't brief at all, the reign of Josiah is a major section of Kings. One and a half chapters are devoted to Josiah's reign, and one isn't talking about a text that at all gives details for major events. Moreover, the writer of Kings repeatedly references a non-extant more detailed text about the monarchs, (23:28 is one mention), so this is the set of events that the writer considers important. Frankly, I don't think that the text in question was the Torah as we currently have it. But it doesn't need to be: it just matters that something major (the text of Deuteronomy is a common hypothesis among scholars) was completely missing to the point where almost no one knows what it is. That strongly undermines any sort of Kuzaritic claim.

In contrast, the Kuzaritic argument has been accepted by the mainstream of Jewry for most of their history

This is both not true (the argument wasn't popular until after the Kuzari was written) and essentially irrelevant. While I can see how a deeply religious Jew would think this matters (since halachah is frequently determined by tradition and the practice of Klal Yisrael as a whole), how commonly accepted a specific theological argument is has no useful bearing on whether or not it is correct unless one has already accepted pretty much all of normative Orthodox Judaism.

-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

And this belief exists essentially to explain the apparent fact that the miracles get tinier and tinier. Nowhere even in the Biblical text does God ever say "oh, and I'll use subtler and subtler methods as recording and history get better, and by the time you have things that can actively record sound and sight I'll never do miracles.' This is a universal throughout the planet- the further back in time one goes the more miraculous claims there are. One sees this in the mythology of China or Japan, or Australian aboriginal groups. The simplest explanation is the obvious one.

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.

First, this is exactly the state of things now. How many frum people can't open and read a blat of Gemarrah? How many of them can even tell you off the top of their head which common midrashim are midrashim and which are actually in the Torah? Relying on the elite in this fashion is no different than relying on Moshe Feinstein or other more learned scholars to issue rulings and advice. Moreover, the math involved in my example is easy: most of it can be explained to a middle school student. And this is only one example of the many things a deity could do. I've got a lot of other examples, such as giving us the dates and times for when we will see supernovae. Since visible supernova to the naked eye occur every few hundred years and are not at all periodic, this would easily demonstrate things to the even ignorant masses. And I've literally only spent a handful of minutes thinking about what I might do if I were a deity, and I'm not particularly bright or creative.

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.

Or the writer of Isaiah thought that the end of the Babylonian exile was going to be the beginning of a Messianic era. And I really don't think you want to try to point to fulfilled Biblical prophecies. That opens a whole different can worms starting with the prophesied destruction of the city of Tyre in Ezekiel that never happened.

That sort of argument implies some unpleasant things about the agent in question's willingness to render assistance to those who claim to serve it, and further claim to receive various favors in return for such service.

Sorry - I still haven't figured out why standard html doesn't work here, or how to do blockquotes...

When you write a comment, at the bottom right of the text box there is a "Help" button that tells you how to to blockquotes, italics, bold, links, and bullet points.