The way that Torah is interpreted in the religious world is that the foremost obligation is to be part of the religious world. But that seems to me to be highly inaccurate. But I can not disprove it except because of my own background. My feeling based on my own experience is that joining the religious world is the worst possible thing to do in terms of actually keeping the holy Torah.
The closest I could see to a sincere effort to actually learn and keep Torah according to its own background and core assumptions was in the two Litvak yeshivas that I was in in New York, Shar Yashuv and the Mir. But outside of the yeshiva world based on the Oral and Written Law of Moses, I found the religious world to be a hot bed of קטנות המוחין triviality and backbiting and a kind of living nightmare while awake.
The only way I could understand this was by means of Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle which he bases on Hobbes. The idea of the super-organism as being Lucifer.
Though he does not look at it in the same way the fact that he uses the term Lucifer to me implies a lot. That is by joining a larger community one gets to be sacrificed to Lucifer.
[The theory of the Background
John Searle: "What philosophers like Quine and Wittgeinstein got right, however, is the fact that verbal expressions underdetermine meaning, i.e. the number of ways that a given sentence could be misinterpreted is so great that, in their view, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning is something that doesn't even happen, because meaning in the traditional sense doesn't exist."
Sentences express abstract features, but these are always in a context of other abstract features (what Searle calls the "Network")
The theory of the Background of Searle
"The thesis of the Background is simply this: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional."]
The closest I could see to a sincere effort to actually learn and keep Torah according to its own background and core assumptions was in the two Litvak yeshivas that I was in in New York, Shar Yashuv and the Mir. But outside of the yeshiva world based on the Oral and Written Law of Moses, I found the religious world to be a hot bed of קטנות המוחין triviality and backbiting and a kind of living nightmare while awake.
The only way I could understand this was by means of Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle which he bases on Hobbes. The idea of the super-organism as being Lucifer.
Though he does not look at it in the same way the fact that he uses the term Lucifer to me implies a lot. That is by joining a larger community one gets to be sacrificed to Lucifer.
[The theory of the Background
John Searle: "What philosophers like Quine and Wittgeinstein got right, however, is the fact that verbal expressions underdetermine meaning, i.e. the number of ways that a given sentence could be misinterpreted is so great that, in their view, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning is something that doesn't even happen, because meaning in the traditional sense doesn't exist."
Sentences express abstract features, but these are always in a context of other abstract features (what Searle calls the "Network")
The theory of the Background of Searle
"The thesis of the Background is simply this: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional."]
