Reb Nachman of Breslov has a good point that most religious teachers are actually demons. That is to say they do not have human souls--though they might have had human souls once. [He calls them "Torah scholars that are demons" and he brings this idea from the Zohar.]
This theory has one thing going for it- it accounts for the damage they cause.
On the other hand if you go with the idea that everyone has an evil inclination, then it is hard to see from where their uniformly evil advice comes from.
The fact is that Jeremiah and all true tzadikim throughout the ages have had to deal with the problem of false teachers.
The obvious question is how to tell who is from legitimate and who is not. From my experience there is nothing in the religious world that is legit except for the rare exception of the great Litvak yeshivas in NY and Ponovitch in Israel.
I bring this up because there is a great deal that one can learn from the Oral and Written Law [Torah] but the first step is to avoid the teachers from the Dark Side.
[ These demonic Torah scholars use Torah and prayer to relieve people of their money. For them Torah is a way to get ahead in life.]
I might mention that the problem of telling the difference between good and evil I am beginning to see is world wide problem. To me it looks that the Dark Side is very active is getting evil to seem like good. The best solution to this problem I take as being this: Reason perceives universals. That is to say: reason might not tell us much, but it remains the only possible way to tell the difference between good and the Devil's plots..
To put this differently I go with Maimonides that there is a reason for the commandments of the Torah and that is to bring to natural law--that is moral law that is objective. Also this goes along with Hegel that reason can penetrate into the dinge an sich by means of a dialectical process.
But I do not mean that Torah is only consequential morality, rather i think it is like what Kelley Ross of the Kant Fries school calls "Ontological undecidability." That is that commandments of the Torah are to bring to some goal and also have an inherent holiness .
This theory has one thing going for it- it accounts for the damage they cause.
On the other hand if you go with the idea that everyone has an evil inclination, then it is hard to see from where their uniformly evil advice comes from.
The fact is that Jeremiah and all true tzadikim throughout the ages have had to deal with the problem of false teachers.
The obvious question is how to tell who is from legitimate and who is not. From my experience there is nothing in the religious world that is legit except for the rare exception of the great Litvak yeshivas in NY and Ponovitch in Israel.
I bring this up because there is a great deal that one can learn from the Oral and Written Law [Torah] but the first step is to avoid the teachers from the Dark Side.
[ These demonic Torah scholars use Torah and prayer to relieve people of their money. For them Torah is a way to get ahead in life.]
I might mention that the problem of telling the difference between good and evil I am beginning to see is world wide problem. To me it looks that the Dark Side is very active is getting evil to seem like good. The best solution to this problem I take as being this: Reason perceives universals. That is to say: reason might not tell us much, but it remains the only possible way to tell the difference between good and the Devil's plots..
To put this differently I go with Maimonides that there is a reason for the commandments of the Torah and that is to bring to natural law--that is moral law that is objective. Also this goes along with Hegel that reason can penetrate into the dinge an sich by means of a dialectical process.
But I do not mean that Torah is only consequential morality, rather i think it is like what Kelley Ross of the Kant Fries school calls "Ontological undecidability." That is that commandments of the Torah are to bring to some goal and also have an inherent holiness .
