The more religious they are, the further from the Torah they are.

Let's say there is a Jewish community in Eastern Europe that has a Rav and community leaders .
But its leaders are not religious. Would there be a movement to destroy it? Would there be a  mitzvah to destroy it? Why would thus be any different than the State of Israel today? Why is it that the insane religious world  think there is  mitzvah in destroying it, and work towards that end? [And hypocritically deny that fact.]
I will tell you why. It is because they think by doing so they are keeping the Torah. And if we are not talking about Satmar and least we are referring to all its friends and associate movements. And that means all of the insane religious world  excluding the religious Zionists.

None of this would make any difference if not for that fact that this makes keeping Torah a highly ambiguous endeavor. Those  that seem to keep the Torah with the most fervor and sincerity are rabid anti Semites friends of Ahmadinejad. It is in fact impossible to find any movement within the insane religious world  that does not have some kind of glaring flaw. Most are pure idolatry in religious clothing.

The more religious they are, the further from the Torah they are.

If we did not have to keep Torah none of this would make the slightest difference. We could all go our merry way and write them off as lost lunatics. The problem is that we do have to keep Torah. And the presence of these poisonous people makes it nigh impossible to figure out how to go about it.
For this reason I have take the approach of recommending that people just plow through the written and Oral Torah on their own without any connection with any organization unless you have to have  religious Zionist shul in your area.{Conservative and Reform are also good except that sometimes they go off in the non-religious direction too far. But  even the most extreme Reform can't touch the insane religious world  when it come to downright pure unadulterated Antisemitism. The the insane religious world  take the pride and prize when it come to that by a long shot right next to Ahmadinejad.}
everything.

Steven Dutch: "What we can call The Fundamental Fallacy of Modern Philosophy might be defined as the idea that it makes sense to study structure divorced from content. This is the idea that has given us businessmen who think they can "manage" without knowing anything about what they manage, critics who claim that only the technical excellence of a work of art matters, not its content, and sociologists of science like the one with whom I corresponded who think you can study the Velikovsky affair without regard to the scientific validity of Velikovsky's ideas."



I would like to add this this insight some thoughts about religious fundamentalism. You must have heard when a Muslim blows up a building with people inside that it is the fault of religious fundamentalism. That is we can blame the fact of someone being over religious, That is we don't blame their being religious but being too religious. How often do you hear the idea that content matters? Maybe it is not whether the guy was overly religious or not is the question. Perhaps it is the content of the book he is reading?

Surely Catholic nuns are also religious and maybe also too religious. Do you blame them also? Perhaps Muslims murdering innocent people is the fault of Catholic nuns who promote religious fervor?

On the other hand certainly American ideas of the 1960's of suggesting people get back to their roots had a predictable effect of getting Muslims back to their roots.

After this introduction I want to say
that in some way everyone is a fundamentalist. Everyone has a short list of basic principles that they operate under in their daily lives--and they stick to those principles. what matters is what those principles are.

The Ten Commandments? Thou shalt not lie, nor cheat, nor steal? 

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Learning Torah,

I have been trying to figure out a good argument for learning Torah. And I don't want to go the way of the Nefesh HaChaim to do so.
That is I am starting out with a conclusion and trying to figure out a good argument to bring to that conclusion.  X therefore Y. Y is "It is good to learn Torah." Solve for X.
The arguments against keeping or learning Torah seem infinite  and some seem convincing.

One argument against learning is when people see what happens when people overdo it. It is like eating too much. You can see what happens to people when they eat too much. But no one uses that as an argument not to eat.

One argument against it is to notice that Reform Jews support the State of Israel and clearly have the  benefit of mankind as the major goal. Yet they do not learn very much Torah. Just a drop.

I could try to point out that this good will of reform Jews while a great thing in itself can go over a line into over-tolerance.


What I can say as an argument for Torah is my own parents home which was an island of wholesomeness and decency and holiness and our home was based on Torah even though we were Reform Jews--in name at least. I am sure my parents held from Torah much more strongly than  the Reform Movement.

There is an aspect of numinous of Torah that I think is the best aspect of it. It connects one to the Divine.

For that reason I suggest having two sessions ever day in Torah. One in the Oral Law and the other in Poskim [i.e. people that sifted through the Talmud to come up with one law on each subject instead of  an argument on each subject.] That is to go through the oral law from start to finish Talmud Bavli Yerushalmi, Tosphta Sifra, Sifri, Mechilta, Torat Kohanim. And the Poskim: Rambam, Tur, Shulchan Aruch with the commentaries.

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In the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

There is a sort of ambiguity when people discuss QM as being subjective. It is not "subjective" in the same way that word is used in general language. There is nothing subjective about the fact that the two slit experiment results in interference. It has nothing to do with who is watching it. It has to do with what happens when a particle interacts with another particle. That creates interference.

The word "subjective" is already ambiguous. A "subject" in Kant is the observer. A "subject" in England is a subject of the king--as in the "king's subjects."

So what is meant by subjective when people use the term in QM? It means probability. You have a state of a system and then you have something that acts on it. Then you get a new state. The probability of the new state occurring is what people mean by the word "subjective."

It is better not to read what philosophers write about Quantum Mechanics. Kelley Ross is right that Kant provided essential insights, but since then there have been very few people that work in philosophy that understand Physics well enough to say anything intelligent about it. And that means that few philosophers are competent to comment about reality. They might be able to give a course in philosophy, but to say anything intelligent about the nature of reality they are far away from.

[I should mention that Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg) deals nicely with interference and you don't need the Schrodinger picture for that. See this post by Lubos that does the actual calculation To derive interference from the Heisenberg Picture


Here is an important quote from Lubos: http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-subjective-quantum-mechanics-allows.html?m=1 

Are there many universes? Reference Frame