Religious fanaticism. Ultra-religious people are insane.

Religious fanaticism seems to be related to the hippocampus. That is a lot of what I have seen is the idea of rituals as cause and effect things. That is people tend to think "I did this ritual and thus and thus happened afterwards." So they are connected.

Pigeons have the same thing. If you randomly reward pigeons they will on their own come up with a superstitious belief  system.  They think, "Since I did thus and thus before the food appeared therefore that must have been the cause of the food appearing." You thus can get a whole room full of superstitious pigeons doing all kinds of nonsense because they think that that is the thing that caused the food to appear because it was the thing that they did one time before it appeared.

But if the hippocampus is damaged the effect is much stronger. There is much less of an ability to tell the difference between cause and effect random correlation.

That is religious fanaticism is biological.

Lithuanian yeshivas are obviously aware of this and therefore discourage religious fanaticism. Learning Torah and keeping Torah are one thing. Religious fanaticism is something entirely different.

Thus you get a situation where most Ultra-religious people are insane as we see in reality and in biology..
So while there are some drawbacks to the average Litvak yeshiva, (because it is an human institution like all others  that has failings.) still it is a huge advantage to the other kinds of insanity out there in the ultra religious world.

Nationalism seems to be related to Hegel. I noticed this before but did not write  a comment because I felt I did not know Hegel at all. Still the connection is there. And for some reason I think Allen Bloom might have been thinking along the same lines when he said that "Hegel was the greatest university man that ever lived." So while not recommending a Hegelian State he still obviously saw lot of potential in Hegel. From my perspective this is awkward since my own intellectual framework is close to Kant.

Zionism is certainly related to Hegel. And scholars have said that clearly Rav Kook's ideas were influenced and sometime borrowed from Hegel.

The Alt Right seems pretty much to have the idea of patriotism and nationalism in mind.


You could justify Hegel in this way: he is referring to a plane of existence in which objective idealism is true. The relation between Hegel and Kant is the same as the relation between Quantum Mechanics and relativity. Both are true but refer to two separate planes of existence. We know both are true. GPS proves both Special Relativity and General Relativity every day. The double slit experiment proves quantum mechanics. [GR says the clock on the satellite will go faster since it is further out from earth. SR says it goes slower because it is moving. So you adjust its rate by about 38 micro seconds per day slower.]

Christianity.But in its modern forms Christianity looks pretty bad.

But in its modern forms Christianity looks pretty bad. Still my major complaints are that it is not very convincing. A good deal of the premises seem to be founded on very strained readings of the New Testament. Still for Christian saints of the past I am willing to cut a lot of slack because of the pureness of their intentions.

What I mean is the divinity of Jesus is not supported by the text. Doing miracles has nothing to do with divinity. Answering a question "Are you so and so?" and answering  "I am" also has nothing to do with it. [If someone would ask me, "Are you  Avraham?" I would say "I am".] It is just the common way to answer a question. And if Jesus had meant to use the name of God אהיה (as God said his name is in the burning bush), then he would have had to have said, "I will be."
For the way the English Bible translates it is  a mistake. אהיה אשר אהיה means "I will be that which I will be." Not "I Am."

For a comparison you can look at writings where someone was claiming to be G-d and they make it clear that that is what they mean like in Bhagavad Gita.

Similarly nullification of the mizvot is not supported by the text. [That is nothing that Jesus said would support such a conclusion.]

What Christianity is based on  is mainly Paul's interpretation of Jesus. It is clear that James disagreed with him.

[In other words as far as Christians follow the example of Jesus they do well. But then some people throw in Paul who is the direct opposite of everything that Jesus said. And then they have to change the simple meaning of everything the Jesus said and did to make it correspond to Paul.]


[Wasp’s tend to take their social meme from Luther [even though in theory they come from Calvin]. I am not happy with Luther. The social meme of WASP's does not even come from the NT but rather Luther and Calvin.]

capricious divorce

Children who experience pointless, capricious divorce (I.e., 90% of divorces) simply never recover. Divorcing destroys childhood. It’s hard to survive with so-called adults stealing one’s childhood. You don’t go to work and get married if your primary life lesson is that a woman can take your home, children, money and freedom with a single phone call.
Women tend to look at divorce as a solution to all their unhappiness. And Beta Males only encourage this.   [See this site RedPillGirl]

Divorce fantasy is the many movies, books, TV shows, talk programs, websites, etc. (an entire industry, really), that sell divorce to women as something noble, necessary, and vital for their future growth and happiness in life.  They show women like Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love abandoning her family and leading an exciting life bedding exotic men in exotic locales.  But for large numbers of divorced, male or female, the reality is far different: they are middle aged, well past their prime, and generally wind up much lonelier, must less happy, and much more materially poor than before.  Like all things satanically inspired, the fantasy is swank and sexy, the reality is frequently miserable.

We are still sold an image of the divorced woman as having been abandoned by her husband.  But women now instigate divorce 80% of the time in the United States.  No fault divorce laws make it impossible for many distressed and abandoned fathers to stop the process.  And of course the children are the ones who pay the ultimate price for this process of female marriage abandonment.  Of course there are men who step out, it happens all the time, but the statistics do not lie – over the past 35 years, women have filed the overwhelming number of divorce claims in this country.  Many of those have been filed for frivolous or entirely self-serving reasons.

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Visions

Visions. When I was part of the Mir yeshiva and also Shar Yashuv [another yeshiva in NY] the question of visions was treated thus -if the visionary is part of our group [or an associated group] then the visions are from the realm of holiness. If the guy having the visions is not part of our group, then the visions are from the Dark Side--the Sitra Achra.  This is an enormously relevant question because all human groups have the need for a shaman--an inspired individual.
The best criteria are; (1) Humility. (2) If the visions predict something that does not come about.

The test of Humility will cancel out most visions and visionaries. The next test of predicting an event that does not come to pass will cancel out most of the rest. [Like the Zohar.]

The trouble then is to find reliable guidance. For that I suggest not going to visionaries and simply to learn and keep the Law of God. [That is the Law of Moses. For understanding the Law of Moses it is helpful to learn Musar the books of Ethics written  during the Middle Ages which do the best job of making it clear. My idea of the best ones are the Obligation of the Heart and also the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.]

You might notice this in all groups. They always assume visionaries that are part of their group or closely related groups are OK and everyone else is not.

This seems to me to be a serious problem from both sides. Especially accepting visionaries who just because they seem to have lifestyle which pleases us and seems to come from good sources that does not mean the vision is true.

Ideas in Bava Metzia  Ideas in Shas

The idea here is mainly that the Torah--the Law of God-is not temporary. That is the laws of God in the Five Books of Moses are meant to apply for all generations. And that makes it necessary to keep them and to do that we need to work out what each law requires.
That is the basic job of the Talmud. The Talmud does not claim divinity but it does depend on the idea of the "Background." That is that the laws of God are not dependent on individual interpretation but that they  have an objective meaning.

[The trouble is those that claim to represent the Law. They tend to be liars and to be using the Law to get Money. The best thing is the separate the Law from Money. People that ask for money to learn Torah should be told to get a job and not use Torah to make money. Or they pretend to be doing some kind of public service.] Nowadays Torah has become a huge business and everyone keeps on lying about it as if this is permitted or desirable. And one that dares say that Torah and Money should be separate is considered a traitor to all those that want to use it for money.

The trouble is schizoid personalities that made rituals to be the one thing that could help when situations were troublesome. These half insane people got to define what Torah is about because of their extreme adherence to rituals