One person said on Breitbart that religion motivates people to evil:
I suggested he look at Dr Kelly Ross and Steven Dutch.

I should mention I have in fact seen religion motivate people towards all kind of things,-- good and bad.


This is what Steven Dutch says:

Given the endless ways religions can be subverted and co-opted, the wonder is less that religions commit evils than that they do any good at all. And given the way Marxism was transformed into an unchallengeable dogma in the 20th century, the simple-minded prescription of John Lennon's Imagine:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
doesn't seem to offer much prospect of a solution. After all, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalinist Russia and Enver Hoxha's officially atheistic Albania didn't exactly shine as beacons in the darkness. One could readily see, in a world where Lennon's ideals somehow gained supremacy, that a few generations later people who atavistically clung to national identities or religious beliefs would be ostracized and persecuted. Solely because of the threat they posed to peace, harmony, and all-round good vibes, mind you.

In fact, blaming religion for the ills of the world is a wonderful way to avoid taking a hard look at human nature. It's a variation on the "noble savage" myth and suffers from the inevitable failure of believers in the myth to ask how innately benign people could ever be attracted to repression in the first place, and how we can guarantee that eliminating all forms of repression in the present will prevent its returning in the future.

the baali teshuva /newly religious.

The religious world was putting forth great effort to get Jews to be religious. [In the sense of keeping trivial rituals at the expense of the more weighty factors  like honoring one's parents.] [Certainly no religious organization was interested in strengthening one's observance of that mitzvah.] But there was more about it that was odd. No one has documented much of the spiritual abuse and the taking advantage of the baali teshuva [''newly religious'']. Maybe it is the prohibition of ''Lashon Hara'' [slander]?

But the main focus seems to have been to create  a slave caste to support the  supposedly superior "frum [religious] from birth". The whole thing reeked of hypocrisy and fraud until it gave a bad name to the holy Torah.
For themselves they would encourage and parade family values, but for baali teshiva
they would encourage their wives to divorce them, and the sexual abuse of the children from those marriages was rampant in the frum world. While pretending holiness and higher moral standards they would  act like the most depraved of humans.  I have long sought for a reasonable explanation of this phenomenon, and the best I could find was the influence of the Shatz and that whole movement that the Gra put into excommunication.

[It is not to say that the Litvak world [Yeshiva World based on the Gra] is immune. Just the opposite. They allowed elements from those movements to get inside, and thus partake of many of the flaws of fraud and spiritual uncleanliness.

So the solution, I imagine, would be simply to pay attention to the excommunication of the Gra. That would seem to be obvious. But for some reason, this obvious solution is ignored except by Rav Silverman in the Old City of Jerusalem and to some degree Ponovitch.

Appendix:
Rav Zilverman is the Rosh Yeshiva of Aderet Eliayhu which is the first yeshiva to specifically do everything according to the Gra. Since then, others have started. Ponovitch tends towards that approach also much more so than any American Yeshiva.

T47 E flat major  mp3  same piece in MIDI  same piece in nwc format

Nice article on Martin Luther

I had heard of this opinion [that is mentioned in that article--the Holocaust being mainly derived from Luther]  before, but I had not been aware of the evidence behind the thesis. My own opinion is that Pauline Christianity tends to waver between two extremes, abidance with the Law and then nullification of the Law. This is the never ending dilemma of Christianity which comes to full force in Luther.  

"You owe nothing to God except faith and confession. In all other things He lets you do whatever you like. You may do as you please, without any danger of conscience whatsoever." (see Grisar, "Luther", vol. iv, p. 145).
...
"The body has nothing to do with God. In this respect one can never sin against God, but only against one's neighbour" (W12, 131).³

"It does not matter what people do; it only matters what they believe." "God does not need our actions. All He wants is that we pray to Him and thank Him." Even the example of Christ Himself means nothing to him. "It does not matter how Christ behaved--what He taught is all that matters" (E29, 196), is Luther's subtle distinction.




[My point of view is the anti law approach is simply unfounded and mistaken. To me it is of greatest importance to keep the Law, The written Law and its oral explanation {that is the Torah and the two Talmuds}.The best way to understand the Gemara in a straightforward way is to learn the books on Ethics from the Middle Ages which explain the basic emphasis of the Torah on good character and fear of God.] 

the religious world

I  can not look it up, but I recall that the beginning of the book of Isaiah  starts on rather a negative note. It is just the opposite of what you would normally expect from Isaiah. You would think it would start on some positive theme  But instead he sounds like Jeremiah. His point is Jerusalem which ought to be a faithful city had become full of pus. From this we can see a parallel to the world of the religious today. That is the name "Jerusalem" is made up of two words. יראה שלמה. Perfect Fear of God. So when a person joins the religious world and expects to find encouragement to fear God and serve him faith fully instead he finds it is "full of pus" and is "infected from foot to head," as Isaiah puts it.
Thus there is no choise but to avoid the religious world as much as possible and buy oneself a Gemara, a few books of Ethics {Musar}, and the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach [which is as deep, but more self explanatory than the חידושי הרמב''ם ] and to learn Torah at home.
The problem is the religious world seems to have some kind of infectious disease that one picks up just by being around them.  
Unless one is in the vicinity of an authentic Litvak yeshiva, then there is nothing to gain by association with the insane religious. The idea that problems with the religious world is infectious can be understood in light of Toxo-plasmosis. This is juts the first of its kind to be discovered, but it is probable there are millions of such parasites that can jump from person to person to infect others with bad thoughts and false idea. This is like the parasite that can make  a male crab believe it is female and then it goes about digging a place in the sand to bury its eggs. One can go a step further and postulate that a social meme has this same characteristic as the ToxoPlasmosis parasite. It face the same challenge-- it can only reproduce in humans and thus faces a challenge how to get inside of humans? (I know this is a stretch-to say the super-organism ha a mind of its own but this seems to be the way Howard Bloom look at it in hi book the Lucifer Principle)






[Though the groups that follow Reb Nachman are in the same boat, still it is refreshing to see that Reb Nachman himself brought attention to this problem as the Na Nach groups points out. The drawback is that as much as one gains from Reb Nahman's good advice, the eventual outcome is to leave off learning Torah.]

T44 C Major  t44 in midi

(ditto in nwc format)

essence of Torah

I do not have enough spiritual sense to be able to claim the absolute truth. Truth as in TRUTH. But I do have enough of that kind of sense to be able to tell quality when I see it and to be able to discern fraud.So I do want to share some of the valuable ideas I have see around.
One thing is the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. More than any other book I have seen that is the one set that contains the essence of Torah in crystallized form. I saw in my parents the path of Torah of balance-- i.e. Torah with Derech Erertz [That is "to be a mensch"decent human being--with good character and being self sufficient].  Their path as more or less the way of the Rambam with his four fold program of learning the Oral Law, the written Law, Physics and Metaphysics. In Reb Nachman I saw a wealth of great ideas --that is: particular pieces of advice, but all a vision of Torah that makes full use of his predecessors to create tapestry or a vast fresco of Torah. That is he weaves together the Tenach and Talmud with the Ari to create an amazing vision of what Torah is suppose to be about. That is not to give any kind of agreement with the group that supposedly go by his teachings. {Visionary would be a good word for Reb Nachman.}

[Among his good ideas are: (1) talking with God in one's own language. That is the real essence of prayer. (2) Avoidance of doctors. (3) Making an importance issue out of the kind of fast learning mentioned in Gemara and later books of Musar.]

Reb Israel Salanter had two disciples Isaac Blazzer, and the Madragat HaAdam. Both have written really amazing Musar books. The Madragat HaAdam is mainly about trust in God with no effort. If only I could come to that! But at least I am happy to be reminded about that. [A second book by Isaac Blazzer came out recently of his writings after he wrote the אור ישראל.]