So cults that worship people I think should be avoided. This obviously was the point of the Gra when he put his signature on the letter of excommunication.

I think the secular world does not make much distinction between religious values. From the secular view it is all the same. Not much more than a waste of time. [Except for the Kant Fries school and Hegel to whom religious value is highly significant.]
But in the Old Testament a distinction is made between different kinds of religious value.
For example in Deuteronomy we find [Perek 13] the paragraph concerning the מסית ומדיח one who suggests the worship of another being that is not the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob.

The verse says that if one person, even a close family member says to you "Let's go and serve some other god," then that person must be put to death.

I did about a year's amount of work on the Gemara in Sanhedrin which deals with the issue of idolatry in order to get the subject straightened out in my mind and I pretty much came to the conclusion  that worship of human beings counts as idolatry just as much as worship of sticks and stones.
So cults that worship people I think should be avoided. This obviously was the point of the Gra when he put his signature on the letter of excommunication.

Philosophy is relevant because of politics and economics and morals. Getting philosophy wrong means that one will get each of these other three things wrong. And if enough people get all those three things wrong things can get really off.

The major problem in Philosophy today I think is really concentrated in deciding between three areas. One is Dr Kelley Ross (CA) of the Kant-Fries School. Another is Hegel and the third is the intuitionsts people like Dr Huemer in Colorado and Brian Caplan [which stems from Thomas Reid, and G.E Moore].
The rest of twentieth century so called philosophy [Linguistic and or so called analytic] is definitely defunct and as Dr John Searle {Berkley} puts it so eloquently:  "It is obviously false."

The Medieval development of Plato and Aristotle as we see in the Rambam, Anselem, and Aquinas seems also important and highly relevant [as Dr Edward  Feser (CA) makes note of].

There is a lot I need to learn here. But just off hand it seems to me that Hegel, Dr Ross are not so far apart.  But Hegel was in fact hijacked so some like Karl Popper blamed him for totalitarian systems that used his name.--Marx for example. But I think a close look at Hegel will show he was much closer to the American political system than is known.



Philosophy is relevant because of politics and economics and morals. Getting philosophy wrong means that one will get each of these other three things wrong. And if enough people get all those three things wrong things can get really off. 

So getting it right is important even if one does not have a natural interest in it. 

The exact quote from the Gra is that proportional to the lack of knowledge of the seven wisdoms one will lack in knowledge of Torah a hundred fold. That is he sees a kind of causality in that relation.

The Middles Ages --the age of faith pretty much ended with the Black Plague and religion seemed useless against it. The Enlightenment had many aspects but one was to find non religious justification for values  and non religious solutions to human problems.
In part this had the great result in advancement in the hard sciences. But it also gave credibility to obvious pseudo sciences--anything that could tack the word "science" onto its ending syllable.

So I ask is that all there is? Just religious solutions to human problems or pseudo sciences?

In the Kant-Friesian School of thought of Dr Kelley Ross we find a spectrum of values. Thus numinous values are found in all areas of the spectrum. Thus in plain English that means "balance."
That is when one tries to have a balance of values each area of value reinforces other areas.

This you find in the sages in many places, One place is the more well known idea "דרך ארץ קדמה לתורה" "The way of the Earth comes before Torah."  The idea is also expressed by the Gra: Proportional to the lack of knowledge in the Seven Wisdoms [Quadrivium, Trivium] one will lack knowledge of Torah.

The exact quote from the Gra is that proportional to the lack of knowledge of the seven wisdoms one will lack in knowledge of Torah a hundred fold. That is he sees a kind of causality in that relation.

The big problem with Torah scholars that are demons is they pretend to be friends, but because they are demons they actually try to cause harm when they are able; and at least never help.

The big problem with Torah scholars that are demons is they pretend to be friends, but because they are demons they actually try to cause harm when they are able; and at least never help.
I mean to say that though the subject of Torah scholars that are demons is not well defined in the Zohar and the Ari, still in the writings of the Ran from Breslov it is easy to see what the terminology means.
For example in the stories of the Ran [from Breslov and Uman] you can see he uses the term as in מזיקי עלמא or what is called "mazikim." that go around trying to cause harm.

One important point that Rav Nahman brings is in his major book vol 1. 61 where he says the major blame is on people that give to these demonic Torah scholars a kind of pseudo ordination.
True ordination stopped in the middle of the Talmudic period. This is the reason Amoraim from Iraq were called "Rav" [as in Rav Yehuda etc.]

The trouble is it is just too easy to ignore this problem. But that just aggravates the situation. To me it seems best to deal with the issue decisively.

To me it seems that this comes under the category of rebuke that one knows will not be accepted. Still in some kinds of cases one is required to give rebuke anyway. I saw this in the אבן שלמה of the Gra where it is brought down that there are situations where one must give rebuke even where there is no chance of it being listened to.
It seems that this is one of those cases, because without at least someone making the problem known, too many innocent people fall into the trap.
[I do not mean that one should always give rebuke as the Ran from Uman makes clear in Vol II:8. Still, there are times when a situation has gotten so out of hand that one must make it known. ]

The problem of Torah scholars that are demons

The problem of Torah scholars that are demons which comes up in the writings of the Ran from Uman and Breslov is not just concerning the issue to avoid certain people. The problem is that from the teachers the decay sets into the whole thing. That is it makes it hard to keep the rules of the Torah at all when the people that you would expect are there to help turn out to be demons.
That makes the entire project of learning and keeping the Torah to be difficult.

Before the time of the Gra I think things were more simple. But after his time and his letter of excommunication was ignored, I think the rot became pervasive throughout the entire structure. And this is the cause of the formation of the Reform Movement that was intended to be able to be true to the principle of Torah without the rot that had set into the religious world.

[Reform however went too far left, and so the Conservative movement started. But it is interesting to note that the formation of the State of Israel come solely from secular Jews.]

[It is obvious that Reb Israel Salanter held that the best approach would be an emphasis on learning Musar [Mediaeval Ethics] and to some degree I have to agree. But just from simple observation or the state of people that do in fact learn Musar, I have to conclude that that solution is highly limited in effect. Even my learning partner said, "I am allergic to Musar." In other words, he also noticed the same thing that I saw. The gap between learning Musar and doing Musar seems too great to be easily crossed.] What I  mean is that often people that represent and are involved in Musar do not seem to have much in the way of human decency. That raises a question on the whole Musar project. So the only solution I can see is to serve God individually at home. [Or your might say that being a "mashgiach" as a paid profession is what ruined it. Maybe it is better to say that the Musar project is right, but only as the way Rav Israel Salanter saw it. Not as Msa becoming a paid business.] 

The big problem with Torah scholars that are demons is they pretend to be friends, but because they are demons they actually try to cause harm when they are able, and at least never help. 

music file U45

U-45 F Major   [U-45 in midi format]

Even though numinous value is important, it does not replace other areas of value.

There is a tendency in religious circles to imagine themselves superior to others in all possible ways. That is in mental ability, in moral actions etc. And in areas that it is clear they are not any better than others the tendency is to minimize the significance of those areas.




The only way I have been able to make sense of this is  by Dr Kelley Ross's Polynomic Theory of Value where he builds on the insights of Kant and Schopenhauer. That is to say: even though numinous value is important, it does not replace other areas of value.

[It is basically a Neo Platonic system which works well for me as that is the basic world view of the Rishonim and Geonim like Saadia Gaon and the Rambam. I mean that even though the Rambam leans towards Aristotle he still is pretty firmly in the Neo Platonic School.]

[For some reason Dr. Ross has not published a book on his system, but I have found his Ph.D thesis on his site to fill in the details.]

In any case, I tend to be skeptical about claims to moral superiority when actions seems to indicate the reverse.  That is to say even though numinous value is important, still in every area of value there seems to be a kind of  Dark Side that surrounds it.