overwhelming religious interest is the sign of schizoid personality.

Robert Sapolsky {Stanford} brings the idea that overwhelming religious interest is the sign of  schizoid personality.

This seems to account for a common-place observation about the unreliability and general lack of sanity among such groups.

The issue is not the importance of religious value. Let's take it for granted that closeness with God is important. Rather the issue is that for every area of value there is an equal and opposite area of value. And since this world is mostly evil as the Ari (Isaac Luria) says, therefore the tendency is for religious people to fall into the Sitra Achra even if their intentions are pure.

[The idea here I think I did not state clearly.  Let me rephrase this: There is a spectrum of values. When or if they decay, they decay into their opposite. When some area of value is not so great, then it decays into something not so bad. But when a holy area of value decays, it becomes something really horrific.  ]


Thus learning Torah and trust in God are important, however self reliance also is--that is not to be relying on other people's handouts.

People that make their living off of Torah are often of this schizoid type. To add to the problem they also desire power and demand others pay their way.

music file U51

U-51 D Flat Major

U-47 E Minor u47 midi
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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. ]