Things involved with religion. The problem seems to be that positive value can all too easily turn into negative value, and that seems to be what has happened on a vast scale.

They do not tend to lead towards a more sincere heart.

In any case things involved with religion make me nervous. I think it is best if we do not discuss them. Ayn Rand and Kant are different, but  other issues--even with M. Idel and Abulafia make me upset and nervous. They do not tend to make me happy nor help me be closer to God. If we can just drop it, all the better.
  I can manage to learn Gemara and try to keep the Law of Moses (in private), but besides that of what is involved in religion nowadays just makes me upset and nervous.
The whole thing just got  to be in bad taste.
  [The problem seems to be that positive value can all too easily turn into negative value, and that seems to be what has happened on a vast scale.]
So the approach of my parents to find positive value in Torah but not to make a parade out of it seems best to me. 

music files u56 u57

U-56 A Flat Major  U-57 D Major

Kant-Fries School

 I really have to say that the Kant-Fries School makes the most sense to me. [That is what is called in Germany the Critical school.] That means more or less Leonard Nelson who kind of revived the whole thing and then Dr Kelley Ross.

There are some good reasons for this. One is the the best second seems to be Hegel, but Hegel seems to have enough problems to make his approach not really as good as the Kant/Fries one.
 It is not just the maddening maze of words--which is a challenge. But rather, outside of certain basic insights, he does not seem to have a lot to offer, even after you get by the challenge  of  his writing style. [It is like reading a book of free associations].

Another second best seems to be the intuitionists like G.E. Moore and Dr. Michael Huemer. But there also there seem to be enough problems as Danny Frederick noted.

It is not to say that there is nothing to learn from Hegel or Huemer. But rather it seems if one is going to spend the time and effort, it might as well be on the best thing available.

Of course you might want to avoid all the issues by going back to the Middle Ages. But that also does not seem like much of an option. Too many axioms that just do not seem right. [It is almost medieval you might say.] Even though almost all scholastics were amazingly rigorous about what they derive from their axioms. The problems with later philosophers are the opposite,-- often nice sounding axioms, but amazingly sloppy logic about what they would derive from them. 

It might make some sense to write an essay about this all, but it would just be covering ground that has already been worked on.

I really think that if you do your own work, you will have to agree that that Kant-Fries School is about the best thing out there.

[The reason in Germany the Kant Fries approach is called Critical  is based on Kant's idea that there is a limit to how far Pure Reason can go. ["Critique" means "limit".] His answer was however unsatisfactory. He put objective knowledge into the subject. So you can see the problem with that. The Kant Fries answer is non intuitive immediate knowledge. A kind of knowledge than does not depend on reason, nor sense perception. The best idea to see what this means is to see Dr Kelley Ross's Phd Thesis and the books of Leonard Nelson.]
[One thing Dr Ross noted in his PhD thesis is that Kant requires causality among dinge an sich things in themselves and to me that seems to be fine since interaction with its environment causes a collapse of the wave function to just one state.]

IDF (Israeli Defense Force)

I think there are at least three good proofs in the Old Testament that show it is important to serve in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force).

One is well known already in the Book of Numbers אחיכם יעלו למלחמה ואתם תשבו פה.
["You will sit here while your brothers go up to war?"]

Another is the other less known events surrounding the פילגש בגבעה.
The third are the even less known events concerning Ezra and the building of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.

The major point I wanted to bring out today is about the פילגש בגבעה. The Concubine of Giveah.
There the Tribes of Israel were upset that the tribe of Benjamin had sat by quietly while a terrible crime had been committed. The tribe of Benjamin said "It is not our business. It is not our affair."
The other tribes said, "We will make it your business." At that point in time the grandson of Aaron was around;-- Pinhas. And he asked consul from God directly by means of the Urim and Tumim and received an answer to go to war against Benjamin. One city (יבש בגלעד) did not go up to war. They also said it is not our affair. So after the war with Benjamin was over the tribes went to war with that city and wiped them out.

The same idea that came up in Numbers is here again. To sit by while everyone else has to go to war is not an acceptable course of action.

As was noted by Shimon Buso that when missiles were raining down on the north of Israel, everyone fled south. No one said their learning Torah would protect them.


The other thing is the fact that a lot of people were against the return of Israel to build Jerusalem and the Second Temple. This is gone into in great detail in the Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah.
The book of Nehemiah has a major theme about the wicked people that tried to stop Ezra and Nehemiah from rebuilding Jerusalem.]




[There are problems today that remind me of the problems that Ezra had. Sefardim often make it their most essential business to get rid of Ashkenazic people--especially in Jerusalem. That is just one example. There are many kinds in Israel that make it their business to get rid of anyone not like their own social group. Sometimes this might even be justified. Still, this is  a factor to consider. Aliya to Israel without taking into account this tremendous animosity is ignoring a factor that might come to one's attention later.]
However my first time in Israel was quite amazing. If you can find a good group, then it is probably a good idea. Probably the best idea is to go to Tel Aviv.

group-think

The power of "group-think" is so powerful that often one can get mixed up whether his own thoughts and attitudes are actually his or her own or from the group. The Spartans were well aware of this when they developed their system of keeping the boys and adolescents away from their family and rather had them hanging out with each other in order to develop the kind of group solidarity needed for the kind of warriors they needed to sustain their system.
[In warfare, the whole strength of the Spartan system was the group locking shields together.]


After all how much of your own attitudes do you really think you came up with all on your own?

[The best idea then is to choose carefully with whom you want to hang out with.]

Bava Batra page 75

There are ways to argue for Christianity. One way is from Bava Batra page 75 from a statement of the Gemara that in the future saints will be called by the name of God. Then the next statement is that they are already called by the name of God. And R. Gershom says they are called the absolute name of God.  The first  idea come from a verse in Isaiah 43. The Gemara only quotes the verse itself but to see why the verse means that you have to go to the whole paragraph and get the context.

This is not to say that everything Christians say is right. Rather the automatic dismissal of everything they say is not in accord with Torah. They have some good and important points.

The events of the barber that gave Sanheriv, the king of Assyria, a haircut. The Gemara in Sanhedrin that was G-d coming down in a physical body. The Gemara itself says that if not for the open implication of the verses it would be impossible to say this.


The other most obvious aspect of this is of course Avraham Abulafia, the famous mystic. [Quoted in the last volume of שערי קדושה  and also brought in the Remak.]  [Professor M Idel has made a lot of books surrounding Rav Avraham Abulafia and it is worth while to pick up and read his essays. ] [The Ari also has at least one hint to what Rav Abulafia was saying.]

Relativity cancels non locality

The way I look at Physics from my admittedly amateur point of view is that Bell's inequality tells us either non locality or non realism. But since Relativity cancels non locality, it must be that non realism is true. That is that the electron has no space time values until measured.

However in the actual equations, it looks that the electron does have a sum of different states.
[In Physics language it is a "superposition of linear states." That means simply that the wave function is a sum of simple values of space or time with a simple coefficient in front of each term to tell you the probability of finding it there. When you observe it, the wave function collapses to just one term.]

So the way to put it perhaps is not that the electron has no space time values until measured,- but rather it has certain possible values before measured, and then the wave function collapses when it is measured.

This way of looking at it  makes more sense in the actual equations.

Also this helps the Kant/Friesian school of thought in that there is causality among dinge an sich things. The reason is that not just observation can cause the collapse of the wave function-- but also a connection with the environment. That is what makes quantum computing hard --that fact that you need the quantum particles to be isolated from their environment.

[The Kant Friesian School seems to me to be very important much more so than Hegel. Apparently Dr. Kelley Ross would like a whole shift in academia from 20th century vacuous philosophy to Leonard  Nelson and Kant. And he is probably right about that. In Germany the Kant/Fries school is called the Critical School and is slightly different from Dr Kelley Ross in their emphasis on the Socratic Method.]

Appendix:
1. What I mean by Relativity cancelling non locality is possible to see on a day by day basis in the Global Positioning Satellites [GPS] found in many taxis. If not for relativity they would be wrong by a few kilometers every day. The nice thing about GPS is it proves both Special Relativity and General Relativity.