Even a parakeet can learn to speak the right words of love and peace.

 Even a parakeet can learn to speak the right words of love and peace. All the more so demons and devils. No wonder Rav Nahman [of Breslov] warned us about Torah scholars that are demons. Even demons can learn how to talk the talk and walk the walk. So what I suggest is to learn Torah in Litvack yeshiva where there is no pretense of holiness. There is simply the idea to learn and keep Torah with nothing added nor subtracted. No one pretends to be a "tzadik"

Z30 D minor 

Friesian school [based on Kant, Fries, Nelson]

 The approach of the Friesian school [based on Kant, Fries, Nelson]. Fries had an important insight into the need for immediate non intuitive knowledge [or what I would prefer to say that reason recognizes universals--not that  it knows them. ] As you can imagine Kant is very great but his Copernican revolution leaves a lot to be desired. That we know synthetic a priori because we have the categories implanted in our minds  (space and time and causality). That is in simple language: "I know it because I know it."  Or as mothers tell their children, "Why? Because I said SO!"    

So as Kelley Ross points out --there is a regress of reasons. Somewhere where reason has to 

So Kelley Ross found a ready made system that needed a bit bringing down to earth to show its great implications as he does in his web site the Friesian.

So why was all this ignored?  Academic philosophy since then has gone off into all sorts of odd directions. The reason for this is simple--people in professional philosophy are very smart. And they do a lot of reading. This enters them into the strange worlds. So they lose their common sense. And nothing is so important in philosophy as common sense.

[I should add that there is a certain degree of distain for Hegel in the Friesian school which I can not share. But I only read the Logic part of his encyclopedia and Mc Taggart and Cunningham's PhD thesis which gave me a very positive idea of what Hegel is all about. [Neo Platonism while taking Kant into consideration --i.e. how Kant modifies the Neo Platonic approach.] But to my mind, the Kelley Ross Fries approach is a modification of Plato as Dr Ross says himself about Socratic ignorance [we know what we do not know that we know] and Platonic knowledge.

 I wish the USA had asked the Russians about Afghanistan. It was well known to the Russians that they never had any trouble clearing out an area of  mujahedeen. They would bomb a whole area to smithereens until nothing was left. But usually the mujahedeen had warnings, so they were gone before the Russians arrived. Then in a week or two the mujahedeen would be right back.

[Another source of the trouble was that the Taliban brought stability  where the mujahideen brought chaos. In areas where the mujahideen would go through, the stores would be looted and other much worse crimes. But under the Taliban, thieves lost their right arms. So a lot of people actually liked the Taliban. Person and property were safe as long as one obeyed the rules.]

Just a few conversations with a few Russian generals would have let the USA know the situation there before wasting lives for no reason. 

 Rav Nahman from Uman and Breslov you might have noticed does not emphasize learning Torah very much. And that has always seemed to me to be a minus in his system.  [After all just look the mishna in Peah, "learning Torah is equal to all the other mitzvot" (and the Yerushalmi says that refers to every sinngle word of learning Torah or Gemara) and at the Nefesh HaChaim of Rav Haim of Voloshin and see the importance of learning Torah] In the Nefesh HaHaim you see the main service of God is learning Torah. There he shows this from the Gemara, Midrash and Zohar.

But in the system of Rav Nahman you find the idea of נייחא דמוחין. [relaxing the mind]  And you do see that people that learn all the time tend to lose the ability to think for themselves. They lose common sense. They are so busy thinking other people's thoughts that  they end up having no thoughts of their own.

So clearly one needs some kind of balance. So while I certainly admit about the evil of bitul Torah [wasting time when one could be learning Torah] . How could anyone disagree with the statement of the sages הכרת תיכרת  היכרת מעולם הזה ותיכרת בעולם הבא הנאמר על ביטול תורה still I can see the need for a relaxing period. [That statement of the sages is brought in Sanhedrin. It brings the verse, "'One who despises the word of God will be cut off to be cut off.' And they explain the double language cut off in this world to be cut off in the next world and they explain that verse refers to one who can learn Torah but does not do so."]

If I could learn Torah all the time, I would but somehow I have found obstacles. So perhaps I can see wat the sages said "Sometimes wasting time from Torah is the establishment of Torah"

פעמים ביטולה של תורה זהוה קיומה

Still there is some aspect of the Litvak world that seems problematic. The aspect that I see is the ignoring of the herem of the ra. That the Gra said that there is a deep sitra achra  dark side aspect of the religious. o I say the farther one can be from the entire religious  world the better. There is a etreme emphasis on rituals however there is a lack of sincerity and devotion to T- For the religious  they want is not Torah or trust and faith in God, but that the secular Jews should a=have trust an faith in their religious leaders.

A lot of the of socialist movements forget the somewhat 100 millions of deaths caused by the communist movements of the the Bolsheviks, Chinese communism , Cambodia, etc.

A lot of the of socialist movements forget the somewhat 100 millions of deaths caused by the communist movements of the the Bolsheviks, Chinese communism , Cambodia, etc. The reason is that the see this as a sort of reactions against the opposite extreme forces. None of them have middle of the way that you see in the American Constitution. Some lunatic people tend to see in extremist positions  as the solution to all human kind's problems. [These are religious and political fanatics.] It takes time and experience to see that the extremist positions never lead to utopias, but rather to their opposite. That is why I see the USA Constitution with its careful working out of principles of government based on balance of powers as the best approach. Middle of the road capitalism along with some welfare sort of nets to rescue those through  no fault of their own have fallen into a state of neediness. [ That however does not imply the sort of constant state of neediness of the religious who are always asking for money in order to support their "holiness" is a desirable state of being.

The fact that they are always asking for money might seem like an appreciation for the value of "tzedaka." But a closer examination will show that their value  of charity is solely on the receiving end, not when they are asked to give. So I see the religious world as a sort of fraud--pretending to Torah  while imitating ritual in externals and the holiness of Torah, and doing the opposite.

z28 C minor midi file