Belief in God is rational. Everything has a cause. So unless there is a first cause, then you would have an infinite regress. And then nothing could exist. Therefore there must be a first cause. Therefore God, the first cause, exists. QED.
3.2.22
music file z63
Musar [i.e. the classical books on Morality] But it is hard to say that one can just get the basic world view of Torah without it.
I may not have a lot of trust in God, but I try to renew my trust in him when I wake up in the morning and repeat to myself the opening paragraphs of the Level of Man [Navardok] in the section on trust. And this practice I recommend to others, to learn Musar [i.e. the classical books on Morality from the Middle Ages]. Then when you find something that you know needs reinforcement, to repeat it to yourself right when you get up in the morning. Over time something has to sink in.
The major works of Musar are , מסילת ישרים, ספר היראה, חובות הלבבות, שערי תשובה, אורחות צדיקים Book of Fear, Paths of the Righteous, Ways of the Just, Gates of Repentance]
But I would like to add the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter as they deepen one's understanding of these principles of Fear of God and good character traits.
[However if you really want Fear of God and good character, you must runaway from the religious world since they assume the appearance of Torah, while are in fact ruled by the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side).]
Where did the break occur between authentic Torah and the false world of the religious? The break happened when the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication was ignored. And the result i that the entire religious world is wicked.
On a side note: The path of Musar is great but has some drawbacks. That is why the Litvak world introduced it in the yeshiva but only for 20 min in afternoon and 15 at night. The danger is that it can get one off the path of learning Gemara,-and even going off on some tangent. But it is hard to say that one can just get the basic world view of Torah without it. In fact it seems clear that without Musar people go off into terrible delusions . But even so you can see that there was a god reason that the actual time for learning it became much less than what was desired by Rav Israel Salanter.
i.e., where there is holiness (the holy Torah) the flies and demons gather around to surround. [This is in fact something that Rav Nahman of Breslov pointed out concerning Torah scholars that are demons. And he meant this quite literally.
For some odd reason I found sticking to the straight Torah path to be hard even though I had a sincere desire to stick with learning Torah. The difficulties were from within and from without. "From within"--means I was too easily detracted. "From without" means even from people that were learning Torah because that was the way they learned Torah to make money. That is the sort of Lakewood kollel sorts of fraud that claim to be super geniuses. But one way or the other I found sticking to learning Torah to be too hard when everyone in the so called "Torah community" convinced my wife to leave me and take her for themselves, and to rape my children. The religious world at first seemed holy and upright. At that point, when they started to rape my children, they seemed to be not at all so great.
Even though Torah is great and holy, the religious world is a mess. They are nothing like their claim of keeping Torah. It all a show of religiosity. There might be others who are evil, but for me the religious people were the most evil because of their ability and success to hurt my family by means of their show and dance.
Torah is one thing. The religious world is the opposite. So the fact that some people see the religious world as hypocrites--well there very well might be something to back that up.
So in conclusion --there is some aspect of things here that are hard to understand in their very essence. Some סביב רשעים יתהלכון "the wicked go round about" i.e., where there is holiness (the holy Torah) the flies and demons gather around to surround [and use it for evil סם חיים למיימינים בה סם מוות למשמאליים בה an elixir of life for those that walk in Torah for its own sake. Torah is a poison for those that walk in it for the sake of power and money (which means the entire religious world is poison).
So what is it about the religious world that makes the show and dance about Torah which s so different from Torah itself? Well for one thing the religious world is not about Torah at all. It is about the appearance of Torah. [This is in fact something that Rav Nahman of Breslov pointed out concerning Torah scholars that are demons. And he meant this quite literally. And thy are the leaders of the religious world. ]
2.2.22
importance of alliances.
the religious world
Even though lashon hara [slander] is serious sin, still there is a need to warn people about danger that awaits them. So to speak highly of the great Yeshiva world of the Litvak yeshivot, one must also draw a distinction between those that follow the straight and narrow path of the Gra and the religious world that is obsessed with rituals
There is some sort of "kelipa" (or evil force) that seems to have take over the religious world. Even though I found myself in a island in the few great Litvaks yeshivot that God granted to me to attend, still the wider religious world that seems to surround these sorts of places I found to be of the lowest moral standards. סביב רשעים יתהלכון [That is a verse in Psalms. "The wicked go round about". That means where ever there is holiness, the wicked surround it.]
1.2.22
medieval books on ethics
I think one of the greatest benefits I had at the few Litvak yeshivot that I attended, was the learning of Musar. Even though I was raised the home of my parents who were in fact very upright and moral people, still, I needed a sort of intellectual basis for this. Maybe I ought to know simple moral principles by being raised in such an environment, but I needed the extra understanding that comes from Musar.
So what I recommend for myself and others is the learning of the basic texts of Musar which are the medieval books on ethics and also the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter
31.1.22
Scientism is the faith that only what science can measure in a test tube can be real. But this seems to be highly non scientific. For science seeks to know what we do not know; not to limit what can be known.
But how can areas beyond what can be tested by a test tube or by pure reason be known? Thus to answer this question I had to turn to Immediate Non Intuitive Knowledge (of the the Kant-Friesian School of Kelley Ross). That means knowledge that is not dependent on the senses nor on pure reason.
And this makes a lot of sense to me because I am sorry to have to admit it but it makes sense to me because of my own personal experience of faith. So I realize that personal experience is no proof of anything, still I have to explain why I find this school of thought to be so compelling.
And along with this I can also believe that mystics like Rav Avraham Abulafia from the Middle Ages-had true mystic vision. [ Rav Abulafia had a lot of ideas that are in absolute contradiction to what the religious world thinks. And I admit I was totally shocked when I first read his ideas in manuscript form in 1992.[This was after I had undergone difficult traumatic times in my life-so I might have been more receptive to his new approach. You might say I was no longer as sure of my ideas as I hade been before that.]
But then how does one tell who has true vision? For this I think you need the mediaeval formula of Faith with Reason. That is Faith may go beyond Reason but Reason still determines what is reasonable.
So the question is how to strike a true balance between reason and faith. The problem is one without the other leads to lunacy. Thus the Litvak Yeshiva approach based on the Gra I think must be thought of as the true approach.