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4.12.18

My search for truth ultimately led me to learn Gemara which which is an area of value of Numinosity. Still that leaves issues of world view aside. Gemara is mainly about how to keep the commandments of the Torah and does not deal with world view issues at length.

So even though it is a great thing to concentrate on one thing at a time and not get too spread out, it still leaves a lot of important questions unanswered. To some degree Saadia Gaon and the Rambam fill gaps left over.
[Though you could argue about that. There is a tendency to seek out in Rishonim hidden truths. Still there is a more relevant issue. It is that world view affects actions. From what I can see the religious world is a disaster zone in terms of decent character traits. You can not be holy if you are not a decent human being first. So in my view, the world view issues have not been addressed well.

To some degree I made up for that by learning the books of Rav Nahman who does deal with the larger issues in a powerful and relevant way.

Today my view is that learning Gemara is one important area of value, but there is a separate area of value that is philosophy. So if I could I would simply plow through the basic works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Leonard Nelson, Hegel. But there seem to be time constraints.