(1)The God of Maimonides and Aristotle

(1)The God of Maimonides and Aristotle tends to lack personality. (2) The omnipotence and benevolence of God, while happy and comforting to contemplate, generates the Problem of Evil, that the evidence of the world and of events frequently would seem to contradict an omnipotent and benevolent agency.
(3) It seems to me that Yaakov along with Job and King David [עד אבא למקדשי אל אבינה לאחריתם in Psalm 73 ] found some way of dealing with these issues. The way they did this was to project God's goodness out over a longer period.
To me it seems that this was the opinion of Job and God himself who agreed with Job.
The friends of Job said: "God is just". God said they were wrong. Point blank. At point blank range. There is no way to misinterpret this because the entire Book of Job shows this.


 The first statement is that Job was without sin. So trying to fudge the variables here does not work. Trying to make it that there were other faults is clearly not what it says. Then the whole story of how God caused him to suffer in order to win a debate with Satan just shows the point. Because you want to win a debate with someone does not give you cause to make someone else suffer. This is the clear position of the narrator of The Book of Job 



What enrages people is that the Rambam understands the Torah thorough the eyes  and world view of Aristotle. And that he is not embarrassed about that makes it worse. At least he could try to hide where he gets his ideas from like everyone else. And what makes it even worse is that no one can claim to understand the Torah better than the Rambam unless they want to seem like an arrogant, ignorant fool. Thus people just ignore the Rambam when it comes to the world view of Torah.

My approach is different than the generally accepted approach. I say the Rambam was right, and everyone else simply does not understand the Torah.

In any case  the Rambam's approach to Torah is I think about as close to the actual Torah approach as possible. In another approaches there are strong elements of polytheism. They may not reach pure polytheism but they certainly come close. Today  Torah practice often contains polytheist beliefs. In fact it is almost an axiom that the more strict one is in practices the more likely there are underlying polytheistic beliefs. Monotheism is not the same as polytheism except in number. There is more than a quantitative difference. There is a qualitative difference. A difference in world view. And the world view of Torah could not be further away from what people think it is today. It presents a reality that is radically different than what people think the Torah is about.

A Rambam Yeshiva would not be anything like the yeshivas we see today. The books there would be the Mishne Torah and Aristotle's encyclopedic work, Physics and his other encyclopedic work, the Metaphysics.   In the beginning of Mishne Torah he writes that the Mishne Torah contains all the Oral Law and take a good look at his language there when he says "One does not need any other book from among them."  "One reads the Old Testament and then the Mishne Torah and one does not need any other book from among them for any law," i.e. the books that he just mentioned in that paragraph. However he says one needs no other books to know what the law is (that is what among the laws of the Talmud is the halacha. But that does not mean that one understands the meaning of the law without knowing the Talmud. That is how all sages of Israel after him understood him. That is without the Talmud one can not know the meaning of any law in the Mishna Torah of the Rambam. Just like the Guide require background in Aristotle and Plato so the Mishna Torah requires the background of the Talmud.



So you can ask then what to do after you have read the Mishne Torah? You can finish it in two weeks easily. Start at 9:00 AM and go until 5:00 PM. A normal working day. You can finish it in two weeks. Then he explains you learn "the work of Creation and the Divine Chariot which are the Physics and Metaphysics of the ancient Greeks." Here too he explains this clearly in several places in the Mishe Torah and  Guide. And he not ambiguous in any way. You can see what enraged people about the Rambam. He says after one has finished reading the Written and Oral law (as he defines Oral Law to mean his book the Mishne Torah) then he spends all his days learning Physics and Metaphysics.



So clearly a Rambam approach to Torah  would be a radical departure from what people think today compromises a Torah approach. And he writes in a letter that the only reason that his book was not accepted as the final decision is because of the arrogance and pride of people wanting honor and power. So when the final redemption comes and arrogance and the evil inclination will be eliminated from the world then his book will be accepted as the objective truth. In the future the Mishne Torah of the Rambam will be considered as the truth and final decision. The son of the Rambam who became the Rav of the city after the Rambam in fact taught the Mishna Torah instead of Mishna or other things that had been customary to teach between the afternoon and evening prayers.

 My personal opinion is that Physics today (and Metaphysics) has gone considerably beyond Aristotle and that today the Rambam would hold to learn the Old Testament, then the Mishne Torah and then modern Physics and Kant. (I must admit I  have not gotten far in Mathematics or Physics. My impression is they both need about the  same amount of time and effort as knowing the Talmud even at the most amateurish level.  That is about 20,000 hours each. That is you have the normal 10,000 hours for just barely scratching the surface. Then the next 10,000 hours for gaining expertise. That was in any case my own experience with Talmud and it seems to me that Math and Physics are not all that different.)

And I should mention that this is the way I have accustomed myself to be learning for some time now. The only thing is I admit I do learn Talmud as I thing it is the only way to understand the Mishne Torah. Without knowing from where the Rambam gets his decision, people always misunderstand what he is saying. [And they think they understand.] For that reason, one should also learn Talmud and Rav Shach's commentary on the Rambam together with the Rambam..

[I should mention that this is not how Litvaks go about learning. And for myself if I have any time for learning at all I go straight to the Gemara. Being limited to what you can get I would say get a Bava Metzia (one full Talmud Tractate with Tosphot Mahrasha and Rif.). One Musar book and one of Jewish world view like the Guide for the Perplexed.

Why do I think that Islam is a threat to America? (This is rhetorical question.)

Why do I think that Islam is a threat to America? (This is rhetorical question.)


Ask the Bulgarians, Greeks, Ionian Greeks and Armenians about how different things were. Moslems were murdering, raping scum from the start, and they are murdering raping scum today. Dirty too. Greeks founded and maintained a circle of splendid cities on the perimeter of Anatolia 5 hundred years before Christ. Islam massacred raped and pillaged the city of Smynra (Izmir now) in 1922 and at that time over one million Greeks who had lived in Analtolia for thousands of years were either killed or forced to emigrate to Greece. Similar stories of course with the Armenians, Hungarians, Serbians and Bulgarians, in fact with all unfortunate enough to come in contact with these people.
Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Christian empire till 1453 when 'peaceful' Islam conquered, massacred, raped and pillaged it.
It is today what it always has been, an anti-civilization nomadic primitive and violent culture. Islam has no place and no part in Western civilization and must be entirely removed from Europe and America.

Though I am against Communism- but still it was based on the Enlightenment ideas and trying to create a just society. (And there were abuses that the czars were doing at the time, e.g. getting involved in WWI.) So I see the debate between Communism and Capitalism as an internal thing, a honest disagreement of how to have a working just society. But Islam is different. It is the worst threat to civilization on every possible level. Islam is the number one threat to the continued existence of the human race and planet Earth.



"To begin with, all manner of leftists are stuck with that whole cultural-relativism thing, at least when it operates to the detriment of the white race, Western culture, and America and old American ways. That drives them to cuddle up to primitive non-Western peoples, the more dodgy and exotic the better; and, to the extent they can, import them into the United State." -Nicholas Strackon

Most leftists (including the femi-nazis) are reticent to admit that they will ally themselves with the most barbaric creatures on Earth if they too are anti-Western and anti-American.
They know EXACTLY who/what they are standing with, but will do so anyway.



Just while I am at it let me mention a problem in political philosophy that relates to the inability of the left to see the threat of Islam.
As John Searle put it: "The leading political event of the twentieth century was the failure of ideologies such as communism, and in particular the failure of socialism in its different and various forms. The interesting thing is that we lack the categories in which to pose and answer questions dealing with the failure of socialism. If by “socialism” we mean state ownership and control of the basic means of production, then the failure of socialism so defined is the single most important social development of the twentieth century. It is an amazing fact that that development remains unanalyzed and is seldom discussed by the political and social philosophers of our time. "

Here is a good example from todays news:
Muslim insurgents attack Kabul hotel; 15 killed
One guest at Spozmay Hotel, Sharif Aloko, said he and 11 friends were sitting on the patio eating dinner when the gunmen entered wearing police uniforms and strapped with explosives. Three of them stood guard outside the restaurant while another one shot a father and a daughter while Aloko and his friends watched in horror and the family members pleaded “please don’t kill us.”
(Washington Post)
In the world of philosophy, there is no way to understand what is wrong with Islam. And when people lack a way of understanding something they simply can't see it. (like south American tribes that live on plants that they grow. They will starve rather than go fishing because the concept does not exist for them.) I mean take yourself for example. You are reading this little essay. How would you examine this? Clearly people have lots of buttons you can push. If you read Talmud or the Bible--it tends to push certain buttons in people. Some people read the Bible and go out and start a Salvation Army or a soup kitchen. Some people read Talmud and decide on daily schedule that that is basically taken up with learning and prayer and high moral standards. Some people read the Koran and decide that to murder lots of Jews is the way to come to the highest spiritual levels of Enlightenment. But if you try to analyze why this is or what is going on you are at a lose. The problem is Modern Philosophy in itself. It is the prime fallacy of Philosophy. It is the fallacy that it makes sense to look at a structure without knowing the contents of the structure. So philosophers feel they can examine religion without regard to the contents of the religion.
Here is what Steven Dutch says about this: " What we can call The Fundamental Fallacy of Modern Philosophy might be defined as the idea that it makes sense to study structure divorced from content. This is the idea that has given us businessmen who think they can "manage" without knowing anything about what they manage, critics who claim that only the technical excellence of a work of art matters, not its content, and sociologists of science like the one with whom I corresponded who think you can study the Velikovsky affair without regard to the scientific validity of Velikovsky's ideas."

hindu revisionism and Prabhakar Kamath

Hindu Revisionism: Was Shankaracharya Deceptive Or Just Ignorant?



(1) I want to mention that the type of revolution that the Bhava Gita was trying to do I look on with approval because of many aspects.
To break through the rule of the Brahmins seems to me to be worthy since basically the ruling class of Brahmins came to India from Iran and enslaved the local population and made them into the untouchables and created the Vedas to give spiritual significance to their rule. The BhavaGita and the Upanishads intended to break that rule and bring people to a true spirituality.

"I'll resign if I don't cut the deficit in half by the end of four years"

"I'll resign if I don't cut the deficit in half by the end of four years"
Now is his chance.
The problem in America is possible to analyze as one problem with different faces.

(Problem 1) Democrats are depending on their belief that Americans are stupid and can't remember a promise made four years ago. ["I'll resign if I don't cut the deficit in half by the end of four years." (It has gone up 17 trillion dollars.)]

Personally, I think this is wrong. I don't think Americans are stupid and I think the Democrats are wrong in this.
In fact, I was very impressed when I was growing up with just the general level of intelligence of average Americans. Whether it was my teachers in school in Math or Physics or just regular American soldiers. Not only did I discover that Americans are smart, but that they are alarmingly smart. So smart to make me intimidated. The average America solider could talk with me about Spinoza or a regular professor of English in Brooklyn Collage could talk to me about Dostoevsky and display an expertise which really flattened my ego. My high school teachers studied the Book of Job with a depth that I never saw afterwards. America today has changed, but the old America was unbelievably smart.


(Problem 2 in America) There is no division of power. Long ago the different parts of government decided that they could all act in concert, as one unit. So the Supreme Court has never limited government power-because they have decided that they themselves are a part of government. Why should they limit their own power?

(Problem 3) This monolithic government can then promise to people lots of money and the blacks and people that their social identity (progressive) depends on their supporting black causes (i.e. reform Jews) vote this monolithic government into power in spite of it being against the constitution of the USA which limits government power.

(Problem 4) In the original America, people like Jefferson did not think that it would work without education. But education today is political indoctrination. And the higher one goes into American universities, the purer the Marxism becomes. I personally saw the texts that they were teaching in social studies at my university where I was learning Physics. They were pure Hegelian-Marxism.

Reb Eliyahu from Villna. The Villna Geon

Today a learning Talmud partner of mine mentioned to me about the Kol Hator [קול התור] of the Geon from Villna. He had not seen the book before so he was unaware of a lot of the history about the Gra. He wanted me to fill in the details.I will try to be as brief as possible. I said "the nice thing about the Gra is he is Kosher."
The Gra (the Geon Eliyahu from Villna) had an unusual way of learning. In general he has a completely different way of looking at any subject and only mentions it in hints. But sometimes when he is more explicit he surprises you. Like on the Mishna "aruga which is 6^6" his commentary looks at it from a completely different perceptive than anyone else and answers all the questions on the Mishna perfectly and it is a way of looking at it which seems to be impossible to think of on one's own.

This seems to be characteristic of the Gra.

This conversion got in the question of the excommunication. I said that it is clear to me that the Gra was right. I mentioned that one reason for the excommunication was due to  teaching Shabati Tzvi's version of Kabalah and also pantheism. I am pretty sure that the Besht did not know that the teachings of the silversmith from Villna that the Besht praised so highly  were from a false prophet of Shabati Tzvi.
(He said that one that learns them will merit to true Divine Spirit.)

But ignorance people say is no excuse. The fact of the matter is that in Orthodox Judaism today are  teachings that are  based unintentionally on Shabati Tzvi.


Pantheism: Now I have nothing against pantheism. If Spinoza would have proved it, that would be fine by me. But that is not the issue at all. The issue is that the Torah does not hold from pantheism. It holds from monotheism. So to lie about the Torah and to claim that it teaches Pantheism is a problem of fraud and lying.

And it does not help to make a difference between Pantheism and Panetheism since the difference is meaningless since the word "pan" means everything. To say you mean that God is everything and beyond everything is simple expanding the word "everything" to include "everything." [It is just a word game to try to get out of the fact that they are teaching pantheism.] But that is what it meant in the first place. So Orthodox Judaism is playing with words. Also the Torah does not teach either one. not pantheism nor panetheism. The faith  and world view of Torah is Monotheism.

In Israel I saw a lot of kabalists. There was never anything about them that indicated any higher type of person.

In fact, if I could I would today change the whole way I went through the Talmud.
The things I would change would these: I would have gone to university 1/2 the time like Reb Shelomo Friefeld [the Rosh Yeshiva of Shar Yashuv in Far Rockaway] told me to do. I would not have ignored the advice of my parents and teachers. (But at the time, I did not see much I liked in university and was not up to learning Physics. Nowadays I have discovered a way of learning Physics, I just say the words and it goes in. This is no joke. It actually worked when I was in Polytechnic Institute New York University. But there I modified this system a little  to say the words forwards and backwards.)
In terms of learning Torah itself, I would have one daily period of Talmud with Tosphot and the Maharsha in order from the beginning to the end of the Talmud. The other daily session I would have would be Chaim Soloveitchik's masterpiece, the Chidushi HaRambam. This means in plain English that I would spend much more time of the so called in depth type of learning which I ignored at the time.

In Israel I saw a lot of kabalists. There was never anything about them that indicated any higher type of person. This in fact would be a great subject for another essay. 

I want to mention a serious problem with package deals.

I want to mention serious problems with package deals. One major problem with package deals is that one rejects things that are good because they are part of some package that has some flaw. A good example of this is the Talmud. The Talmud can be taken as one package, and then rejected because it has some areas which it is flawed in. Or it can be accepted as one package and then one accepts doctrines which are in fact "not very good" as my dad would have put it. The usual example of a part of the Talmud which is not so great is the attitude towards gentiles. However if we look at the Muslims that are devolving, we can see at least a little of the point of the Talmud. Clearly the human race is breaking up into two distant parts--Western civilization (the Judeao-Christian West) and the Muslims on the other side (with some nations like China and Japan being part of the Western part because of their orientation.)
The problem is that obviously gentiles from Christian nations are not the worshipers of the stars [Akum] of the Talmud. They are not idol worshipers in any sense of the word because to be qualified as an idolater, one has to be worship a different god than the God of the Old Testament. Christians simply do not qualify because their God is the God of the Old Testament, even if they worship him in a different way than we would consider kosher.


Further examples are numerous. Christians also taking the New Testament as a package deal get bogged down in the quagmire of internal contradictions.

However there are times that one should take a package deal and just try to sort out stuff after he has bought the product. I got born into a great package deal--the home of my parents. This was--it is true a Jewish home-but it was also much more. It was a home that had too much love that is possible to describe. The powerful principles that was there are not possible to put now on paper. They can not be described. Torah was a part of our home' and so was Physics and the other natural sciences. Classical music was important there even though my brothers listened to modern stuff that shall remain nameless. But all this was external. There was something about the very essence of our family which made it one package deal that I can not describe.

At any rate, some package deals are pretty good.

()  Let me just say that the Talmud is great package deal if you decide to just accept the good things which are three basic things. One is rigorous evaluation of individual laws of the Torah, second is the structure of the laws--how they all fit together; third is the rigorous evaluation of verses.
Of course people that say they are taking one whole book as a package deal are never really doing so. They are taking some issue- usually a completely trivial issue that has little of nothing to do with the basic message of the book and elevating this trivial issue to Divine status. [However it does seem to me that some people in fact do get close to the basic message]

Of course sometimes Talmudic scholars are not very good examples of  Jews. In fact often they do not provide good examples. This is to be expected as the prophets themselves cursed the Jewish people with the curse of having bad leaders. When we did not accept true prophets we were cursed with accepting false prophets and following them.

Even today the the group known as Na Nach  assume that any famous teacher of Torah is a phony. They can be a little extreme in this but it is often quite true. ("Arrogance of office" as Shakespeare put it.)




() Another example of a package deal is racism. Sometimes based on game theory this can be justified.
I quote: Geoff's Blog (Geoffrey Falk):" For example: Kirsten Brydum was traveling across the country with an Amtrak pass and an old bicycle. She was meeting with fellow Marxists around the country and campaigning for Obama. Fresh from protesting the RNC National Convention, she arrived in New Orleans by train. While bicycling around New Orleans’ all black 9th ward ghetto to campaign for Obama, she was shot in the head. Residents would not even call the police to notify them that a dead white girl was laying on the sidewalk. Her body laid in the streets for hours until a construction crew drove by and noticed her.

Even the New Orleans police issued a statement saying “robbery does not appear to be the motivation.” All evidence suggests that she was murdered simply because she was white.

That girl would still be alive today, if only she had believed the “racist” stereotypes about black violence.

We have no qualms about being treated as “numbers in actuarial tables” when it comes to paying for health insurance, split down by [the different life-expectancy of] men vs. women, or by smokers vs. non-smokers … and we certainly don’t consider the (actuarial tables) practice itself to be the least bit immoral … yet if you judge others by their membership in, say, a high-crime group (e.g., poor blacks), you’re guilty not merely of judging individuals based on the characteristics of their group, but of a moral fallacy (and a moral failing).

If racism and sexism are morally wrong (for judging people by the characteristics of their group), then group-characteristic-based insurance must be equally morally wrong. And so are all other forms of mechanical prediction, even though they work better (i.e., “as well as or better,” which on average is better) than the “clinical method” of treating people as individuals.

That is, the most-efficient way of doing things, which causes the least total suffering, and the greatest benefit for the greatest number, is also morally wrong.

Actuarial tables are “formal, statistical stereotypes,” based on simple things like sex, smoking, diet, race, etc. They provide more-accurate (and thus more fair) judgments about the individuals they represent, on average, than do one-on-one, individual evaluations of the same people. What makes you think the same thing wouldn’t be true for other characteristics, outside of life expectancy? And if it would, what makes you think that that superficially unfair approach wouldn’t be the best way we have available to minimize suffering (or alternatively, create the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people)?"