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4.1.20

The fact is it is hard to get a good idea of the world view of the Torah even if one would know the whole Gemara. The reason is there was an aspect of things that the Rishonim [mediaeval people] were good at and that is to get at what the actual world view of Torah is in a general sense and then also to work out the details so that you iron out any seeming contradictions.
So to get an idea of the working world view of Torah--what it actually holds is right and wrong you really need the Musar Movement of Rav Israel Salanter who emphasized that aspect of the Rishonim.


There is no crisis in Physics.

There is no crisis in Physics. Physics is doing well, thank you. The crisis is in the minds some people who do not get the idea. The reason for this is that it has gotten hard and takes longer to get the idea.
QM works as well as when it was started. So does Relativity. There were problems with QM in terms of interactions so Q field theory was worked out by Feynman and Schwinger. There were strange kinds of relations between mass and spin so strings were suggested. [Spin seems to increase with mass squared. Regge trajectories.] Gravity was  a problem and it turned out that strings have answer to the problem of gravity.

The thing is to know Physics today takes a lot of time and effort. Lots of "Girsa" [saying the words and going on] and lots of Iyun (Review of one section many many times.]





Just for the sake of information, there is in Vayikra [Leviticus] a death penalty for sex between two males. It does not matter if one of the males cuts off his penis and makes a hole. He is still a male.

I recall this from a few places which I have not been able to review for years. [Of course I still hope to do review God willing].

One place is the subject of the person born with two sex organs. This is in the Mishna itself, not just the Gemara.
And that Mishna is brought in plenty of places that I ran into when in Shar Yashuv and also in the Mir in NY. And just take a look and you will see that cutting off the male organ would not make the person into a female even with a natural vagina. He is still half male.[So even way back in the time of the Gemara it was crystal clear to people that the difference between male and female is in every single cell of the body.]
[I ran into this when I was doing Hulin about the subject of a "Kvi" an animal that is between two species. I also recall this in Yevamot. But Sanhedrin where the main subject of the death penalty for sex between males comes up I simply did not learn in those few years I was in NY. Sanhedrin is a not a "yeshivishe tracate"]


Germany tends towards to extremes.

Germany tends towards to extremes. This is different from the way the USA used to be in that people tended towards to Middle. The differences between the political parties was usually confined to a ten yard line somewhere in the middle. Not the extreme Left or Right.
The fact that Germany tends toward extremes is on one hand the secret of their excellence. They take a axiom or build a car or a rocket and take the idea or build the car to the ultimate degree. In that they can find what is wrong with an axiom or find the weakness in the car and fix them.

But going towards the extremes has a defect also in that the truth never is in the extreme but somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps the best idea is to be extreme about being in the middle and having balance.

I am referring here to two reports from Germany. One about "sex" between two males is thought to be "natural". My answer to that on a Catholic blog was this: "The natural world includes not only green grass, bright flowers, and blue sky, but also fleas, lice, cholera, malaria, diphtheria, yellow fever, typhoid and smallpox." [Steven Dutch.] They are all a "normal" part of nature.

The other was on Reference frame about "climate science".




3.1.20

My feeling about philosophy is that Leonard Neslon [the Kant/Fries school] and Hegel both have important points. It seems to me the differences between them are less than the similarities.

And both seem a lot better than almost anything that came after them.

[Most of 20th century philosophy after Kant and Hegel is simply trying to come up with anything significant by people afflicted with Physics envy.]

My feeling is that people would not be so prone to believe in pseudo science or flaky philosophies if they had more background in actual Physics.

A lot of people that went into the hard sciences did so as they were fed up with politics and politicians. They were looking for a bit of certainty in life. That is certainty that did not depend on what other people were saying. This is a good strategy for smart people. But what about us average?
For that there is the path of "Girsa"--say the words and go on. See the Musar book ארחות צדיקים [Ways of the Righteous.]

After you have finished the book four time and still do not get it, then review becomes important.


2.1.20

The question about saying that learning math and physics is a part of learning Torah [according to those rishonim [Mediaeval  authorities] that hold that way] is where is the numinous [holy] aspect of it? Answer is that there are paths towards holiness that have been revealed only after great tzadikim opened them up. They were not just hidden before that but in accessible. Sometimes you need a tzadik to go into the jungle and carve out a path before others can follow.



At least I can depend on the Gra who held "One who lacks knowledge in any degree in any of the 7 wisdoms will lack in Torah knowledge a hundred times more." So at least to that degree math and physics are important. [That quotation is from the translation of Euclid done by a disciple of the Gra in his introduction.]

[You can see this opinion in the Obligations of the Heart [shar habehina chapter 3 where he makes a distinction between learning about the spiritual aspect of things and the actual learning of their physical workings. And both are necessary to learn.]



Any of the Musar books of ethics and morality makes sense to learn for many reasons. One reason is that after the Middle Ages thinking in philosophy and or religious matters lost rigorous logic. That is,- even if the axioms that are assumed in the Middle Ages you might question, but almost always the results are exact. After the Middle Ages thinking in philosophy became mostly circular. Even by people you would have thought would be above that kind of mistake like John Locke or Kant.

The circular reasoning in Kant and Locke was pointed out by Dr. Kelley Ross. That is why he adopted the more rigorous approach of Leonard Nelson.