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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (20447)	8/30/1998 10:22:00 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Respond to of 39621

Emile, the way I see it is much simpler than that (and my view is tainted by my holding agnostic beliefs), From Abraham to Moses, a herculean effort has gone into the abstraction of the deity, but the stubborn nation of Israel could not grasp the concept and time after time they had to be brought back to the idea of a single deity and for that an abstract one, they finally gave up, and ended up with trinity rather than a single deity, and something which no longer requires the herculean intellectual effort to have faith in an abstract idea. Now they had concrete viewable, "grabbable" concepts, pretty much between paganism and Judaism. Some very few continued the principles of an abstract god, the rest followed the apostles. As for proofs, go and read The Kuzari and old theological discussion from the 11th or 12th century (authored by a poet/philosoph Yehuda Halevy), there is a detailed discussion of proofs of "miracles", those that were witnessed by multitudes and those that were witnessed by a very small minority. I, personally, am not too much into miracles and proofs thereof, I am more interested in the moral backbone of religion and the preservation of our constitution, which happen to include the freedom of religion (for you too). Freedom of religion includes in my book, freedom from being exposed to constant proselytizing and efforts of converting whomever has a different faith onto your own with the "threat" of "loss of salvation" or whatever. In this respect you may want to delve a little into Indian philosophy, particularly the Carvaka. Last, I know not of a "palestinian Talmud, you may refer to what is commonly known as the "Talmud Yerushalmi"? And finally any one that claims that Rabbinic Judaism put greater importance in the Talmud then in the Torah, is a "boor and Am Haaretz", namely, a person with barely a basic understanding of Judaism. The Torah is the "Core" of Judaism, the Talmud is nothing but a "fence around the Torah", trying to assure that, by mistake, one willing to practice Judaism would not step over the rules and laws of the core, thus setting standards that are "removed sufficiently from the core, assuring that "innocent errors" will not result in violation of the core itself. Zeev