following an unusually thoughtful broadcast last week by richard dawkins (he’s obviously trying to take on board how much his militancy turns people off by some of the pleas he made on behalf of sacred texts as fine language, cultural literacy and so on) i am grappling again with some of the issues raised by faith schools in the critical thinking debate. dawkins, as per usual, lumped all faith schools together as a) proponents of segregation (for which there is some justification) and b) closers, rather than openers of young minds – the segment in which he, somewhat exasperatedly, grappled with the islamic school science class with an apparent 100% rejection of evolution was a powerful statement. however, also as per usual, he implied (by saying that he “worried that”) this was inevitable in a situation where the parents’ wishes about what they wanted their children exposed to overruled the presumed human rights of children to make up their own mind about what they thought was interesting or worthwhile. this argument was given short shrift by a catholic educationalist from northern ireland, who told him he was simply imposing his own expectations over those of the parents concerned; i personally thought they struggled with the editing a little if they were seeking to show that the wishes of parents were unreasonable; this wasn’t the strongest argument i’ve ever seen against faith schools. in my opinion, they’d have done better to concentrate on the ethos of these schools as exclusivist and contrary to “community cohesion”, but then again, what do i know?
given that the board of deputies and, by the looks of it, the community as a whole, has withdrawn cooperation with the programme, as it was clearly interpreted as a hatchet job, the same way that “the root of all evil?” was – tendentiously edited and, wherever possible, using extreme examples as if they were the norm. of course whenever the jewish community was mentioned, it was invariably accompanied by a shot of someone strictly orthodox – small boys with giant peyot, or behatted, abundantly bearded, penguinish yeshiva bochurs staring through bottle-top glasses. as we all know, all jews look just like that.
the jewish community yesterday, apparently
a salient example was that of the british humanist society researcher pulling out the “shocking” example of the jewish school that does 8 hours of “religious education” a week compared to 6 hours of science. i wonder which school it was? they didn’t say if it was a mainstream united synagogue school or a strictly-orthodox school, of course.
what the anti-faith-schoolers don’t seem to get is that in this “8 hours of religious education”, they’re *not teaching theology* or “how to be unscientific” – they’re teaching practical skills of language, textual analysis and interpretation. in this sense, the correct analogy is not between a “faith school” and a “secular school”, but between a “specialist school” and a “generalist school” – i don’t see dawkins jumping all over sylvia young because her schools devote 10 hours+ a week to performing arts compared to 6 hours of national curriculum science. these kids need to PRACTICE – and so do religious kids, whether they’re learning Qu’ran or Torah or gita or granth. most religion – and this is an area where the preponderance of christianity in this country distorts the debate – requires considerable grasp of both practical techniques and core knowledge, in the same way that you’d expect a specialist technology college to spend extra time on programming languages to an level of detail not matchable by a specialist modern languages college.
anyway, stereotypes apart, like most of the jewish people (and christians and muslims) i know, religious or not, faithschoolers or not, i do struggle with whether we’re doing enough to encourage critical thinking. and i think it is worth mentioning that, in my opinion, in general, we’re not, which is part of the reason that the kiruv and dawah organisations which are, as far as i’m concerned, the vanguard of clerical fascism, are gaining ground. whether pro- or anti- people don’t know enough about religion to make informed choices and, as a result, many are either accepting it for badly-thought-through, poorly-rationalised reasons, or seeking to have it eliminated for equally misguided reasons. there isn’t a strong enough voice saying that you can be both traditionally religious and a clear, critical thinker, or that even though you don’t believe something yourself you still think it has a role to play. and, in point of fact, i don’t hand over the programming of my kids’ minds to their school, to teach them “the correct way” to think, that has to be my responsibility as a parent as well. part of the problem with the faith schools debate, it seems to me, is that focusing on theology and the problems with critical thinking misses why faith schools are really needed – it isn’t to teach them to “think correctly”, it is to teach them the skills to live in that particular community, which are time-consuming to learn, the same way as if you wanted to grow up to be an orchestra player, you’d need to go to music lessons and spend a lot of extra time practicing in order to be able to perform to the required standard. because christianity does not, generally, require these sorts of skills (say, for example, latin and greek, or scholastic argumentation) it is a lot harder to say how they clearly add value, other than that by all the motivated parents competing to get in increases the performance of the school – i think it might in fact be just another variety of the hawthorn effect.
getting back to the main point about the critical thinking deficit, however, i think a major part of critical thinking is the ability to debate with people of differing opinions. this, i feel, is typified by the current debate over free speech and offence. i analyse the issue and i see a continuum, starting with unintentional offence, going through intentional offence, through harassment to ultimately incitement to violence. it seems to me the debate is currently polarised between those who see all offence as tantamount to incitement to violence and those who see even incitement to violence as merely an expression of free speech. considering the vehemence with which my religion and ethnicity is attacked by the former and their apparent inability to comprehend the continuum connection, one might think that i would go to that opposite extreme – as indeed i have been accused of many times, when pointing out instances of jew-hatred and being told i was merely being hysterical. in fact, i am naturally far closer to faisal’s espousal of the “fry/hitchens standard”, if you like – “so you’re offended? so fecking what?”, as i believe in free speech. my difficulty is where the line should be drawn, which needs a far more nuanced perception than i can currently bring to the debate.
an excellent example of the challenges of critical thinking is currently being debated at harry’s place and elsewhere in this intellectual neighbourhood of the blogosphere between edmund standing and others:
“why would anyone want to take books that manifestly do make assertions about ultimate reality and give clear commands about how humans should behave, the punishments they should incur for thinking or behaving differently, and so on, and then delude themselves and others into thinking that actually those books don’t say what they clearly do say, or attempt to ‘reinterpret’ those books in a way obviously at variance with their intended meaning?”
in other words, if someone says “kill the bastards”, he means “kill the bastards”, not “engage them in debate” – and you should take that statement at face value. the trouble is, mr standing, that *isn’t the way we do it in judaism* (and, i would argue, not the way many people do it in islam) – we take challenging statements like that as a jumping off point, assuming that there is more to the basic statement than meets the eye. it is, for us, clearly established by the talmudic debate about the “oven of akhnai” (BT baba metzia 59b) that human interpretation has the power to overrule a “voice from the heavens”, but our *authority* to do this is derived from the Torah’s plain meaning: “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30) – in other words, that it is for us to interpret how the Text should be interpreted, that’s how it’s designed in the first place, not as an instruction manual free from ambiguity. jewish texts are based on cardinal principles of interpretative methodology and it is understanding how these work that constitutes a large part of the training that jewish children undergo when they are understanding their texts. i would go so far as to say that you can see the difference between people with this training and people without it is abundantly evident from the attitudes of, say, your average bible-belt christian and those of your averagely educated student of jewish law – the latter would not consider carrying out a punishment from leviticus, or even suggesting that it should be carried out as stated in the plain text without the full range of checks, balances and protective safeguards detailed in hundreds of folio pages of Talmud, commentaries and halakhah, under the precise circumstances in which such conditions apply. yet what some people seem to object to is interpretations based on simplistic misunderstandings. the objection then is:
“We don’t look at the work of medieval cartographers and then try to ‘reinterpret’ their maps so they fit with modern understandings of geography.”
well, no, but this isn’t a physical phenomenon here, it’s a legal framework, so its application is always going to be a matter of interpretation. i really don’t see what’s so hard to understand about that – but nonetheless, i don’t see an authoritative argument being made in return for the benefit of those who might not understand why interpretation is important; G!D Forbid, someone might think that that’s what those texts actually mean, or that G!D actually Wants us to behave like bronze age maniacs, when nothing could be further from the truth.
r. jonathan sacks once said, in conversation with john humphrys i believe, that the Torah seeks to teach us to learn to think for ourselves; initially, like a parent, G!D Chastises us and then Picks us up – but there is an expectation that we learn, over time, to pick ourselves up and eventually, not to fall over in the first place. i would argue that developing critical thinking is a salient example of precisely that and that the Commandment to do so is itself a Divine Mandate – so objections such as this:
“In every other area of human thought and writing, we turn to the latest, most advanced ideas, not to the primitive ideas of men of the past.”
should be shown as the red herrings they are. of course, this objection is foreseen:
“There is absolutely no rational basis for ‘reinterpreting’ ancient texts to make them appear relevant to today, nor any objective criteria for how this should be carried out, or to what extent such texts should be ‘liberally’ reinterpreted.”
but why should such criteria be objective? do we demand objective criteria against which to measure the Torah? do we demand that the world be judged against the Torah’s criteria? no, we do not – by the Torah’s own command. nor do we always demand a “liberal” interpretation. the point is that the giants of Torah throughout history to the modern era have always provided for the best of modernity to be understood, whether as “the wisdom of the nations” or as “Torah and wisdom”, but this perspective is in danger from the tendency to look inwards, to assume we have all the answers, from fear and suspicion of the outside world. simply to assert that “it’s not a valid question”, or that “it comes from an impure source” is not going to cut it in the long-term, whether or not you’re able to control the sources of people’s knowledge; and, if this is what is sought, it is both immoral and contrary to the justice that the Torah commands us in the most emphatic terms to pursue.
we need to understand and respond to these questions and attacks as a bona fide challenge, as if they were asked in an open-minded way – because regardless of whether the people conducting the public polemic are open-minded or not, similar questions will always be asked from “inside the camp” – and not to be able to address them effectively will prove the case of the public polemicists.
17 Comments
Interesting post – I think earlier Christian patterns of thought and study (which I’ve only dipped into through studying the earlier periods of Eng Lit) also promote a flexible, inventive even subversive approach to knowledge and religion. I’m thinking of the way in which episodes from the OT were assigned many different levels of meaning, rather than a single meaning, and certainly not just a literal meaning. Classical texts too were appropriated for Christian readings and Christian glossers made odd parallels such as that between Apollo (trying to rape Daphne) and Christ, or between Myrrha (committed incest with father) and Mary who bore the child of her ‘father’.
I feel uncertain about faith schools because they seem, on the one hand, to be an expression of freedom of (parental) choice but, on the other, might be more likely to shut down choices/freedoms for the children in some instances.
I don’t think it is very contentious to say that as far as Islam is concerned, there is a historical absence of critical thought in application to the religious texts since the likes of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi, and that was more than a thousand years ago. The paucity of critical thought could be put down to the fact that Mu’tazilites, the school of thought which these two figures were part of, were marginalised and persecuted as heretics.
That is not to say that there isn’t a rich and broad body of religious law, which was massively patronised by the Caliphs – largely because of self interest. There is an extensive corpus of theology and cosmology, put together by Sufi teachers independent of state institutions. But theological discourse has not been developed and, what little there is, has largely been declared invalid by modernist scholars, studied only by a select group of “spiritualists”.
As a result, there is almost no critical or textual analysis of the primary texts in Islam and certainly no formalised school of thought which deals with that kind of thing. Muslims, by and large, deal with the nasty and objectionable nature of the some of the Quranic verses by daintily dancing around them or not practising them altogether.
There is certainly no way any critical thought which attempts to look at human agency in the exposition of Quranic texts would be acceptable to the orthodoxy, using any structured or objective methodology. Unless total acceptance that they are the unedited word of god is expressed a priori, expect to hear the sound doors slamming shut followed by charges of heresy and apostasy. See the life of Abd’ur Raziq, for example.
This explains why there are almost no liberal Islamic theologians. And certainly no Muslim theologian has been able to take theology to where liberal theologians have managed to take modern Christian thought.
Although Muslims can manage to live in progressive, liberal, post-religious societies – it is largely a balancing act. And a case of the see nothing, speak nothing and hear nothing when it comes to dealing with objectionable Quranic tracts and verses.
bananabrain (and others) might enjoy this too:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9447/
in other words, if someone says “kill the bastards”, he means “kill the bastards”, not “engage them in debate” – and you should take that statement at face value. the trouble is, mr standing, that *isn’t the way we do it in judaism* (and, i would argue, not the way many people do it in islam) – we take challenging statements like that as a jumping off point, assuming that there is more to the basic statement than meets the eye
I don’t see what basis you have for assuming any such thing.
On the objective criteria question, here’s why:
In order to claim to believe in a monotheistic faith you have to – at minimum – claim there is some basic reason for doing so. In order then to proclaim that there is at least some sort of ‘truth’ to your belief system – i.e. you haven’t just made it all up yourself – you have to make some absolute assertions about the nature of the universe, starting with ‘I believe the universe was created intentionally by a being we refer to as God’.
Once you get past that, you then get onto what makes you a Jew as opposed to a mere deist. In order to follow Judaism – theistic, not cultural – you must believe there is something within the Jewish religious tradition that uniquely corresponds with the nature of reality. But what basis do you have for asserting that? At some point, inevitably, your sacred text will have to enter the picture.
You have already made some objective statements about the nature of reality – there is a God, Judaism in some sense accurately refers to the nature of that God – and you will now have to decide which elements within the Jewish texts you consider authoritative and binding. Which bits actually in some way correspond with the nature of reality, and which are mere poetry or metaphor.
But how can you decide which ones without some objective criteria by which you will sort the wheat from the chaff? If you acknowledge you have none, then ultimately your religious beliefs boil down to nothing more than being ‘I believe that whatever I think is true, is true’. But that’s not religion, that just relativistic drivel.
sarah:
this is derived from the jewish PaRDeS method:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_(Jewish_exegesis)
however, halakhah, the actual case law derived from either “de-oraita” (written Torah) or “de-rabannan” (oral Torah), is a lot more complex and mutable depending on time, situation, context, authority and facts, not to mention the source of original derivation. halakhah will have a majority answer for a given time, place and situation which determines what opinion and therefore procedure is followed and a number of minority opinions which are not. if we are talking about theology, however, there are almost certainly a number of possible options, any one of which is a valid position to hold. for this reason and others, judaism does not have a systematic theology, particularly by comparison with christianity or even islam.
this means that what a given prophetic statement in, say, isaiah implies about what we believe to be true can rarely be taken at face value, as it will be able to support a multiplicity of meanings. you can see this from the conflicting jewish and christological interpretations that are often supported from the same texts – although obviously ours are correct, hehe. unfortunately, the same is true of the face value and apparent plain meaning of the laws in the Written Torah, because of the need to reconcile them with all the other laws, both written and oral. consequently, what may appear to be an obvious “kill the bastards” may be very far from that and may in fact have an entirely opposite effect in law.
i agree that this seems like a strong objection, but once you start looking at it you realise that parents inevitably make choices for their children, particularly in their early years which “shut down their freedoms” – for example what language to speak at home, where they live, whether they’re allowed to watch tv and for how long, when they’re allowed to go to the park on their own, what time they go to bed, whether boys are allowed toy guns, whether they are taken to sport, music, drama or whatever extracurricular activities and which these are or indeed whether there are any at all. once you start talking about children’s “rights” in these matters you have to start deciding what the fundamental rights actually are and educational choices i don’t think really make a strong case, unless you envisage me being able to sue my parents because they made me take accordion lessons for years. being a parent is all about learning to take responsibility for your child, which includes the exercise of choice on their behalf – dawkins is absolutely kidding himself if he thinks this can be avoided.
faisal:
if this is the case, is it the case, in your opinion, because the detail of islamic law was largely the religion of victors, not a minority in tension with an external government? i do think, however, that the dance need not be as dainty as all that, as long as the appropriate authority can be established for liberalising practices.
edmund:
firstly, i appreciate your response, but:
the basis is in part derived from the contradictions that emerge on close textual analysis of the various laws. for example, if the same law is repeated with slightly different wording, this must be because it refers to a slightly different set of circumstances, the discussion of which is set out in the Oral Law. in other cases, the Written Law may describe an *exception* to the “common law” which it is assumed that everyone knows, which is set out elsewhere. i can give you examples if you like. you may if you wish, however, object on the grounds that there is another underlying assumption, namely, that the Torah contains no redundancy nor contradiction and that wherever this may appear, it is only in order to reveal a teaching point, that there is something for us to learn by going through the process of exegesis. you may, if you wish, object to us bringing this assumption, but only at the cost of excising the Written Law from its cultural context – no jew looks at the Torah text on its own, only protestants do that – and even they do it in their own context. the Torah is a jewish text, written for jews (regardless of what one believes its ultimate origin to be) and consequently the correct way to use it is by definition the way that we use it.
oh, i’m sorry – i didn’t set out my axiomatic basis, of course, because i didn’t necessarily think it was necessary for this particular piece. i work on the principle that the only things i *actually* need to “believe” in a “take on faith” way are maimonides’ “thirteen principles”. now, admittedly, not everyone regards these as the correct answers if Torah law is reduced to its axiomatic basis (as you’ll see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Principles_of_Faith#Maimonides.27_13_principles_of_faith ). you can tell this from an examination of the various mediaeval statements of the “principles of faith” or “fundamentals”, or indeed take it back to first principles via the talmudic discussions recorded on how to decide what is heretical, which are mostly fairly inconclusive because, as i said earlier, we don’t have a systematic theology and there may be more than one correct answer – i tend more to think of it as a sort of gradated circle with a fairly fuzzy line round jewish theology (something like maimonides’ “parable of the king’s palace” from “the guide for the perplexed”) in which some answers are definitely inside and others (e.g. christian ones) are definitely outside. however, like everything else to do with judaism, it is not in any way straightforward – if you’re interested in the issue, i’d recommend anything by menachem kellner, but particularly “must jews believe anything?” or “dogma” which deals with it in extensive detail.
correct, for which i refer you to my first comment to sarah above – but the division is not between reality and metaphor, but between correct action and correct belief – what we call the distinction between commandments “bein adam ve-adam” (between humans) and “bein adam-le-Maqom” (between humans and G!D) – in other words, humans care about whether a contract is binding or not or whether you are treating your employees correctly, but G!D also cares about things which make no conceivable difference in the real world, such as mixing wool and linen in a garment. if you look at the ten commandments you’ll see this distinction shows very clearly between the first five and the second five.
they’re not *objective* criteria, but they are *jewish* criteria – by which we mean that all [traditional] jews have a common process by which we determine correct action (and, less so, but as far as practical, belief) but we do not expect these criteria to be universally respected, nor universally followed – this is the important and, some might say, crucial difference between judaism and the other two abrahamic religions, in that we only determine what goes for us, they attempt to determine what goes for everyone – which is why they seek converts and we don’t. we have universalist bits, obviously (although the universalist halakhic effect is only seven universal or “noahide” commandments, all of which you will undoubtedly observe by default) but the other 606 commandments are only for us. it is not our problem, really, if other people insist on using the Torah for a purpose for which it was not Given. does this answer the question, or are you really wanting to know the process by which a statement in the Torah becomes practical, actionable halakhah in the C21st?
b’shalom
bananabrain
Thanks bananabrain – and I take your point about all the other ways in which children may be given too little (or too much) freedom in many other ways/contexts.
Hi Bananabrain,
Thanks for ongoing discussion. I’ve responded here:
Religious people and critical thinking #2
for those of you that are following this discussion as it develops, edmund standing responds here:
http://edmundstanding.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/religious-people-and-critical-thinking-2/
as indeed i do, although i do state that the contradictions, for us, are *apparent* rather than absolute and are stated in the way that they are stated so as to encourage us to dive in and learn from exploring how they can be resolved. the natural objection, of course, is that:
what we have here is a case of the same data supporting two contradictory hypotheses, i suspect – here i think i may have to refer to stephen jay gould’s concept of a “POMA” – partially overlapping magisteria; naturally an atheist, not starting from the same axiomatic basis as myself, would not end up with the same answer but, at any rate, i’d see no contradiction between the available data and my own position.
yes, but “should be” isn’t “is”, i believe there’s quite the ongoing philosophical debate over that one. the word “Torah” means “teaching” – we are not expecting G!D to spoonfeed us, but rather to enable us to think for ourselves – this is necessary for us to live with the consequences of having freewill. i would have thought that apparent contradictions which can be reconciled are ubiquitous in natural phenomena – why should a supernatural phenomenon be expected to be unambiguous? that’s an assumption we jews simply don’t bring to the table. life is complex, communication is complex, why not Revelation as well, if one assumes that Revelation is possible? (this, obviously, is an axiom)
i don’t get why you find this so strange. let me try to illustrate this with an example. obviously, everyone knows we’re not allowed to eat pork, as per the dietary restrictions of leviticus 11. however, if i’m locked in a room and all there is to eat in there is spam then i can scoff away in order to save my life, because in leviticus 18:5 it says “and you shall live by them”, which is taken as telling us not to die because of following the law too stringently. is leviticus 11 then wrong? of course it isn’t. it just describes circumstances in which leviticus 18:5 is not a consideration. and that’s just a basic contradiction between two bits of Written Torah, it gets a lot more complicated when you start considering the massive corpus of Oral Torah as well. this is the purpose of the discussions in the Talmud, commentaries and pretty much all religious discussion to the present day, which is the reason i tend to describe judaism as not so much a religion as a 3000 year-long argument.
why should that be? the text doesn’t tell us how to get married, only how to get divorced, which shows us that the Oral Torah is necessary for marriage procedure. similarly, the test case for this argument is the famous “lex talionis” – the sages immediately ask what you do if a blind man pokes your eye out, you can’t pole his eye out back, so the law must therefore allow for financial compensation, which becomes the principle thereafter. you might consider this to be predicated on a “fundamentalist” assumption i suppose, but the effect of it, to shunt the debate into the arena of human interpretation, is a far from fundamentalist response, i’d argue. you could argue, of course, that this takes it out of the purview of the Divine and i’d say, yes, of course – that too can be shown to be mandated by the Torah in the first place!
well, yes and no; we have a principle that “the Torah cannot be deprived of its plain meaning”, but we would argue that this plain meaning is nonetheless maintained *in principle*, even if it cannot be carried out *in practice* – thus we are still commanded to literally exterminate girgashites, but cannot identify girgashites to exterminate in a sufficiently reliable way that eliminates the possibility of harming someone who merely resembles a girgashite, whatever a girgashite may look like. thus the plain meaning is maintained, even though it is not carried out. now this may look like legalistic fidgiwidginess to some people, but it’s really a matter of life and death and we are abundantly aware that this is ignored at one’s peril.
well, it might seem that way in theory, but surely the test should be what happens in practice – if the system results in a “fundamentalist outcome”? besides, that’s a different argument; the *authority* of the Text is certainly axiomatic and is ultimately subject to the autonomy of the self, we have another principle that the only thing that cannot be compelled by “Heaven” is the “fear [awe] of Heaven”. either way, i don’t really see what the problem is as long as a “fundamentalist outcome” can be diverted through moderation, as we would argue is built into the learning process of the interpretation of Torah.
i’ve run out of time today to address the rest, but will return to this tomorrow.
b’shalom
bananabrain
reviewing this, actually it seems that the underlying issue here is that differences in axiomatic basis are going to inevitably prevent “objective” criteria emerging, so i therefore have to go back to the original question and ask why it is important that objective criteria exist? i mean, what is the purpose of objective assessment of sacred texts?
the answer in this case, i would suggest, is not to establish an objective truth-claim, because the axioms prevent this, but ultimately to allow the social contract of a multicultural society to be maintained, which i would suggest is for our purposes more or less coterminous with what i’m calling a “non-fundamentalist outcome”. we therefore should ask what is the Torah basis on which jews engage with wider society and what halakhic interface exists for determining the terms of the social contract from our end. i suggest that this is constituted by, on one hand, the noahide laws and, on the other hand, the Torah principles of “dina de-malkhuta dina”, the “we must abide by the law of the land” and the prophetic exhortation “seek the peace and prosperity of the city in which you dwell” (jeremiah 29:7). dina de-malkhuta dina has a specific interface with three of the noahide laws, namely 1) forbidding murder 2) forbidding theft and 3) the establishment of courts and a system of law.
if a qualifying society (and it is established by numerous authoritative scholarly opinions that liberal democracies are such societies) passes laws, they have the binding force of halakhah for us and we must work for their good. a society such as the soviet union or, indeed the four “evil empires” (assyria, seleucid greece, rome and post-achaemenid persia) failed this test, because they legitimised the murder of innocents, had corrupt laws, failed to respect property rights and, therefore, there was a religious basis on which to stop cooperating with it. NB: this also covers tax – a tax may be swingeing or unfair without actually being theft. the rule of thumb is very often whether jews are oppressed by officially-sanctioned violence, theft, or discrimination, although, interestingly enough, authoritative opinions, despite pogroms, blood libels and so on, ruled in almost all cases that mediaeval christendom and the islamic world, as well a lot of places along the silk route, also qualified.
consequently, i think it would be correct to say that we have a *Torah obligation* to ensure outcomes that are COMPATIBLE WITH UK LAW, which is why it’s such a problem if jewish school admittance, or kashrut or circumcision become illegal in the laws of a noahidically kosher society. these things make it possible for us to be who we are and, therefore, participate in the social contract. now, for me, that’s as near as objective/universal an understanding of what a religious text is as possible. it is my understanding, of course, that there is a similar basis for muslims to be part of the modern social contract, but it’s not widely known, let alone understood. however, since shari’a is not nearly as well-organised or unified as halakhah, numerous “fundamentalist outcomes” bring it into conflict with uk law.
therefore, the “objective criteria” available are those which allow *interface* and *compatibility* with modern society, but the objectivity is in the *outcome*, not the *axiomatic basis*.
well, i would say that we would agree that if a text makes a clear command, it should be taken literally – we just disagree strongly on what constitutes the operational definition of “clear”, for which we have a far higher standard than i think you probably do. the criterion you might be looking for is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2), which is interpreted in conjunction with the imprecation to respect human interpretative authority, “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:12) to *preserve minority opinions* even though they are not followed in practice. however, there are a number of other principles which are more or less universally respected, such as the rules of interpretation set out in the “baraita of rabbi ishmael”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraita_of_Rabbi_Ishmael
but then you get into the field of talmudic hermeneutics, in which it is actually quite hard to establish an “objective” criterion in any case.
because the “majority rules” principle results in authoritative opinions in the case of halakhic decisions, most of which have been codified over the last thousand years between the period of the babylonian ge’onim and the publication of the “shulhan ‘arukh”, although the process does of course continue as new subtleties of context and circumstance arise. nonetheless, over time, a fairly well-established, peer-reviewed set of working laws can be seen, so pork remains non-kosher except in life-threatening situations and a free society still passes binding laws. i don’t know if you’d still call this process “arbitrary and relativistic”, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way to us.
well, we’re not sure that such things can ever be logically derived in the cases of theological speculation, which is why it is OK to, for example, either believe or not believe in reincarnation and also why we aren’t clear precisely what the term “world to come” actually denotes. in other words, we have very firm procedures about real-world activity, but you are effectively free inside the confines of your own head, which to my way of thinking is how it should be and not at all incompatible with modern society.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Hello again. Thanks for the ongoing discussion! I’ve replied to your first post, only to see you’ve added more!
I’ll respond to the second part soon.
well, in the mean time:
actually, it’s not so simple – we take the commandment in that text, *after due consideration of the circumstances*, to be authoritative.
well, those are more serious sins (you can tell by the capital punishment attached) so they require a higher standard of evidence for a conviction, because of “you must have accurate and honest weights and measures” (deuteronomy 25:15), which in the case of capital punishment requires two kosher eye-witnesses to the act itself, a qualified and capable 71-person court which hasn’t passed a death sentence in the previous 75 years, a warning of the penalty and an acknowledgement of understanding and acceptance of the penalty by the sinner before the act – within a specific time-window. there are many other safeguards which would make the standard of a safe conviction impossibly high – and that’s before you start looking at whether the precise situation is the same as the situation described in the text. for example, i have heard it argued that the “as with a woman” bit is phrased in such a way as to restrict its sense to a “punishment rape” as practiced in, iranian elections, in which case people who apply this to a old situation of consenting homosexuality are not only violating the structural integrity of the system but also the plain meaning of the text as well.
we disagree here, then, on how the spirit of the command is defined. for a start, the text says “son”, not “child”, so we are in the domain of some extreme form of violation of parent-child relationship here, not “i WON’T eat my spinach!”. furthermore, this is a Divine command – are you suggesting that we don’t go to the most extreme lengths to ensure word-perfect compliance? we take it far too seriously to take that sort of chance especially with a life at stake. if you compare this with the lengths we will go to to avoid mixing meat and milk (i presume you are familiar with the expenditure on crockery amongst other considerations) then it shouldn’t surprise you that the discussion on the correct characterisation of this commandment runs to a number of volumes. even the size of the stone and the condition of the victim before it lands must be examined in exhaustive detail.
well, firstly, it would only lead to “modern good” in a “modern interpretation”, which is one of the reasons the text also specifies, when you take something to a “priest”, it says “the priest that is there”, meaning at that particular time – we also have the principle that “jephthah in his generation was equal to samuel in his generation”, jephthah being by far the stupidest man in the entire bible, in other words, go with the best authority available to you. more to the point – and returning to a previously mentioned principle, the “opinion of the minority must be preserved”, AGAINST THE DAY ON WHICH IT BECOMES THE OPINION OF THE MAJORITY, thus a modern perception of good would decidedly affect a modern-day outcome. i’m not saying that good outcomes are inevitable, batei din aren’t infallible, but we don’t say that the human outcome necessarily reflects “G!D’s Will”, as per the discussion on the “oven of akhnai”:
“DO X.”
“ok.”
“DON’T DO Y.”
“ok. but hang on, what happens when doing x means we have to do y as well.”
“YOU HAVE TO WORK IT OUT FOR YOURSELVES, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE RESPONSIBLE.”
“ok, we thought about it, we think we should do x in this case.”
“HANG ON A MINUTE, THAT ISN’T RIGHT. YOU SHOULD DO X ANYWAY.”
“naff off! didn’t you say yourself that we had to work it out for ourselves?”
“AHA! EXACTLY!”
stoning people is now “ultra vires”, to use the civil law terminology. they’re both just as important as they always were, it’s just that one is effectively impossible to action, same as exterminating girgashites.
because you have to apply the same penalty in both cases. it would be an inequitable outcome (“do not favour the poor man in his case” – exodus 23:3) because if you had to choose between your eye or paying a fine, you’d choose the fine every time. and what if you find out later that it wasn’t his fault after all, how do you give him his eye back?
using the extreme example identifies a *potential flaw in the application* of the law and, of course, this is a Divine command and we really care about getting it right (as good fundamentalists), so we must be absolutely punctilious to a extreme degree to avoid such flaws. it’s interesting what you conclude about G!D from a minutely detailed examination of the implications of the text, but it certainly doesn’t add up to “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” as the First Horseman would have it.
well, yes, but we would argue that a) they’re not as unambiguous as you seem to think and that b) the aforementioned “hermeneutical jiggery-pokery” is something that makes G!D very happy indeed, as “the study of Torah” is also a Torah commandment (see deuteronomy 6:4-9), because it shows we’re using our brains as Intended.
i’m afraid this isn’t unambiguous either. this doesn’t apply to hinduism, or to anything other than “seven nations idolatry” (e.g. girgashism) and, even if it did, you’ll still have difficulty getting a stoning conviction, especially if it was done “secretly”, without witnesses. the only unambiguous thing about this is just how wrong it is, whatever form of non-judaism it involves. the significance of “secretly” here, however, is to identify one of three situations in which one must accept martyrdom rather than save one’s life, namely where you are asked to worship an idol in order to demonstrate that the Torah is false. nonetheless, martyrdom cannot be practically compelled, because of the autonomy of the self.
well, for a start, it’s not “apostates”, but a specific type of apostasy and although they “should” be killed, they can’t in practice. disraeli, marx and, indeed, jesus would be quite safe (which tells you something about whether the sanhedrin of the new testament was a kosher trial faithfully reported or not).
i assume you’re looking for a different answer than “because what we’re doing represents the *actual* Intent and Spirit of the View of the Creator once you understand how the actual text actually works in actual practice and if the plain meaning appears to be diverted, then it is because it is being considered in light of other statements expressing the Intent and Spirit of the View of the Creator”.
it is extraordinarily difficult. but nonetheless, we try, by constant practice, study and knowledge transfer, by access to appropriate expertise and by the provision of interpretative assistance. in other words, by developing a culture of continuous learning, question and challenge.
it’s a human enterprise, but i would have difficulty sustaining it if i didn’t really want to show G!D my love for Torah, i dare say. some do consider it a human enterprise, of course – that’s where the “progressive” denominations start, but of course they have more difficulty sustaining many of the behaviours required by traditional belief.
because it is philosophically necessary, rationally (in my view) sustainable and, more than anything, because we promised we would. G!D Hasn’t Broken the Covenant, so neither should we. perhaps this seems stupid to people, but i would tend to argue that the positive effect of the jewish people on human civilisation has been astounding for a bunch of loony shepherds with towels on their heads and that, it seems to me, is something worth carrying on with.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Thanks once again.
http://edmundstanding.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/religious-people-and-critical-thinking-4/
and thank you too:
really, you’re such an expert? ok, here’s how this works. you start with the phrase “you shall keep My ordinances” from leviticus 18:30, which is extensively discussed by the talmud sages (BT yebamoth 21a) in the light of the mishnaic principle that we should “make a fence round the Torah.” (‘aboth 1.1). that’s the Torah rationale for having safeguards, although, i would have thought that the importance of having safeguards was self-evident and the operational definition of “frankly ridiculous” was very much in the eye of the beholder. you think it is, the sages and i think it isn’t, considering we’re talking about human life here/
these are the standards that emerge from the discussions in the Oral Torah about how many people you need in which type of court to try which type of offence. i would expect “qualified and capable” to apply in any situation which involved applying expertise, religious or not and there is voluminous literature on how “expertise” is defined in halakhah, for which i will i’m afraid have to refer you to the rather large talmudic tractate sanhedrin, or if you want a quick rundown, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanhedrin.
the number 71 is originally derived from the size of moses’ advisory council in the Torah (numbers 11:16 says 70, plus moses as a casting vote) and there is a mishnaic discussion (maqqoth 1:10) about the safeguard against letting capital punishment become a sort of judicial habit (as it is in some parts of the world) – more detail can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Judaism#Judaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporal_punishment_(Judaism)
(erratum – the limit is 70 years, not 75 as i previously said)
you might argue that four of the greatest Talmudic sages there have ever been, r. eli’ezer b. ‘azariah, r. ‘aqiba, r. tarfon and rabban shim’on b. gamaliel, did indeed intend to negate the *effect* of the text, but i hardly think it is credible that they intended to negate its authority, given they all spent their lives teaching Torah and that two of them at least were martyred by the romans for teaching it in defiance of the military dictatorship. personally, i think that this indicates a commendable attachment to matters of religious principle and that it would be unreasonable to discount such principle during the discussions over their interpretation of this text.
perhaps because we consider the interpretation to be precisely aligned with the moral authority we see in the text? if we have done everything possible to make such an undesirable outcome practically impossible, i would have thought that should be grounds for acknowledgement of moral sense, not accusations of jiggery-pokery. it feels to me like your objections are founded on a sense of disappointment that religious jews don’t turn out to be a bunch of bronze age nutcases but, rather, moral human beings instead.
the sages, for excellent and highly rational reasons, applied this text far beyond the matters of honest business practice, to ensure fair and equitable outcomes and prevent corruption in criminal cases. it also seems pretty important to ensure that you don’t execute anyone incorrectly (“it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death”, according to maimonides). so either something is judged to an appropriate moral standard or it isn’t. this seems pretty clear to me, even if it isn’t to you.
you don’t, but the sages do. if you want to avoid causing unnecessary suffering (see the iranian application of stoning for what i mean) you ought to make sure that the stone is big enough to kill someone outright. remember, the sanctity and preservation of human life is virtually paramount in halakhah, so any case where it has, regretfully, to be taken, should be as humane as possible, which means you need to describe a standard to maintain.
no, i can’t, because of the safeguards and the context. you are looking at specific aspects of the wording, i am looking at the system. the text says “son”, not child. the son might, for example, be 50 years old (you can’t condemn a minor in any case) and his parents could still be alive and they might be quite upset at him being, say, a serial killer paedophile, in which case being stoned under halakhah is probably quite an attractive option. i am not against the death penalty, i am only against it being carried out without appropriate safeguards and if that makes me the same as the taliban, i think you are lacking a sense of proportion.
to be precise – if it were 100% certain that this was the appropriate action, it would be acceptable, just as killing someone in self-defence would be acceptable if you were 100% sure it was self-defence. let’s look at what a girgashite was – we’re talking about those guys who used to sacrifice children by burning them in brass idols. personally, if i come across someone like that, i think provided it was 100% certain they would attempt to continue to do so (nb: in halakhah you are not a “girgashite” unless you DO “girgashism”, merely being a member of the tribe itself is not sufficient), i would think that capital punishment would not be unreasonable under the circumstances. however, the contingency is a remote one and, therefore, the case is mainly instructive for what it teaches us about jurisprudence and adjacent laws and, therefore, i don’t see a problem.
then you are, in effect, maintaining that your objection in theory is somehow more morally praiseworthy than my objection in practice. i fail to see why moral pragmatism is a bad thing. there is no such thing as a risk-free system and a 100% perfect outcome record, so i think i’ll take moral pragmatism over lofty declarations of theoretical principle.
because you are still making the mistake of considering the written text as if it stands alone, when in fact it never did so even when we wandered in the desert. the Oral Torah existed even before sinai. you are also trying to have your cake and eat it – if the Torah isn’t true, then what evidence do you have that such punishments were ever carried out? you can see that the safeguards would have prevented it even 2000 years ago. during even earlier periods when the vast majority of the population did not abide by the words of the Torah and indulged in idolatry and immorality and, in the words of judges “every man did what was right in his own eyes”, it was the words of the prophets that provided a vision of peace, justice and plenty compared to the violence, greed and bloodshed of the time. i find it simply astounding that you can characterise the *texts* as “primitive and barbaric”, when i have demonstrated that they cannot be used in practice to produce primitive and barbaric outcomes.
physical adjacence of individual texts is not particularly relevant to halakhic derivation.
if you spend any time whatsoever studying Talmud you will see that it is an intertextual document – arguably, the first ever – where the sages *constantly* cross-reference “baraitas” and “toseftas” – exceptions and additions to the implicit common law – from different tractates of the Mishnah and elsewhere in the Gemara, demonstrating astounding feats of linkage, cross-pollination and contradiction. i struggle to convey a sense of this to you, the enormity of storing such a vast corpus of case law and jurisprudence in the memories of legislators and interpreters and then unifying it into one redacted library. your objections here are increasingly based on your own perceptions of what appears to you to be reasonable and i fail to see why that should be the standard here.
it is axiomatic that the difficulty obviously is envisaged, presumably with the intention of conveying a teaching point by making us take it to bits and put it back together again.
ok, well, i’ll be “morally on a par with the taliban”, if it makes you happy, but you obviously realise the absurdity of such a claim when the moral outcomes are so obviously different. look, i’m not sure if you’re aware of the violence and bloodshed that arose even within recorded history due to our “apostates” – perhaps the name “torquemada” means something to you? how about pablo christiani? nicholas donin? paul of burgos? gerónimo de santa fe? these people were responsible for the deaths and persecutions of thousands and i for one would have happily seen them up before a court of 71 if those deaths could thereby have been prevented. and i haven’t even mentioned our old friend saul of tarsus.
deary deary me. i suppose providing food and support to widows and orphans and the poor as per leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22, 24:19 and deuteronomy 14:28-29 & 26:12-13 don’t deserve any consideration, nor does “do not oppress the stranger, for you were a stranger in egypt” (exodus 22:21), does it? what an egotistical, arrogant and self-serving point of view.
perhaps it was adopting them through christianity that did this, rather than getting them directly from source. i suppose you think we’d have been better off learning from the spartans or the macedonians, hell, or the romans. perhaps we should have stuck with gladiators, slavery and exposing children to die? i don’t think you’re on a winner with this particular argument.
assuming, of course, that they are demonstrably primitive and ignorant, that is – but not to replace them with the overweening arrogance of the superiority of modernity and the triumph of progress. we ourselves know better than anyone else the downside to modernity and technology, we learned that from the “scientific racists” of C19th europe, the communists and the nazis. voltaire was genuinely rational – he also hated jews. now, obviously, you don’t, but you are in such a hurry to condemn religion that you’re making all the usual mistakes – for which we jews are always, always, *always* the canary in the coalmine.
b’shalom
bananabrain
“if you want to avoid causing unnecessary suffering (see the iranian application of stoning for what i mean) you ought to make sure that the stone is big enough to kill someone outright.”
No, you ought (assuming acceptance of capital punishment for the sake of argument) to use the most “humane” form of execution available. Stoning of any kind doesn’t fit that description.
Bananabrain,
Thank you for your responses and I’ve enjoyed our discussion.
I think you’ll agree we’ve probably reached something of an impasse, so there’s probably not much more to say.
As a final point: regarding Nazism and Communism, I would say that they were not rational movements and in fact far more closely resemble secular forms of religion.
Nazism in fact in many ways consititutes a kind of perversion of the Judeo-Christian tradition, with the ‘Aryans’ as a chosen people, Hitler as a messianic figure, the Thousand Year Reich as a Kingdom of God on earth, Jews as a Satanic force, collectivism and faith in place of individualism and rationality, and so on. Mysticism, not rationalism, lay at the heart of the Nazi project.
Likewise, Communism can be seen as a continuation of the Prophetic tradition, and as a secularised attempt at, again, bringing the Kingdom of God to earth.
Anyway, thanks again,
Edmund
ophelia:
in fact, the most humane form of execution is one that doesn’t actually happen – that, as i hope i’ve shown, is the way in which the safeguards have developed. the argument could be made, without much trouble, that keeping the idea of stoning (or beheading, burning or strangling, the other three options for other capital sins/crimes) as the ultimate end in principle, actually incentivises the attempt to avoid it, whereas if it was more humane perhaps it would be a more attractive outcome for the prosecution. quixotic, perhaps, but i suppose one might say that the end justifies the means in this case. no doubt you could object that it would be simpler to drop the whole thing altogether but you’d lose the sense of just how seriously the original act is considered, plus you’d also lose the opportunity to gain the learning that comes from considering the question in detail, which for us as a culture of lifelong learning is inordinately important.
edmund:
ah – i think you’ve misunderstood the point i’m making here. this isn’t Ye Olde Chestnutte Standarde Religious Response #53, “atheism has its own genocides”, which is mostly a red-herring (as long as you ignore voltaire’s point about hanging and priests’ entrails) and i would agree with your characterisation – both to me are extreme forms of idolatry, one using “race” as an idol and the other “class” and both turning the state into the religious institution – certainly both required blasphemous blood sacrifice on the scale normally associated with, say, the aztecs.
no, my point here is a different one, which is that both attempted to pervert science and reason into their service, the former in support of so-called “scientific” theories of race and the latter in support of “scientific” theories of class and economics which in fact were nothing of the sort, they just borrowed scientific terminology, approaches and methods in order to give some kind of intellectual respectability to what were, at bottom, utterly unscientific systems, insofar as they had little respect for evidence, experimental controls or peer review. if science can be co-opted in such a fashion, just as religion can, then we have to be extremely careful of attaching the labels “rational”, “reasonable”, “logical” and “scientific” to things which may on further examination be anything but.
perhaps. i think its more that we have reached the point where we have established, effectively, that interpretation and opinion have overwhelming influence on either the case for reason-based or faith-based systems of morality when you analyse it in sufficient detail. obviously we will disagree in a number of areas where “reasonableness”, relevance or connection is in question, but that need not be grounds for dismissing either point of view as irrational, illogical or indeed inconsistent. this is what allows me to conclude that we can have robust disagreement and still coexist within a philosophical system that allows for both points of view as well as a unifying moral code. the precise sources of our axiomatic bases is far less important than people seem to think when you view it in terms of reasoned, logical outcome – at least, that’s the case with judaism at any rate.
b’shalom
bananabrain
1915: 1.8 Billion people,
2010: 6.8 Billion people,
95 years: 5 Billion people,
2310: 22 Billion people,
Solution to problem: Stop Creating Babies,
I am 100% sure your generations will appreciate not being created and left behind to suffer that mess of insanity. And it will be one hell of a mess.