http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV2VVQdcx_w
- We are all made in God’s image, but religion has a way of making us forget this. (The first act of worship recorded in the Bible ends in the first murder)
- Christians did not really become aware of the disconnect of followers of a peace-loving God killing, until they found themselves killing each other in the religious persecutions of the 1600s.
- The desire to prevent the violence led to divorcing religion from first power, then academia, etc., culminating in the secularization today.
- The cure of bad religion was thought to be the removal of religion. However, the solution to bad science is not no science, it is good science; hence the solution to bad religion is good religion.
- Aside: bad religion tends to be one of: religion + power; focus on end times; dualism is especially dangerous
- Religion did not die, because although we have replacements for much of what religion used to do (explaining the world: science, prayer to control the world: technology, removing guilt: psychotherapy), only religion can answer the three fundamental questions:
- Who am I?
- Why am I here?
- How then do I live?
- Religion brings people together into an “us”; this implies that there is a “them,” so religion also divides
- Religion generates loyalty; loyalty is what causes people to go to war over things
- People don’t go to war over different cultures; culture doesn’t generate loyalty in the same way, so different cultures can peacibly coexist.
- Judaism answers questions by biblical interpretation.
- Greek thought sees truth as a Framework; Hebrew thought sees truth as a Story.
- Greek thought is P or !P; Hebrew thought tends to create a carefully constructed tension.
- Genesis will provide the answer to how to view the Other (the person not like you).
- Genesis 1 and 9 both begin with a void earth with the Spirit hovering over the surface of the waters; both talk about how Man was created in God’s image. But in Gen 1 gives the image of God as a statement of power; Gen 9 uses it as a limit of the use of power (you can’t murder).
- Gen 10 - 11 is the bridge between the human story (Adam - Noah) and the specific story of Abraham.
- Gen 1 and 2-3 tells the story of Creation two different ways; Gen 10, 11 tell the story of how human diversity came about: Gen 10 shows how how things naturally develop (seventy different people groups); Gen 11 says the opposite.
- The beginning of the Tower of Babel shows the reverse: people united in one language, staying in one place
- Lots of evidence for the Tower of Babel: there were about 31 different ziggurats in Mesopotamia, of which the one at Babylon was the largest. In fact, it was the tallest man-made object for several thousand years. Inscriptions on the ziggurats describe them as the gateway to heaven.
- The biblical narrative ironically notes that, despite the goal being to reach heaven, God had to “come down” to look around, implicitly noting that they didn’t actually make it all the way!
- Mesopotamian rulers boasted in their inscriptions that they forced everyone to speak their language. Thus, the Tower of Babel is an anti-empire polemic: Empire forcibly created unity where God desires diversity.
- The uniformity in Gen 11 is an enforced unity, not the natural way (described in Gen 10)
- The Tower of Babel transgresses three boundaries:
- Disobeys God’s command to fill the earth
- Attempts to invade heaven
- Suppressing the diversity that naturally comes (as shown in the previous chapter)
- The Bible is a critique of imperialism: Babylon and Egypt
- “Imperialism is the attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world.”
- Therefore, fundamentalism and imperialism is essentially the same thing
- Coins from the same mint all come out the same, but we are made in the image of God and we all come out different.
- Therefore, the Jewish answer to the question of the Other is that we respect the diversity that God desires.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqAYb5_iVeU&list=PLBV6X10gsVCodDEpledtI6eRVcy1zaIcR
- How can the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) co-exist? They each make truth claims that cannot all be true.
- The answer is in the difference between how Greeks and Hebrews conceive of knowledge.
- Jesus spoke Aramaic, but all the Christian books are in Greek; Greek thinking is a completely different worldview than Hebrew thinking.
- Greek thought:
- Knowledge is gained through observation: check to see if reality matches what you see on your metaphorical television screen.
- The metaphor for understanding is sight; even today when we understand something we say “oh, I see.”
- Only one truth can exist.
- Greek thought gave us science.
- The English word for “person” comes from the Greek idea of the persona, the mask, that an actor wears on stage. The “person” is the mask we wear to represent ourselves in life.
- Hebrew thought:
- Knowledge is relational; therefore the metaphor for understanding is hearing.
- “To hear” in Hebrew means “to understand”.
- “To know” in Hebrew means “intimacy” (not limited to sexual intimacy).
- God knows us better than we know ourselves; therefore there is no word for “person” because wearing a mask does not make sense when God knows us completely.
- There is no word for “obey” (e.g. blind obedience) in Hebrew
- How can selfish people cooperate? Only by use of promises.
- Speaking the promise actually creates something: a covenant.
- Each of the three monotheistic religions reflects a different relationship with God, hence each can be true (just as Rabbi Sacks can be husband, father, and grandfather all at the same time).
- Both ways of thinking need to be expressed.
- Greek thinking gave us science: “science breaks things apart to find out how they work.”
- Hebrew thinking gave us relationship with God: “religion puts things together to find their value.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBt1afJsE_E
- Greek thinking is good at finding order in the natural world; Hebrew thinking is good at finding order in the human (relational) world. Both are good, but are very different.
- Biblical narratives have the surface narrative, and then another subtle narrative that usually runs counter to the surface narrative.
- Ex: Moses:
- Names are import; name changes are important.
- Moses was named by an Egyptian, so he should have an Egyptian name, but the Bible gives the Hebrew etymology. “Meses” (muh-see) means “child” in Egyptian, and is like Rameses (the traditional Pharaoah) but without “Ra”, the sun god.
- So now the narrative has Rameses (“child of Ra”), the demigod, versus Moses (“child”). Indeed, the nineth plague, darkness, is a strike against the sun god.
- But below the surface, all children are children of God, even slave children, not just the ruler who claims to be the divine son. However, you only find this subtlety if you notice that the etymology of “Moses” is wrong.
- Sibling rivalry:
- “Static reading”: Genesis states the problem (sibling rivalry), Exodus states the solution (bind the brothers in a covenant, so that they all share the same fate), Leviticus states the law (love your neighbor as yourself)
- “Dynamic reading”:
- a System (Greek) is independent of time; a Story (Hebrew) plays out over time.
- The final scenes of brothers in Genesis:
- Cain and Abel: Abel is dead, Cain is sentenced to be a restless wanderer
- Isaac and Ishmael: they stand together at their father’s grave
- Jacob and Esau: they kiss and go their separate ways
- Joseph and brothers: reconciliation and forgiveness
- Moses, Aaron, and Miriam lead together with only a hint of sibling rivalry
- Thus sibling rivalry is something that can be overcome with time
- “Depth reading”:
- God is disappointed with humanity in early Genesis, but also regrets the Flood.
- God makes two covenants: a universal one with Noah for all of humanity and a specific one with Abraham
- Why does God make two covenants? (this is fundamental to Jewish theology)
- because we need to consider both the general and the specifics.
- Heidt identifies five aspects to morality:
- do no harm (universal)
- fairness (universal)
- respect for authority (specific to culture)
- loyalty (specific to culture)
- sacred (specific to culture)
- So Western liberals only consider the first two, because they consider morality to be universal
- We have this tension between universals and specifics (because if we were all the same, there would be nothing to say, and if there were nothing the same, there would be no commonality)
- Lon Fuller (American law writer)
- Morality of duty: the minimum standard, what you make law (e.g. Noahic covenant)
- Morality of aspiration: the standard that we aim for (e.g. Abrahamic covenant)
- what happens when you add divine choice? That is the problem of sibling rivalry: e.g. Isaac is chosen, Ishmael is not
- the text gives the divine choice to one brother, but the reader’s emotional sympathy lies with the unchosen brother
- Isaac and Ishmael get the same blessing: 12 tribes for Isaac, 12 kings for Ishmael.
- they are reconciled, and there is even a Rabbi Ishmael
- Jacob and Esau: Jacob gets land and descendants, Esau gets land and descendants but he gets it more quickly, and God specifically tells the Israelites not to invade Seir.
- Jacob and Esau are also reconciled: Jacob wrestles with God and says that he has seen God. The next day he meets Esau and says that he has seen the face of God in the face of his brother.
- So when God chooses someone for the covenant of aspiration, we should not assume that God does not love those who only have the covenant of duty.
- God is not only with us, but he is also with them.
- Prophets are sent to Syria, Jonah is sent to the Assyrians, etc.
- Jonah is actually read at the end of Roshashana, the holiest day of the year
- The religious challenge is “can we see the face of God in the face of the Other”
- Q: what is the meaning of the Holocaust
A: when Cain is about to kill Abel, God tells him he can master the sin that wants to master him, but he doesn’t listen, and God says that his brother’s blood cries out. When Rabbi Sacks visited Aushweitz he got the words “if God speaks to man, but man does not listen, then even God is powerless” (because of his self-imposed limitation to give us free will, since we are in His image). However, God does not desire this. When Job refuses to accept his friends’ idea that he sinned and questions God’s justice, God says that Job is actually right. The faith is in the question; many prophets ask why the wicked prosper, why is there evil. - Repentence is the only proof for freewill: if we are deterministic, then if we come in the same situation we must do the same thing. But if we have repented we have changed our mind.
- Sibling rivalry is based on the false assumption of scarcity. Wealth and power are always zero-sum, so there will always be sibling-rivalry. But in religion, God’s love is plentiful, and he loves the chosen and the unchosen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVLCUKDf64o
- Adam Smith said that the Market somehow magically transforms people’s self-interest into the collective good.
- (he even gave it a sort of mystical name—the Invisible Hand)
- Von Neumann noted that the Invisible Hand does not describe how people actually act in finance because what I do depends, to some extent, on what the other does; he created Game Theory to mathematically describe this.
- The Prisoner’s Dilemma refutes Adam Smith:
- Two prisoners in separate rooms; if both snitch on each other they get five years, if one snitches but not the other then the snitcher goes free and the other gets ten years; if they both keep quiet they both get one year.
- The optimal behavior is for both to keep quiet, but because they do not trust each other, they both inform on the other.
- This demonstrates that each person pursuing their own rational self-interest is not necessarily positive for everything.
- The difference is lack of trust
- Tit-for-Tat:
- Darwin couldn’t figure out why altruism exists: altruists risking themselves for the sake of the group die earlier, yet altruism is highly valued in all societies.
- The Tit-for-Tat algorithm won a competition for the best algorithm dealing with other species:
- If you meet someone new, be nice. Then do whatever they did last: if they were nice, be nice; if they were nasty, be nasty.
- Martin Novak created an algorithm that beats Tit-for-tat called “Generous”:
- Regularly, but randomly, forget a slight and be nice.
- Forgetting is the closest a computer gets to forgiving.
- So you need Justice (tit-for-tat) and Generous (mercy). Note that this is the Judeo-Christian ethic, but actually established through the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
- A group with a high level of distrust, cynicism, and corruption will not cohere and will not survive
- We need trust as a society to flourish, which must be established as habits.
- Where does this happen in a liberal democracy?
- We need to encounter each other repeatedly so that we can build trust between individuals
- (This is why crime and unniceness is higher in cities: chances are you won’t see the other person again)
- Families, communities, and neighborhoods are where repeated encounters happen
- Covenantal relationships:
- Contractual relationships create the Market; social contracts create the State. It is a transaction.
- A contract is about interests
- Covenants are inviduals promising to share interests by being faithful to each other.
- A covenant is about relationship; it is about identity: you and me becoming an us
- Cooperation is what creates trust.
- This type of covenantal trust is essential to the Bible
- How do combine human freedom and order?
- Genesis begins with freedom without order and it ends in chaos (the state of humanity before the flood, and the flood afterwards).
- Exodus begins with order without freedom.
- Creating freedom and order is done with a promise.
- A covenant is a mutual promise
- God trusting us and us trusting God creates a society of trust
- The Hebrew word for “faith” means “trust”
- Thus a market economy depends on Trust, which is not created by the market
- Character is no longer a component of our business
- Now we have lawyers draw up contracts to make sure that if the other person defects we come out ok
- Without Trust, the Market will fail like the Prisoner’s Dilemma predicts
- We cannot rely on the idea that self-interest works in the public good
- Bertrand Russell noted that what happened in the great Age of Greece also happened in the Renaissance: they threw off moral restraint because it was superstitious. There was a brief flourishing of the arts (due to the new freedom), but then the lack of morals created anarchy and treachery which led to them being dominated by other nations who were less cultured but more moral.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3XMUeAenA0
- When China sent scholars to learn how the West had gone from being behind China to surpassing it in several hundred years. They explored the ideas of better weapons, better political structures, better economic structures, and eventually came to the conclusion that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that was responsible.
- China invented many things, but never produced a market economy, Science, industrial revolution, or sustained economic growth (until recently). [David Landis]
- Why did the market economy only arise in Europe?
- The biblical ethic values the dignity of each man regardless of race, status, etc., because each is created in the image of God. The market economy values each person’s choice more than any other economic system.
- The biblical respect for property rights:
- In the ancient world, rulers treated their subjects’ property as their own.
- Slavery deprives the slave of the ownership of the wealth they create.
- The Bible respects labor:
- God saves Noah, but Noah needs to build the ark.
- Job creation gives the dignity to people to not rely on charity; the rabbis said that you should not say “I am a priest” and not work.
- Wealth is positive: wealth is a sign of God’s blessing
- Asceticism and poverty are not positive in Judaism
- Poverty humiliates, and forces the imperished into dependency
- Wealth is to be given away
- Market economy is good because it lowers prices, lowers absolute poverty, increases choices
- Limits of capitalism: good at creating wealth, bad at redistributing wealth
- The Law has quite a number of redistribution mechanisms.
- Even the poor should have the dignity of earning a living.
- Every 7 and 50 years wealth is redistributed.
- Many Jewish societies had charities to provide for the poor
- The modern idea that taxes should redistribute wealth to provide for the poor came from Christians reading the Hebrew Bible in 16th and 17th centuries; it was not found in Greek or Roman classics (and therefore, was not a product of the Enlightenment)
- The Market erodes the principles that founded it
- The market can direct self-interest to the detriment of the common good, instead of the for the common good as envisioned by Adam Smith
- It can become the moral principle itself: if you can buy it, it is legitimate to.
- Yet it is only humans that can delay gratification, but the Market instructs us to simply satisfy our desires now.
- Causes of the 2007 crisis:
- The financial instruments were so complex that the rating agencies didn’t know how to evaluate them.
- People, including some bankers, did not understand the risks or the failure mode.
- This is completely against the principles of transparency and accountability (which was modeled in the accountability of the making of the Tabernacle in Exodus, which lists how every donation was used).
- People encouraged to take out mortgages that the people encouraging them should have known they could not repay.
- “You shall not put a stumbling block in front of the blind.”
- Bankers gave themselves golden parachutes which protected them from the risks that they were exposing to consumers and investors.
- It is not biblical to benefit from failure of duty.
- The West has ridiculous levels of debt (mortgaging tomorrow for today), which is very contradictory to the Deutoronomic society which regularly resets debt.
- The current corporations are in danger of having power without responsibility: they can quickly deploy their outsourced resources to another area of the globe in taxes or the business climate becomes undesireable.
- We have shifted from an economy based on trust to one based on risk
- George Soros spent his first few years just building trust. Now you just have lawyers draw up a contract.
- Trust is fundamental to the market economy: since everyone was accountable to God, people could be trusted
- In fact, lack of trust is what caused the Panic of 2007 in the first place.
- The very words of the economy are religious:
- “credit”: from Latin “credo”, meaning “I believe”
- “confidence”: from Latin meaning “shared believe”
- “trust” is a religious word
- “Social capital” is when people people have internalized their responsibility to be moral.
- Lack of social capital is when people are solely individual.
- The liberal democracy idea that morality can be externally enforced rather than internalized is just wrong.
- We tend to look at the price instead of the value.
- “The consumer society encouraged people to borrow money they didn’t have to buy things they didn’t need to achieve a happiness that wouldn’t last.”
- Judaism says that the person who is rich is one who rejoices in what he has.
- The consumer society says that the person who is rich is one who can buy what he doesn’t have.
- Given that we have given our kids lots of stuff but little time and they are an extremely unhappy generation, prone to depression, etc.
- Kids that have self control are happier, do better in school, are more successful, etc., but the consumer society encourages exactly the opposite.
- Five things that Christians and Jews have restricted from the Market
- The Sabbath: the day when we focus on the things that have values but not a price: family, community, thanking God, prayer.
- Marriage and the family:
- Many of the most important religious moments happen in the family
- Marriage is where love and loyalty combine to bring new life.
- Eductation:
- Judaism says that study is even holier than prayer.
- There is no higher calling than a teacher (the greatest Jew, Moses, had the title “Teacher”).
- Property:
- All our stuff is on loan from God; when we have more than enough we are supposed to give it away.
- We are worth only what we give away.
- Law:
- The Ten Commandments often say “Thou shalt not;" how many things in our culture say that to us?
- The Market only governs those things that we produce and trade; some things may not be traded no matter what we want.
- “When shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our liturgy and our worth in measured in what we earn and spend, then the Market is destroying the very virtues which, in the long run, it depends” and the religious traditions need to speak up.
- Proposes that Jews and Catholics become a Creative Minority and organize altruism, and teach ethics to our societies.
- Economic superpowers have about a 100 year shelf life (Spain, Netherlands, France, Britain, America); Christianity is 2000 years old and Judaism is 4000 years.
- Humanity was not created to serve markets, markets were created to serve humanity.
http://fora.tv/2012/12/05/Chief_Rabbi_Lord_Jonathan_Sacks_The_Great_Partnership
- Genesis 1 has this theme of 7: seven days of creation, the verses are multiples of seven words long, no word is superfluous. Except for the last word: “God created everything that he had created to do.” Rabbi Sacks thinks that the last word, “to do,” which appears to be superfluous, could be interpretted as “to evolve.”
- Maimonides says it would make no sense to believe that what Torah says about the world and what Science says about the world must be fundamentally the same thing.
- Unity in heaven creates diversity on earth. The creator made creation creative. (Certainly we can see that we ourselves are creative)
- Natural selection is the most efficient means of the world creating diversity.
- People saying that science eliminates religion are incorrect. Western religion is essentially the combination of Jewish and Greek perspectives, resulting in an Aristotlean view (since the Bible was only read in Greek by Christians, and some concepts are untranslateable into Greek). What science really did is show that Aristotlean religion is incorrect.
- “We deserve a better class of atheist [than Richard Dawkins, et al].” They are not philosophers, so they don’t understand that without faith we are back to the pre-Socratic Greeks; all of Western Civilization goes down. For instance, if we are purely deterministic and have no free will, then why have laws? Why not just do neurosurgery on criminals?
- People want to be “unburdened of their responsibilities.” Some try science to absolve them of their responsibility. Some strains of Christianity and Islam do the same.