After forty years: reflections on human aspirations, on great achievements and the ability to preserve them
This article was published in issue 131 of Galileo
The first and last man to walk on the moon
On July 21, 1969, at 02:56 UTC (Greenwich Mean Time), a man placed his foot on the surface of the moon, for the first time in the history of the human race and for the first time in the history of the solar system. It was the American astronaut Neil Armstrong who got out of his space vehicle, the "Eagle" lunar compartment, and descended in steps of a small ladder to the lunar soil. "Eagle" itself landed on the moon about six and a half hours earlier. Lowering his foot from the bottom rung of the ladder to the ground, Armstrong announced into the microphone on his helmet to the radios at the Space Center in Houston, Texas to hundreds of millions of attentive television and radio receivers around the world, in the ears of all humanity: "That's one small step for a human being, one giant leap for the human race." .”
The small step that Armstrong spoke of was photographed and recorded by a television camera that he placed while descending the steps of the ladder from "Eagle" to the ground below him. Millions of people saw with their own eyes how this step was carried out and billions more can watch it even today in movies and mostly on websites.
A few minutes later, Armstrong's partner in the lunar cabin, astronaut Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, also came out. The two walked on the lunar surface for about two and a half hours, during which time they moved as far as 250 meters from their lunar cabin. Twenty-two hours later, "Eagle" rose above the surface of the moon and attached the command module Columbia, which was in orbit around the moon the entire time, piloted by astronaut Michael Collins. Three days later Columbia landed safely in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
The landing on the moon was the culmination of the Apollo 11 mission of the American space agency NASA. It was followed by six more Apollo missions, during which ten more people stepped on the lunar surface and returned safely to Earth. Astronaut Eugene Cernan (Cernan), the last man to walk on the moon, declared on December 11, 1972 when the spacecraft he was sitting in separated from the moon: "America's challenge today shapes the destiny of man tomorrow." So far, these are the last words spoken by man on the lunar soil.
The seed of the Apollo program was sown on May 25, 1961, in a speech delivered by American President John F. Kennedy before both Houses of Representatives of the United States, in which he asked the American Congress for approval of the budget he proposed. A central item in this budget was the allocation of resources for a huge space operation whose summit will be conquered within ten years, and which will be sending an American man to the moon and bringing him back to Israel safe and sound. The declared goal of the operation, as President Kennedy himself formulated it, was to prove the technological power of the United States before the whole world, in particular before the Soviet Union, the great rival of the United States during those years of the Cold World War. In the eyes of the initiators of the operation and its perpetrators, America stands at the head of the freedom fighters on earth and the march of an American citizen on the lunar soil will be primarily a dramatic strategic step in front of the eyes of the enemies of freedom in the world. President Kennedy, as we know, did not get to see his dream come true. However, America completed the operation to its end and even met the pretentious schedule set by the president. More than a generation has passed not only since the first landing on the moon but also since the last man left the white soil. The global enthusiasm that at that time swept all the members of the human race faded long ago, and is now almost completely forgotten. After 37 years that a human foot did not set foot on the white soil, should we see the moon landing operation, despite the great excitement, so understandable, that it caused all over the world, as a one-time passing episode? Did the moon landing have or does it have a purpose beyond its main stated purpose as a strategic move in the Cold War, a move that may have actually achieved its goal, and was a direct or indirect cause of the collapse of the Soviet Empire twenty years later? Does the fact that a human being walked on the face of brick have meaning not only in the soul of the romantic, the heart of the poet, the mind of the philosopher, or the creativity of the science fiction writer?
In this article I will try to show that it is indeed appropriate to attribute great significance to the fact that man walked on the moon forty years ago, beyond the fact that it was a dramatic display of power in that cold war. For this purpose we can use the two sayings of the two astronauts, the first to walk on the moon and the last of them, announcements that have already become slogans. According to the best Jewish tradition, we will try to give each of them an interpretation, not necessarily the one that was in the mind of the speaker himself. According to this interpretation, the two slogans express two deep meanings for the march on the moon, from which far-reaching conclusions about the fate of man in the universe are also required.
The big jump
The leap that Neil Armstrong was referring to in his words is perhaps the tremendous technological leap made by the human race, especially in the 20th century, the one that made the small step that the astronaut took possible. However, the human race took a much bigger leap that had a far more decisive meaning for its destiny, a leap that the descent from the ladder to the soil of the moon was only a step that symbolizes its completion. And if we use the image of Armstrong's jump, the concept borrowed from the field of athletics, then the big jump we are dealing with here is more likened to the Olympic discipline known as the triple jump. In this sporting profession, the athlete covers the measured distance from the first starting point to his final landing in a series of three consecutive jumps. The jump of the human race, of which Armstrong's step is a kind of final landing, is not exactly a triple jump but a quadruple jump. It consists of four large footprints, which took humanity thousands of years to complete, as I will explain later.
The first leap: from Artemis to Copernicus
The starting point of this leap was the state of knowledge and consciousness of humans thousands of years ago. In the ancient world, whose roots go back perhaps tens of thousands of years, the moon, it and the entire army of the sky with it, were perceived as an entity that does not belong to the material reality known on earth. In many cultures, perhaps in all, the white belonged to the kingdom of the gods or was under the supervision and responsibility of a deity peculiar to it. We do not know how the prehistoric man saw the white, but from the dawn of human history a moon god or a white goddess were an integral part of the world of belief, thought and cognition of humans. Thus, for example, in the pre-Muslim Arab culture the moon god Hubal was known, the origin of the belief in him may have been in the ancient Sumerian kingdom. In the Greco-Roman pantheon, a place of honor was reserved for the moon goddesses Phoebe, Artemis and Diana. Even in the Jewish tradition, to this day, you can find remnants of seeing whiteness as a metaphysical entity, if not as a concept with real divine characteristics. Thus, for example, one can find in every Jewish prayer seder the blessing of the whitewash that many Jews say every month in the month of Shabbat after renewing the whitewash. Kiddush al-Blava includes, among other things, the statement of the worshiper, which he announces three times during some kind of dance: "Just as I dance against you and cannot touch you, so all my enemies will not be able to touch me badly."
The perception of the moon as a deity, or as an entity that acts under the direct responsibility of God, is the way the human mind interpreted the dramatic and completely incomprehensible phenomenon of the small light that dominates the night sky, and of its miraculous monthly cycle. Attributing divine or idolatrous qualities to incomprehensible phenomena, or understanding them as the result of the actions of a divine being with will and intentions, were cornerstones in the perception of the world by humans for thousands of years. Even in the 21st century, such an explanation mechanism for phenomena in the physical world, and even in the socio-political world, is still recognized as valid in the eyes of millions of people.
Breaking away from a worldview in which reality is controlled by the will of a single God, or of many gods, began simultaneously with the understanding of many natural phenomena as belonging in principle to the set of physical phenomena known and known to every person, and which due to habit do not seem to need any special explanation. Already the philosophers and thinkers in ancient Greece recognized that the moon is a physical object that moves around the earth, and that the moonlight and the whitening shows are the reflections of the sunlight by this object.
However, the most dramatic expression of the first observation made by humanity, the separation of astronomy from the pagan world, is symbolized perhaps more than any man by Nicolaus Copernicus (Copernicus). This is the man who, at the beginning of the 16th century, first "moved" the earth from the center of the universe. In the picture of the world named after him, the abode of human beings, the creatures who in the eyes of most religions are the crown of creation, is not a center around which the entire universe revolves. This understanding, in the deepest sense, removes the person from a special status that he attributed to himself until then. It was a concept that the Catholic Church, then ruling Europe, could not digest.
The realization that the earth, man's abode, is not the center of the universe but merely one of the six planets (that were known to Copernicus), thus largely undermined the perception that man has a special status in the world. In particular, it weakened the degree of conviction that exists in explanations that attribute the phenomena of nature to divine will and providence. According to the theistic and pagan worldview, the phenomena of nature and physical existence itself are the products of the action of a metaphysical being, of some god, one or more, with his own will and intentions. According to the pagan explanation, at its deepest base, this divine activity can actually have only one purpose - service for man and always in relation to him, being the only creature that worships God. However, if man is not at the center of the universe, and the world apparently does not revolve around him, perhaps it is also possible to doubt the centrality and importance of man in the consciousness of a God who creates and activates the phenomena of nature, in particular those that directly serve man, or alternatively those that endanger or even kill him? Can God remain as a satisfactory explanation of a world where man is not at the center?
The second leap: the scientific method
The second leap that humanity made from the pagan world to the scientific world was made immediately after the leap symbolized by Copernicus. This rejection is also associated with the name of a great man: Galileo Galilei, after whom this journal bears his name. Galileo lived and worked in Italy at the end of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century. If Copernicus before him largely undermined the foundations of the metaphysical explanation of the world, Galileo recognized the foundation of another, non-religious, valid and potentially applicable explanation that was not at all the pagan explanation of the world. He realized that useful knowledge about the world, knowledge with the power of which it is possible to predict natural phenomena in advance and plan intelligent planning in the world, that is, to build mechanical or even biological systems to achieve any desired goals, can only be achieved in a certain way known today as "science". Galileo did not found or "invent" science. Every normal person, and primitive man in general, acquires his most basic knowledge about the world through the scientific method. Its essence is the adoption of an interpretation of signals received from the world as knowledge, provided that this interpretation is received as a conclusion from a combination of observation of the world, experiment, and the application of logic laws and mathematical calculations. The mental ability to construct explanations of the world using the scientific method is one of the characteristics of Homo sapiens, "the thinking man", who began walking on this planet about one hundred thousand years ago, and is an important part of the reason why he is called by that name.
Every person today, and all people since time immemorial, explain to themselves the basic signals they receive from the world using the scientific method, but until the 17th century people did not know that this was what their minds were doing. Galileo's great departure is the recognition that this is the method by which valid understandings of the world are acquired. Galileo was the first to come to this understanding and express it explicitly, mainly by the personal example he gave in his method of investigating the world. The results of the meticulous experiments he conducted in the study of the kinematics of moving bodies in the earth's gravitational field were one of the cornerstones on which Newton built his theory (see below). Among Galileo's important contributions is the discovery of four moons orbiting the planet Jupiter, which now bear his name, the Galileo moons. This discovery was made in an observation he made in the astronomical telescope he built, probably the first of its kind in the world, and it is the one that significantly confirmed the Copernican picture of the world. Galileo is the one who instilled the understanding that the scientific method is the only way to acquire knowledge about reality, and there is no end to it, which is why Albert Einstein considered him the father of modern science. This understanding is the pillar on which the entire human civilization of the last two hundred years rests, both from its technological side and from its medical side. She is the one who opened the gate to the use of the method in a deliberate and controlled manner, a process that today is represented by the word "science".
The third leap: Newtonian physics
Immediately after Galileo, another man arose, who is more responsible than any other man for the third observation of the great human leap. This man is Isaac Newton, who lived at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. Newton is the person who most fully realized the abstract principles underlying the human understanding of the world that Galileo pointed out. In his genius, Newton combined all the elements of the scientific method in his work and created the backbone of modern physics by combining the analysis of observations and the results of experiments with sophisticated mathematical theory. Newton's theory is the one that provides us, among other things, with the most basic data related to the Earth-Moon system. These include, for example, the exact distance between the two bodies, and the position of the moon at any moment. Newton's laws are the ones that allow the calculation of an orbit, with a precise schedule, of an object moving between the Earth and the Moon. The great strength of Newtonian physics is first and foremost in what it lacks, for although the man himself was probably a man of faith, there is not even a trace of metaphysics in his physical theory.
The fourth leap: to the peaks of technology
The enormous technological revolution, which took place mainly in the second half of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, is the fourth leap of the human race. This revolution fundamentally changed the fate of the human race and there is no person on the face of the earth who is not directly touched by it. This is actually the application of Newton's theory, and of the great physical theories that were created following it - electromagnetism, thermodynamics and quantum theory. This tremendous revolution is a dramatic confirmation like no other for the Galilean concept, that it is possible to gain useful knowledge about the world only with the help of the scientific method. Until Galileo's time, the human race existed on planet Earth for thousands of years in a form of life that was almost completely stagnant. The life expectancy and standard of living of a citizen of the world in the 16th century was not much different from the life expectancy and standard of living of a person in the second millennium BC. On the other hand, after Galileo, in the last hundred and fifty years, the human condition has changed beyond recognition. Neil Armstrong's small step is a symbol of this enormous change, a fitting end to the quadruple leap made by human culture, from perceiving a world in which the moon is a deity and the white is the goddess Phoebe or Artemis, to a civilization and understanding of a world in which a human being steps on Artemis and walks upright on the ground of the moon.
The big challenge
Eugene Cernan saw putting a man on the moon as a challenge that would shape man's destiny. The American astronaut spoke, in the spirit of those times, about America's challenge. Today it is appropriate to replace the word "America" with the word "humanity" in his statement. We can venture to guess that neither Cernan himself nor the President of the United States would today oppose a revised version of the statement, to say: "The challenge of humanity today shapes the destiny of man tomorrow."
This password may sound a bit trivial. It almost goes without saying that the problems and difficulties facing the human race today and the ways in which humans understand them and try to address them, determine what will happen to humans tomorrow. However, that great leap, which Armstrong's small step seals, gives this statement a sharp meaning that it did not have less than a century ago. The Great Leap didn't just lift man into the sky and place him on the lunar soil. It also brought in its wings developments in completely different directions. The last jump in the quadruple jump brought into the world tools that give human beings, perhaps even in the hands of individual human beings, the power to destroy the entire human race. This is a reality that humanity has never faced before. Powerful people who determined the destinies of millions have stood up to the human race not infrequently in its history. However, until the middle of the 20th century there was no situation where this kind of destructive power was in the hands of one person, in the hands of a group of people, or even in the hands of a world power. The most serious and difficult challenge facing the human race in the 21st century is how to continue to exist in such a reality, which has no equal in human history. It is likely that a large part of the organizational tools, the social mechanisms, the laws, the procedures, the associations and the distribution of powers used so far in the global human society are not suitable for this new world, full of danger. It is possible that even basic moral principles accepted in most human societies will also have to undergo fundamental changes in this new reality.
The challenge posed to human society by the existence of ever-increasing means of mass destruction in the world is particularly severe in view of the dynamics of the great leap to which we attributed Armstrong's statement. Most of the factors that currently have the political and military power in the world did, in general, make the same big leap. But this is far from true for millions, or perhaps even billions of individual human beings in the world. The nearly 6.8 billion people who currently inhabit the planet Earth are scattered in their knowledge and understanding of the world at different points along the cultural, philosophical and religious distance that stretches between the first starting point of the quadruple jump and its final landing point. Those who have fully completed the leap may not even constitute a majority of humans alive today. Hundreds of millions of people, members of all nations and all religions, adopt as their knowledge of the world insights that came to them other than through the Galilean scientific method. It is possible that most people continue to see the reality of metaphysical entities as a legitimate explanation of phenomena in the biological world and even in the physical world. Many even accept this as a fact from which binding conclusions also arise in the human social world. The extremists among those with this kind of world view and knowledge are today called fundamentalists, and they are found in considerable numbers in perhaps all human societies in the world. The union of a human mind, which recognizes in the physical world traces of a deity with certain demands on humans with hands that hold weapons is a dangerous combination. The massacre in New York on September 9, 2001, the perpetrators of which fortunately did not (yet?) have nuclear weapons, is a warning sign of the lethal potential up to holocaust proportions inherent in such a combination.
This is not to say that those who have a Galilean worldview, free from any metaphysics, are immune to attitudes, desires and intentions that are disastrous for others and even for themselves. However, as these words are being written, there seems to be a high correlation between the sources of the immediate dangers the world is facing, as well as between a large part of the perpetrators of the great acts of violence occurring in the world today, and between individual people or human divisions who believe in metaphysical beings, who operate within physical reality and even make demands on humans , is part of their worldview. Therefore, that "great leap for mankind" could be a double-edged sword. The spread of nuclear weapons and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction also comes on the wings of the jump, and is a process that plants ticking bombs in human society. There are varying degrees of proximity between different human societies to those bombs, but the enormous potential for destruction puts the human race as a whole, and other species on Earth with it, in real danger.
conditions for survival
In order for the human race to continue to survive, or in any case so that its existence on Earth does not change significantly for the worse, at least one of two conditions must be met in the 21st century: one possibility is that the same technology that developed the tools of mass destruction will discover within a reasonable period of time also means To neutralize this tremendous power. However, it is very difficult to build a plan, directed and prepared in advance, towards the realization of this condition. Even the physical knowledge on which all nuclear technology is based, including that related to the production of nuclear weapons, was not obtained as a result of a deliberate and orchestrated activity towards the construction of this technology. Admittedly, the development of the first atomic bomb in the American "Manhattan" program during the years of World War II was achieved by such a deliberate and planned activity. The parade on the moon was also the result of nine years of initiative, development and work directed towards this very goal. However, both projects were not possible, and there was no room to even think about trying to realize them, without a broad and deep infrastructure of knowledge and understanding that was achieved without any guiding hand and certainly not towards any immediate purpose for human use. Unfortunately, we apparently do not currently have a basis of physical, biological or chemical knowledge on which to plan technological projects to save humanity from the weapons of mass destruction that are being stockpiled in various warehouses around the world.
Today there is a race in the world, which perhaps not everyone is aware of, between the rate of spread of weapons of mass destruction in the world, and between the development of the abilities of those with wisdom and compassion in human society to monitor what is happening in the world in this area, and to control, if necessary, the destructive factors in it. The second possibility for ensuring the survival of the human race is that in this race the elements of reason will win. And this does not necessarily mean a military victory during a war or any other violent action. The victory of reason will be achieved if the rational element in human society is able to build in the world, before it is too late, international social mechanisms and pan-human and supra-national frameworks and associations, which have technical means, physical strength and above all the moral and ideological backing of the rational citizens of the world, to operate all over the planet to prevent global holocausts. Such a development would involve a radical change of many accepted human conventions. For example, "world police" is a concept that many are afraid of and that many writers, thinkers, sociologists and statesmen have dismissed it from its core. It is possible that in order to ensure the existence of the human race even in the 22nd century, it will be necessary to remove the veto that many liberal circles impose on such a concept.
The shaping of human destiny
Armstrong's step was but a small symbolic action at the end of a leap over a very long way, not only in the dimension of time but mainly in the field of the human spirit and people's perception of the world. As we have already mentioned, not all humans have made this leap. In fact, this leap has opened a gap in human society that may be impossible to bridge. There is much talk in the literature and the press about the huge economic gap that exists in the world between different layers of people, both between different countries and within the countries themselves. Another big gap that exists in human society, which is of course related to the economic gap, is the education gap. However, the biggest and most dangerous of all is a gap in human consciousness, in the image of the world and its understanding in the minds of different people. This gap exists between those who made Armstrong's jump and those who were left behind. Because of this gap, and precisely because of liberal worldviews of humanism and absolute equality between all human beings, the second option of making structural changes in the order of human society that are required to ensure survival, may not be able to materialize. In this case the passwords of the two astronauts and the enterprise in which they participated may have a completely different meaning. Walking on the moon will remain a small step in a big leap, as Armstrong described it, but in this second meaning, it is also a first step towards a new leap that the human race is making outside the borders of its planet, and here perhaps an image of a high jump is more appropriate. The step on the moon is the beginning of the process of building human colonies outside the earth. This is a big leap as well, but its direct impact on the lives of most people will not necessarily be so decisive, certainly not immediately. However, if the two options for survival do not materialize, it is possible that Cernan's words about reshaping human destiny will take on an extreme meaning, perhaps beyond what he intended. From a pessimistic view of human behavior at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is impossible to fundamentally disprove the thought that that second leap of humanity, whose first step was taken on the moon exactly forty years ago, will be an escape hatch from the earth for some members of the human race. And if this is the face of the future, Cernan's words will come true in a most painful way. The human race will be completely reshaped in external colonies, far from the Earth, the cradle of its birth and the original home of humanity, which did not meet today's challenges and was unable to maintain this home and itself.
personal:
Prof. Elia Leibovitz is a lecturer in astronomy at Tel Aviv University and director of the Sackler Institute for Astronomy of this university.
27 תגובות
Yair,
Thanks.
Since I believe in the saying "if you're not going to do it well - don't do it at all" and I've been under a heavy workload lately, I've postponed the blog project, and I've hardly participated in the conversation on this site recently.
As for the links - I don't usually rely on sources on the Internet. My main sources of knowledge, in subjects in which I have some orientation, are books or previous studies.
Unfortunately, many of the sources on the Internet are partial and superficial or tendentious or one-dimensional. The network usually contains 'instant' knowledge, one that provides general concepts but cannot be a real infrastructure for solid positions or meaningful discussion. It also turns out that the network largely 'erased' much of the knowledge that preceded the Internet era, even basic knowledge - and did not know how to recycle it properly. The temptation of using the net - a use that is done with unbearable ease when it comes to dilettantial sources - also motivates people not to try to tap into in-depth sources. There are of course excellent sources of knowledge also on the net, but leisure and technical ability are needed to filter them and learn from them, and it is not always possible, for me anyway.
What some of the respected writers wrote makes me remember the following:
"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm still not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
to Eddie
Your approach is wise and correct, and it is a pleasure to read your comments.
Please link me to sites, articles or the blog where your words can be found
Thanks
Great appreciation
Yair
Too late, too long - I won't spend time on it.
autumnal,
First - a statement: due to lack of knowledge of your sexual identity, all my words regarding your response - will be in the masculine language, purely for convenience and without of course hinting at any attitude of sexual inequality contrary to any law...
And hence my response itself:
So that's it - that there is a God without religion.
Deity separate from religion - this is not only a philosophical possibility - it is also a historical reality: no Greek philosopher who has philosophized about God since Plato - has not turned his philosophical and/or moral deity into a 'religion'. Many of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian philosophers philosophized about the divine idea even in isolation from religion.
Even in modern times, many good people in science and philosophy have philosophized about God - without integrating him into any religious framework.
In the matter of deity and religion there is symmetry: it is possible to have religion without God (in this you are right, although the example you gave - Buddhism - is wrong, since the concept of some kind of deity also exists in Buddhism) and it is possible to have God without religion.
I suggest you look at the relevant materials before you set 'learned' rivets as you pretend to do.
You're trying to pin claims on me that I didn't make - and therefore Halacha has nothing to comment on.
Nevertheless, in fact - exemption for nothing is impossible:
It is a historical fact that Western culture and its origins relied in their development on the concept of a 'moral God'. This is the first factual claim I made. The second factual claim I made was that Western culture murdered the moral God about 150-200 years ago, in stages, and the terrible historical results were not long in coming. From here I continued and argued that Western culture must preserve and develop the concept of moral divinity, and not continue to kill it (as people like Elia Leibovitz obsessively try to do, in the name of a very specific agenda). that's it.
For the questions you raise, such as who brought morality - that is, what is the source of morality (divinity or the human spirit), whether the divinity of the Bible is moral or not, whether the fact that you claim that the God of the Bible is not moral is true or not - there is no essential importance in this context. The important thing is that the concept of a moral deity as expressed in Western culture was quite defined, and it required man to act according to certain basic moral values, norms and patterns of behavior, which in fact shaped the behavior of the individual and Western society and marched it towards its achievement. Certainly, on the long road of thousands of years there were difficulties, bumps, distortions and deviations - but the trend of progress did work due to the concept of moral divinity (until recently, as mentioned), and that is what is important.
On this basis, by the way, the 'dissections' that Michael Rothschild raised about the degree of morality of the God of the Bible and the question of his being a source of morality according to Michael's standards or yours - 'dissections' that you rely on as a source of great wealth - have no relevance to the discussion. What is important is the historical impact that the moral divine concept created, in a long and complex process of constant improvement and refinement on the back of basic foundations that were created and formulated in the Bible (and on this last point there is certainly no philosopher or historian or just any educated person who could disagree).
In my understanding, the multitude of 'religious' questions on the subject of the discussion I brought up is nothing more than a futile attempt to avoid the subject, and to drown it in a sea of so-called 'religious' quarrels and provocations, mainly by people who are not ready to forget anything from what has been established for them and are not ready to learn anything beyond what has been won For fanatical religious canonization (and it doesn't matter that it is 'secular') with them.
The question surrounding the ontological existence of the moral God is also not particularly important.
As for myself, I believe in the ontological existence of a divine being, which, among other things, has a moral attitude (although in my opinion this morality is necessarily dynamic in nature, just as the attitude aspect of the observed/manifest divinity to creation, from the side of creation [as opposed to the essential aspect of divinity] is necessarily dynamic ). Personally, I believe that I am also able to prove the existence of such an entity as a rational belief, but I am certainly able to accept that other people (some of whom are certainly intelligent and kind - and moral) may not agree with me - and that is perfectly fine. What is important for our purpose is the fact that a person can and should behave in the light of a concept of moral divinity, even if it is a divinity that Kant called only 'regulatory'. There is a certain (not complete) similarity between such a deity and the legal 'lawgiver'. The 'legislator' is a legal fiction (in the case of the State of Israel it is an accumulation of 120 people raising their hands - private individuals - driven mainly by elites of capital, media, culture, power and rule) but no sane, rational person will train himself In breaking the law just because the 'legislator' is a fiction... As I mentioned in a previous response, the cultural world, including the scientific world - includes many fictions, and this does not necessarily imply conceptual heresy and practical opposition to culture and science.
As far as I am concerned, my talk about the concept of a moral God is minimalistic (I do not require an ontological entity, necessarily) - I am satisfied with the 'concept' because for the purposes of this discussion it is certainly sufficient, and my consistent claim was that unlike people of Elia Leibovitz's type - it is mandatory to develop and preserve this concept And if not to champion it - not to condemn it.
You are upset that I supposedly think that belief in the concept of a moral God is the only path to a person's morality. I will answer you simply that I do believe that on an inclusive historical and social scale - indeed this is the case, although it is not necessarily true on the scale of this or that individual and on the scale of limited companies and in short time frames. There are certainly private individuals and limited societies who were, and may still be, a certain moral exemplar - but their morality is always broken on a historical scale and in broad social scopes, unless they make use of the concept of a moral God. In this context, it is important to give decisive weight to the 'mandatory' virtue and the 'enforcement' virtue that I spoke of in a previous response, that moral divinity has against every fundamental value of any moral system that is not based on moral divinity.
I can surmise that the Jewish people have been morally perfected throughout their generations - thanks to such a concept. On the other hand, limited moral elites, or special personalities in unusual problematic situations - did not last when they did not rely on a moral deity. Societies that rejected the concept of moral divinity - reached in a short period of time moral madness and distortion, and we have seen examples of this as well, and in a dramatic way - in recent generations. Regarding moral personalities - I cannot think of an absolute moral person - a moral 'saint', who did not advocate a moral deity (the case of Socrates is no evidence to the contrary - since he was quite an adulterer and did not control his sexual desires for a certain minor, in at least one case).
As for Freud's theory - again, as I said above, the question of the origin of morality is not important to our case, and therefore Freud's words, even if there is some truth in them - are simply not relevant.
In a framed article he only says that this is a theory that a person can agree to or disagree with. To me, Freud was a professional with certain therapeutic advantages relative to his contemporaries, and used a therapy that suited a certain bourgeois circle of German society from a practical point of view. In certain individual distinctions in his theories, which may have validity, I am sure that others preceded him - for example a Sage (for example - the concept of 'libido' is equivalent to the Sage concept of 'evil instinct', as any educated person knows, and more). But nothing in the philosophical theory that underpins his methods rises to the level of a great philosophical or scientific truth, and from the distance of a few generations it seems quite dilettantish, dogmatic and even embarrassing, from the point of view of any educated person versed in the subject matter. In this context, in my opinion, he was a creative rascal, whose work was an important cultural historical marker, not much beyond that. Therefore there is no evidence of his words, certainly not for our purposes.
At the end of your response you state: "In conclusion, your argument is barren and even ridiculous".
I can accept that a person like you can disagree with me (although, after weighing the arguments - not exactly understand...). What I cannot accept is the rude, condescending style - in terms of 'poor pride' which can perhaps, with your honor's forgiveness - be regarded as ridiculous, to be honest.
Michael Rothschild,
Some of the things and claims I included in the response to the fall, also concern your last response.
I believe that there is no 'challenge' in your words, and they are simply irrelevant.
It is none of your business nor anyone's business to know what my religious position is and what I think about the relationship between religion and morality and how I act in practice, rather than what is happening on my plate, for example. And I'm not making it a secret: I will express my opinions on these matters in other, more correct and appropriate places.
The challenge I brought up as a topic for discussion was an assessment of Elia Leibovitz's words in relation to a moral deity, not a religious deity, and from this challenge people who have an 'agenda' suitable for the website 'Freedom' and the party 'Or' - will always always evade with a variety of techniques, since it disturbs their intellectual peace And the personal fortified in the mountains of dilettantish slogans and intellectual hatreds and also, here and there - others.
With all my personal respect and appreciation for you, in your above-mentioned particular words, apart from just an attempt to divert attention from the subject, as usual in the 'religion debates' on the Hidan website, you also voiced anti-religious criticism and hatred as in a quasi-religious ritual practice - and also an attempt to transfer the claims from the body of the matter to a person's body, within what I defined in a previous response as 'an attempt at ideological blackmail with threats'.
In this matter I am irrepressible, and I do not intend to play this devious game...
And all the "M.S.L." will not help you. The fiction you will write…
Eddie:
I assume you are clear that the challenge I set before you was not just set.
Since you have personal experience with the results of believing in God and you should know what morality is, you should also know whether the commandments of the Jewish religion are moral and also know that adherence to an immoral religion is not moral.
The question puts you in a trap because it requires you to stand behind your claims (exactly the same mechanism I proposed in the discussion with Nadav on freedom of expression) and this is something that it turns out you cannot do.
Readers of that discussion are invited to see how beautifully the method works.
For me, as mentioned, M.S.L.
* Of course, this refers to the super-ego
Eddie,
Of course they are responding to you in a religious context, because there is no God without religion. While there can be a religion without God (eg Buddhism, or differentiating thousands of Scientology differences), the opposite situation is simply not possible, therefore the discussion cannot be separated.
Certainly if you claim that the same divine being is the one who brings morality to humans, and here Michael refuted your claim easily with two examples from the Bible. Jehovah is certainly not a model of morality, and the Bible is a book full of hatred of the other and preaching violence. And all the gossip wires written later will not help.
If, on the other hand, you claim that a "moral deity" is not a being, you must explain yourself because it is very unclear. God by definition is a being. You wrote about a "philosophical concept", well, philosophizing is a human action and so are its products and it is not clear to me why you mixed the word "God" into the discussion. Maybe just to provoke a scientific website.
But what personally bothered me the most about your argument is that you think that the only way humans can be moral is if they imagine that there is a seeing-and-unseen being who examines their actions and judges them.
In my opinion, Freud already answered this in his talk about the ego. Each of us has an inner conscience, influenced by the society in which we grew up, etc., which directs our actions. It is also a fact that there are people who believe that are not moral, and atheists are very moral. Another fact is that it was not God who invented the moral laws, but humans. And even before the Ten Commandments (Laws of Hammurabi, for example).
In conclusion, your argument is fruitless and even ridiculous.
If you are interested in believing in mystical beings, you are welcome, but remember that the source of the morality of human society is human society itself and not an external factor.
Michael Rothschild,
As I mentioned, I don't usually have a religious discourse on the knowledge site. For the purpose of this discourse, a dedicated essay infrastructure is required, a diverse audience of commenters who also have an understanding of non-scientific fields, and a culture of debate with appropriate and much higher standards than what has been demonstrated so far in the 'debates' (if they even deserve that name) on the knowledge site.
I don't understand the connection you want to make between my 'motivation' and my opinion on 'some of the laws of Judaism'. My argument was philosophical, not religious. Your attempt to drag the discussion in the religious direction, instead of focusing on the substance of the historical philosophical argument I presented - may indicate some deficiency in your motivations precisely...
Additionally, I don't accept conceptual 'blackmail'. In particular, not when you determine in advance that a certain claim (the immorality of some of the laws of Judaism, so to speak) is valid, in the light of 'such see and sanctify' and all who disbelieve in it suffer from intellectual dishonesty. There is a noticeable intellectual distortion in such a position, especially when it has no support.
These days I am setting up a blog on topics of religious philosophical discourse. I will invite you to participate in the discourse that will develop, and then - I hope so - we will be able to address religious philosophical questions as well as concrete religious questions - in a more thorough, successful and constructive way than we have done so far on the Hidan website, with all due respect.
As for your claim about horrifying behavior in the name of God - well, the horrifying behavior will be condoned more than once in history by the 'will of God', but in any case it is an 'excuse'. It is not the idea of a moral God that has caused horrific human behavior, but rather the absence of it has caused it. People did horrible things because of the malice of their all too human hearts - in spite of the divine idea, not because of it.
It is also easy to imagine what the face of history would have been without the divine idea - it would certainly have been much more difficult and horrifying. To remind you, the terrible acts of murder in history were committed precisely in the twentieth century, by ideologies and forces that sought to murder the divine idea and discard its corpse outside of history (I am talking about nationalism, fascism, communism and Nazism, which 'starred' in the twentieth century, and especially during the world wars) - And not by someone who actually believed in the idea of a moral God.
As for your claim about 'morality based on drug consumption' - it seems to me that most of the history of Western culture, and almost all errors, are to a large and decisive extent - the result of this so-called 'olive' idea of a moral God. I also believe that figures like Kant and many of the figures of the Enlightenment period, the 19th century as well as the 20th century - were far from being delusional or preachers of addiction, when they adopted for themselves and recommended to their contemporaries the idea of a moral God. Entire societies (including the societies of Europe and America up to the middle of the 20th century) were conducted as moral and advanced societies for their time, while basing their social credo on the idea of a moral God. Not to mention the generations of the Jewish people, the multitude of moral role models it had, and no less than that as an extraordinary moral collective.
That's why I think the idea of a moral God has worked very well in history.
As for your claim about the inheritance of morality by a 'lie' - well, from a philosophical point of view, a conceptual construction of a moral God is not a 'lie'. Beyond that, our lives are full of fictions - in the field of society, morality, law and so on - also in the field of science and no less in the field of mathematics. In all fields, the fictions are positive, because they are required and because they 'work' - they are successful and useful. I do not think that the construction of a moral God should be different in importance and less legitimate than all these, and it is certainly no more 'false' - to adopt your jargon - than all the fictions in the fields of human thought and culture. Past experience has also proven its effectiveness, as long as human societies know how to preserve and nurture it, and the time has come to reconsider it and re-adopt it.
By the way, I do not think that the moral divine construction is devoid of reality, including ontological reality. In the past I proposed, in several responses that I sent in conversation with you, to hold an in-depth discussion, with a necessary and proper essay infrastructure - on the issue of the arguments in favor of the deity. The offer was not picked up by the Hidan system. I will try to raise these issues in the blog I am setting up.
Eddie:
First of all - in order to convince us of the correctness of your claim regarding your motivation - please state here explicitly that in your opinion some of the laws of Judaism and in particular some of the laws of Judaism that appear explicitly in the Torah are immoral.
If you don't do this, then in my opinion - this method that you claim to exist - of indoctrinating people in moral directions through faith in God - does not work even in your case and then MSL.
Secondly, even if the method works in your case, it is clear that in all cases, religions based on belief in God lead some of mankind to horrific behavior, so it is not clear to me what facts you are basing your claim on.
To me it is really clear that this is the necessary fate of any religion that contains laws that allow physical harm to people who have not physically harmed you.
Thirdly, a morality based on this kind of faith seems to me like a morality based on drug consumption and the question of whether it is even moral to try to instill this kind of morality (I think it was Aldous Huxley who recommended giving drugs to all humans to neutralize their tendencies to violence).
In my opinion, the answer to this question is absolutely negative!
The idea of inheriting morality through a lie (and a lie is not only presenting a claim that you know to be wrong as true, but also presenting a claim that you don't know if it is true or false as true!) is an idea with a built-in contradiction because, in my view, lying is one of the most immoral things there is.
My father and Michael,
If you noticed, I don't usually have a 'religious' discourse or even about 'religion' on the site. I don't think this site is the right hostel for that.
But I distinguish between 'religion' and philosophical 'belief' or 'morality'.
Therefore, when it comes to scientific conceptual articles that refer, among other things, to moral/religious concepts, I have an interest in expressing an opinion - not as a religious opinion but as a moral philosophical opinion. Prof. Leibovitz's article is easy to read - it is weak, superficial, with a narrow worldview, far from excelling in accurate delivery of facts or reasonable judgments, which is why it includes all kinds of so-called scientific 'nonsense'.
In my words in responses 10,11, I was not referring to God in the religious sense, but to the normative philosophical idea of a 'moral God', an idea that is a key to the progress of Western culture in the last three thousand years.
In particular, I did not speak as a missionary of one religion or another (my reference to historical religions was limited, except for the fact that I stated that it is quite clear that the concept of a moral transcendental divinity is a Jewish invention, that Christianity accepted important elements of the above concept, and that Islam does not really advocate it in practice) , and I did not preach one religion or another or 'religion' in general.
It seems to me that everyone who reads the above comments understands this very well.
Avi:
If you understood from me that in my opinion 'science is the source of evil and religion is the source of good' - I would say that there is a problem of reading comprehension here. You are welcome to read my words again, in particular their Sipa:
"In order not to be misunderstood - I am not an enemy of scientific progress. Paraphrasing Sartre says that 'man is condemned to progress' - and this progress includes an 'essential scientific-technological component. But equally it depends on effective morality, the key to which is the idea of a moral God, demanding and commanding morality, a God who seeks man, a God whose moral demands and commands cannot be evaded. In the end, the 'big step' for humanity depends on it."
- This is my personal opinion, which I tried, within the limitations of the limited framework - to hit with evidence and claims. You can disagree with her - but please don't twist her.
In light of my words so far (and not only in the last paragraph) it seems to me that there is no need, with all due respect to you (and there is respect) - to address your claim regarding "which religion exactly to join", etc., etc.
Michael Rothschild:
I repeat my words above, that my comments in responses 10,11, 150 are not directed at any 'religious issue'. Moral divinity is a philosophical concept, not just a religious one. This is a philosophically defensible concept, and there is no benefit in abandoning it; On the contrary, it's a shame that Western culture murdered him in stages during the last XNUMX years. The phenomenon of the incompatibility between scientific achievements and moral normativity evident in this period and in our very period - is a result of this act of murder, and it is desirable that people like Prof. Leibovitz think about it and try to understand it, before they write articles of the type issued above.
Of course - 'killing Shabbat breakers or homosexuals' is not relevant to the philosophical concept of moral divinity, about which I spoke. Nor did I claim that 'religion must necessarily be seen as a source of moral authority'. It is also clear to me, that as a declared secular person, you are not supposed to be religious in order to be moral. But on the other hand, even if a person does not have to be religious in order to be moral, then in the XNUMXth century he must be rational enough to understand that an effective moral method is impossible without the founding concept of a moral (philosophical) deity. (In this context, I distinguish between the ability to build a moral system, and the ability to create the mental implementation and 'enforcement' mechanisms in a moral system, which is the characteristic of the 'effectiveness' of a moral system.. My position was that it is not possible to have a moral system that is effective - that is not based on the concept of a moral deity).
Therefore, with all due respect, your claim ("It's hard for me to believe that there is something that ever...") is not relevant to what was said in responses 10,11, XNUMX above.
good week.
Enoch:
*Louis* Armstrong never walked on the moon (maybe he wanted to…) 🙂
Eddie:
Ada Yonat's words about the terrorists are indeed unfortunate, but what does that have to do with our case? All the rest of your words are, in my opinion, just nonsense.
Their distance from a reliable description of reality is as far as east from west and I have no intention of dwelling on every detail of them because all these details have already been discussed here many times.
It is hard for me to believe that there is anything that will ever convince me that killing Sabbath breakers or homosexuals is a moral thing and this is of course just an example of the depth of the delusion that pushes people to see religion as a source of moral authority.
my father
If that's your conception of the site, that's your prerogative. But still there is something dishonest in the way I was blocked, when I was the most polite and most matter-of-fact commenter in the chain.
I consider myself obliged to refer to your words on the subject itself, since you repeated it several times. The theory of evolution is a theory - more or less logical - that has never been proven. It has never been proven even about one organ in one organism in the entire history of the earth, that it was created as a result of accidental mutations, that is, as a result of errors in DNA. Not even a shred of positive proof, or reductive proof through the exclusion of all other possibilities, has ever been brought to this.
Since the random mutation is the basic premise, the heart of the matter and the foundation of the foundations on which the entire Darwinist theory stands or falls (and not the splitting into species or the table of evolutionary progression, which are secondary), therefore there is no basis for saying that this is a proven theory. As soon as this is proven regarding any organ, I promise to post a comment on the website in which I strike a sin and accept Darwin's theory on me, for all that it implies. You can save this comment and demand her release from me on judgment day.
How about everyone (or at least most of them) have things in their heads, but none of them are 100% right?
Do you necessarily dismiss the beliefs of others on a factual basis? Or is it motivated by your belief that they are wrong? 😉
Eddie, let's say you convinced me that science is the source of evil and religion is the source of good. Which religion exactly to join? And if so, then for which stream exactly? Only in Judaism there are three main currents and hundreds of sects (mainly Orthodox) who exactly has a direct relationship with your God? After all, anyone who joins another stream is a heretic, who of them holds the real truth and who the other 99.999% hold a lie.
And one more thing:
We 'won' this weekend exceptional pearls of wisdom from the mouth of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Prof. Yonat.
According to her, we are supposed to set terrorists free (and maybe not catch, judge or imprison them in the first place) - terrorists who and their ilk represent the most polluted scum of the earth in the world, vile types who put our very lives at grave and constant risk.
The aforementioned scientist suffers from severe gangrene - if she is not cerebral (after all, she is a 'Nobel Prize winner') - then she is logical and no less - moral.
Immoral opinions such as the above opinion must be condemned, even if, and perhaps more strongly - they are spoken by a scientist, especially when it comes to the personality who has a known scientific prestige.
The moral gangrene eventually corrupts everything - even the finest minds in their field. The process of corruption is not always immediate - sometimes it is delayed, and sometimes it will manifest itself only after the historical course that includes two or three generations. But eventually he comes. Then, as Arnold Toynbee proved in his studies - moral dissonance brings down the strongest empires, collapses the most developed nations, and destroys the most advanced civilizations.
For the past three thousand years, a process of moral improvement has been operating, which has been a certain barrier against the corrupting potential (and this potential also exists - along with the promoting potential) in man's scientific and technological ability. This improvement process is rooted in the practice of Jewish civilization, and to a certain extent in Christian civilization (certain foundations of which are rooted in Jewish civilization).
The basis of the moral improvement process was the idea of a moral God. This God - who is a God who obliges man to be moral - is the key to effective morality, since it turns out that rational moral 'understanding' alone - without enforcing authority - cannot tame the creative animal of man (in this respect - the Greek tradition, which believed in reason as a total security For moral behavior in practice - a tragic mistake was made, despite being trivial. Every secular moral theory repeats this mistake, believing that the understanding and identification of a certain moral value also means obedience to the obligatory pattern. Understanding does not necessarily lead to obedience, it turns out).
This process of moral improvement knew ups and downs, but the general trend was positive, especially as far as the behavior of the members of the Jewish civilization is concerned.
Note: Muslim civilization never reached the maturity of a complete conceptual and normative moral codex, and at best it spoke with two voices. The violent voice - an echo of the ancient pagan tradition of the peoples of Islam - was and remains the strongest and dominant, and made and continues to use the idea of the moral God in vain. That is why it is not possible to grasp Islam as evidence to reject the action of the moral God that is the fruit of Jewish civilization - as superficial people or ideologues who lack knowledge or intellectual honesty sometimes do.
This process began to stop about two hundred years ago - when human civilization decided to murder in stages the idea of the Jewish God (which is to some extent - the Judeo-Christian God).
The results on the historical scale, came with a gap of several generations, starting with the German rampage in the second half of the 19th century, continuing in the First World War, continuing in fascism and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, continuing in the Second World War, and in the end - in the vision of an inexhaustible power of destruction It is possible to deal with and stop as we have witnessed in the last decades. All these processes and events were and are, without precedent in their scope and severity, and in the end they can be linked to scientific and technological progress that was not completed by sufficient moral normativity, not to mention moral normativity in retreat.
The problem of scientists like Prof. Leibovitz is that they do not understand that the key to real human progress is adequacy and correlation between scientific progress and moral progress; And that instead of fighting the idea of a moral deity - it should be cultivated, or at least not condemned. Only morality commanded by a divine idea has decisive binding power - because, as I said above - moral reason, and even it is of a high level - is not binding in principle, and does not necessarily lead to - actual obedience to the moral value - and experience proves this on a historical scale.
As long as people like Prof. Leibovitz - do not understand the above idea, they will continue to agonize about the curse of progress, and engage in fictional speculations; And people like Prof. Yonat will continue to think their vain thoughts.
So that I don't get it wrong - I am not an enemy of scientific progress. Paraphrasing Sartre says that 'man is condemned to progress' - and this progress includes an 'essential scientific-technological component. But it equally depends on effective morality, the key to which is the idea of a moral God, demanding and commanding morality, a God who seeks man, a God whose moral demands and commands cannot be evaded. In the end, the 'big step' for humanity depends on it.
The article, unfortunately, is rather weak, superficial, with a narrow worldview.
The very idea that human progress is a function of purely 'scientific' progress is a baseless idea. Also the claim that the same human advance/progress can be summed up in the strange theory of the four stages that the author formulated - is a claim torn from any conceivable historical and philosophical understanding, as any average high school student (not a university professor!) should know.
Beyond the above, the article is far from excelling in accurate delivery of facts or reasonable judgments, which is why it includes all kinds of graceful - and less graceful - scientific 'nonsense'.
Accidents of this type not infrequently happen to (certain) scientists who take the liberty of expressing themselves as authorities in fields that are not their areas of expertise; In particular, when they are obsessed with raising the crowd to a very specific ideological agenda, in this case anti-faith. It's a shame that something like this is done under the guise of scientific authority.
No wonder that in the end the 'article' ends with an illusory fictional vision.
This means that there was a very long period from 58 to 73 when the ultra-Orthodox were stronger in the coalition than today, and that at least one positive result was the Yom Kippur War. By the way, I still remember that Chaim Yavin, who presented Mibat, which was then broadcast at half past eight, informed the viewers that tomorrow (after the switch to daylight saving time) an edition of Mibat would still be broadcast during daylight hours.
Pay attention toThis link at the end of the entry.
This is a table of all dates of daylight saving time since the establishment of the state.
It shows that my father is right.
Read HERE The episode about summer time in Israel
A. To the best of my memory, summer time was already introduced during the mandate period.
B. Prof. Leibovitz mentions summer time here.
third. If there was no summer time, it would be 3:56
With the blessing of Isro Hag: Avi Luz
In the XNUMXs, daylight saving time was not activated.
On July 21, 1969, at world time 02:56 (Greenwich Mean Time), 01:56 according to Israeli summer time.
Israel time is ahead of Greenwich time. Two hours in winter and three hours in summer so the time in Israel was 04:56
Avi Luz
It's long and a bit tedious, put in some software that will read everything and we'll just click on it and listen to the whole article, it will be used by smart lazy people as well as the blind
C
Enoch:
You are not alone in your opinion.
See, for example, here:
https://www.hayadan.org.il/will-war-ending-1909092/#comment-250486
However, it is clear to all of us that another vision is due.
The factors whose fear is the one that encourages us to think about a world government are exactly those who will oppose the world government we are thinking about because their plan is to establish a world government according to the laws of their religion.
Greetings,
Response to Prof. Elia Leibovitz's article, Saturday, October 10, 2009.
Louis Armstrong's "small step", the development and scientific and technological progress of humanity in the future, which can advance it in many fields. But this development, the author of the article points out, raises possibilities of danger to humanity, by developing means and tremendous forces of destruction that may be under the control of extremist elements.
The United Nations in its current state is not capable of handling such a problem. (See the failed treatment against radical Islam and global terrorism).
In my opinion, the possibility of establishing a democratic world-wide government, while preserving the uniqueness of each nation in regional provinces with internal autonomy, should be examined, where there is no "global United States" with a system of universal laws and which will also take care of the populations in the provinces on all aspects: security, economy, health, education, Scientific research, social conditions, quality of life, etc.
It's a utopia, but in my opinion it can be the right solution for the future reality. See the beginning of this development in the European Union.