Opinion

I don’t have questions: how a good Jewish boy turns atheist

​I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I saw a blogpost which annoyed me, and LessWrong is where I blog stuff (see my profile for my actual username).As one of the disproportionately many LessWrong users who grew up in an orthodox Jewish household, I continue to follow some Chareidi bloggers. Daas Yochid is an interesting and thoughtful example, and the Chareidi world would be a far better place if there were more people like him.However a consistent theme across his writing is that whilst everyone has questions, religious people simply know God exists, so stay religious, whilst e.g autists or people with difficult family relationships don’t develop that experiential connection to God, so as soon as they have any intellectual problems with religion, they leave orthodox Judaism (go OTD).I am friends with many OTDers. Most of them left for intellectual reasons; that is, they thought the truth claims of Judaism just did not add up. Yet, every single one of these friends, as far as I know, have one of these two things: They are either on the autistic spectrum somewhere, or alternatively, have severe issues with a father figure in their lives, often to the point of trauma.Yes, I too, kept believing, even though the questions bothered me, something my OTD friends could not do.Essentially, when one grows up in a culture where Hashem is real, one knows and experiences Hashem and KNOWS its true, even if he cannot explain it logically, just like someone knows the table is smooth and the passerby is his friend Moshe. This realness of Hashem, and this spirituality, is not an illusion, but is real to anyone who experienced it.I do believe there are very strong questions on Yiddishkeit. I have attempted to answer a lot of questions, but some still remain. Yet I am still frum because I know viscerally it is true, as R Danziger says. And we don’t die from a question.Well as a neurotypical guy from a warm household with a good relationship with my entire family. All I can say is:Bullshit.It’s not that I have questions…We don’t die from a question. I have plenty enough without Orthodox Judaism.What instead made me an Atheist is the sudden realisation that I was fighting a losing battle. That every single thing I learned about the world would be another blow to my faith that I’d have to explain (or explain away), and I could already predict that in advance. There was no dragon in the garage.In the real world, either the Jewish God exists, or he doesn’t. And if he exists, then the world ought to look one way, and if he doesn’t it ought to look completely different. When you find out that every single thing you learnt about Judaism is false, even if you can justify each one individually, at a certain point you’ve got to admit that there’s a deeper problem here. Your model of the world is fundamentally broken. So let’s go through the kind of things that I’d accepted were strong evidence against everything I’d been taught about Orthodox Judaism, but had found a way to either deny, or reconcile:Firstly, the Torah appears to be a book written by some ordinary people, years after the events it described:The creation story didn’t happen, the flood didn’t happen, Abraham couldn’t have had camels, the Exodus as reported is looking increasingly tenuous, the Torah never even claims that it’s authored by Moses, and indeed has numerous explicit indications it was written long after (e.g. uses of “until this day”, Edomite king list, etc.). It bears all the hallmarks of being written by different groups of people with different interests, was clearly more in flux just 2000 years ago and was considered legitimate to edit, numerous rituals, laws, texts and names of God are taken from other Mesopotamian traditions.Moving on to Nach:Then Nach contains a fixed set of books, but we know there’s numerous apocrypha that weren’t included in Nach, and that as late as the Mishnah the set of books included in Nach wasn’t fixed. If the Rabbis of the Mishnah weren’t sure which of these books were legitimate, why should we be sure any of them are?The Nach rarely mentions the Torah (as a book), or most of the festivals – and indeed frequently appears to contradict laws in the Torah. The prophecies in Nach weren’t talking about the times of Messiah, aren’t relevant for our times, and are clearly referring to a context in which they were written, calling curses down upon long dead nations for some ancient betrayal for which we have no record. The books were rarely written by their stated authors.And rabbinic Judaism:There was no oral law dating back to Moses, the religion of the ancient Israelites would have been unrecognisable to Jews today, Rabbinic Judaism mostly took off at the turn of the millennium and developed over the next few hundred years, the Talmud wasn’t just recording laws passed down from the Mishnah but rather hugely expanding on the much slimmer body of law they were handed down, (e.g. even such basic ideas as the status of someone who’s mother is Jewish and father is not, or how one becomes Jewish were in flux at the time of the Talmud). There were numerous versions of the Talmud well into the late Geonic era. The Rabbbi’s of the Talmud had no special insight or scientific knowledge, were not particularly moral or brilliant, and their stories are the facile stories of superstitious villagers, which even most Chareidi Jews just silently skip over rather than wrestle with.The great Rishonim of Spain wrote extensive pedarastic poetry, the Zohar is a completely blatant forgery which is accepted by 90% of Orthodox Jews worldwide and hugely influential in every aspect of modern Jewish practice, even when directly contradicting the Talmud. A majority of the Jewish population, including most of the great Rabbis of the time, followed Shabtai Tzvi, then quietly pretended it had never happened. The early Chasidish Rebbes were cult leaders and fraudsters, as were numerous other Rabbis throughout history. Medieval Jews were no more enlightened or less boorish than their neighbours.To the modern day:The greatest bulk of seriously religious Jews today are Chasidic followers of cults based on a forged book, with dynastic fights that would put George RR Martin today. The largest Chasidic group avoided that by following a dead Messiah instead.Non Chasidic Chareidim sacrifice their children on the alter of the Torah, forcing them all to engage in mental masturbation 10 hours a day as the only pursuit worth following. Instead their children mostly crash out and burn, living their days emptily smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee whilst pretending to learn Talmud.Traditional Sephardim’s interaction with religion is almost entirely kabbalistik gobbledeegook, with following Halacha considered purely optional. Their Rabbi’s are an endless series of fraudsters, criminals, and even outright rapists and murderers.The most religious non-Chareidi Jews are also murderers and thieves, who have elevated brutality towards Palestinians to a religious duty in the name of Zion.And what about all the rest? The non-Israeli Chareidim, the modern Orthodox and Gushniks, the Daati Lites?Yes, they exist, but in a liminal state. Their children are for the most part either extremists, or irreligious, the centre cannot hold.When you look at all of the above, do you explain each one individually? Or do you take a good hard look at yourself, and realise that even if God does exist, shes got nothing to do with Judaism. Judaism is what happens when a random religion develops in a random way, formed by the ravages of history rather than a guiding hand. It had some neat ideas at the time, but now is arguably as much a force for evil as good.Meanwhile, if God did exist, and gave us the Torah, he could trivially have told us so. Instead we explain this away with incredibly convoluted arguments about free choice, despite the Tanach happily recording explicit miracle after miracle over a thousand year period and claiming that the same people who literally saw God at Mount Sinai worshipped a Golden calf 40 days later.Our world makes sense if God doesn’t exist, but is fractally weird if he does.But mah Experience!In another article he writes:I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever believed in Hashem, but I have. I still do. Hashem exists because he does. Just like the chair in my room and the family in my life, he exists. I feel the way he affects my being. I talk to him. Sometimes he answers, in his own way. He’s simply real. I need no proof or answer to explain his existence rationally, not any more than I do the chair.Maybe he’s telling the truth. I’m not him. But in the other post he claimed that’s true of most people growing up in an Orthodox household. Well, that’s just about all my friends, and I call BS.I agree that almost all of them (including myself) have had deep moments of connection to God.When I binge a fantasy book or a computer game for a couple of days, the fantasy feels more real than reality. I’ll go for a walk and feel constantly out-of-odds when magic fails to happen. The real world feels like a game I’m playing in, people I’m interacting with feel like NPCs, but the game feels like the real world.My experiential moments of connecting to God have not felt qualitatively different from my experiential moments connecting to Neverwinter Nights 2. I don’t believe the forgotten realms are real, and I don’t believe God is either.And neither do my religious friends. They don’t act the way one who truly believes in God acts. They act in the way someone who believes in belief acts. But they have doubts, and nobody ever doubts that their table exists.The reason that mostly Autists and people with Daddy issues go OTD is because going OTD has a cost, one which is much lower for those with poor relations with their family, and most people are able to cognitively dissonance themselves enough to keep going. Autists find that harder.I’ll stop here for nowHe has numerous other posts that annoy me, like the old “how could you possibly be so confident there isn’t a God” (whilst he can be incredibly confident not only there is one, but that it wants us to put on our shoes in a particular order), and “I don’t accept bad reasons to believe in Judaism, here’s ones that a toddler can demolish in 5 minutes instead”, but as I said, I’m preaching to the choir anyway, and I’ve mostly got this out my system, so I’ll stop here.Discuss ​Read More

​I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I saw a blogpost which annoyed me, and LessWrong is where I blog stuff (see my profile for my actual username).As one of the disproportionately many LessWrong users who grew up in an orthodox Jewish household, I continue to follow some Chareidi bloggers. Daas Yochid is an interesting and thoughtful example, and the Chareidi world would be a far better place if there were more people like him.However a consistent theme across his writing is that whilst everyone has questions, religious people simply know God exists, so stay religious, whilst e.g autists or people with difficult family relationships don’t develop that experiential connection to God, so as soon as they have any intellectual problems with religion, they leave orthodox Judaism (go OTD).I am friends with many OTDers. Most of them left for intellectual reasons; that is, they thought the truth claims of Judaism just did not add up. Yet, every single one of these friends, as far as I know, have one of these two things: They are either on the autistic spectrum somewhere, or alternatively, have severe issues with a father figure in their lives, often to the point of trauma.Yes, I too, kept believing, even though the questions bothered me, something my OTD friends could not do.Essentially, when one grows up in a culture where Hashem is real, one knows and experiences Hashem and KNOWS its true, even if he cannot explain it logically, just like someone knows the table is smooth and the passerby is his friend Moshe. This realness of Hashem, and this spirituality, is not an illusion, but is real to anyone who experienced it.I do believe there are very strong questions on Yiddishkeit. I have attempted to answer a lot of questions, but some still remain. Yet I am still frum because I know viscerally it is true, as R Danziger says. And we don’t die from a question.Well as a neurotypical guy from a warm household with a good relationship with my entire family. All I can say is:Bullshit.It’s not that I have questions…We don’t die from a question. I have plenty enough without Orthodox Judaism.What instead made me an Atheist is the sudden realisation that I was fighting a losing battle. That every single thing I learned about the world would be another blow to my faith that I’d have to explain (or explain away), and I could already predict that in advance. There was no dragon in the garage.In the real world, either the Jewish God exists, or he doesn’t. And if he exists, then the world ought to look one way, and if he doesn’t it ought to look completely different. When you find out that every single thing you learnt about Judaism is false, even if you can justify each one individually, at a certain point you’ve got to admit that there’s a deeper problem here. Your model of the world is fundamentally broken. So let’s go through the kind of things that I’d accepted were strong evidence against everything I’d been taught about Orthodox Judaism, but had found a way to either deny, or reconcile:Firstly, the Torah appears to be a book written by some ordinary people, years after the events it described:The creation story didn’t happen, the flood didn’t happen, Abraham couldn’t have had camels, the Exodus as reported is looking increasingly tenuous, the Torah never even claims that it’s authored by Moses, and indeed has numerous explicit indications it was written long after (e.g. uses of “until this day”, Edomite king list, etc.). It bears all the hallmarks of being written by different groups of people with different interests, was clearly more in flux just 2000 years ago and was considered legitimate to edit, numerous rituals, laws, texts and names of God are taken from other Mesopotamian traditions.Moving on to Nach:Then Nach contains a fixed set of books, but we know there’s numerous apocrypha that weren’t included in Nach, and that as late as the Mishnah the set of books included in Nach wasn’t fixed. If the Rabbis of the Mishnah weren’t sure which of these books were legitimate, why should we be sure any of them are?The Nach rarely mentions the Torah (as a book), or most of the festivals – and indeed frequently appears to contradict laws in the Torah. The prophecies in Nach weren’t talking about the times of Messiah, aren’t relevant for our times, and are clearly referring to a context in which they were written, calling curses down upon long dead nations for some ancient betrayal for which we have no record. The books were rarely written by their stated authors.And rabbinic Judaism:There was no oral law dating back to Moses, the religion of the ancient Israelites would have been unrecognisable to Jews today, Rabbinic Judaism mostly took off at the turn of the millennium and developed over the next few hundred years, the Talmud wasn’t just recording laws passed down from the Mishnah but rather hugely expanding on the much slimmer body of law they were handed down, (e.g. even such basic ideas as the status of someone who’s mother is Jewish and father is not, or how one becomes Jewish were in flux at the time of the Talmud). There were numerous versions of the Talmud well into the late Geonic era. The Rabbbi’s of the Talmud had no special insight or scientific knowledge, were not particularly moral or brilliant, and their stories are the facile stories of superstitious villagers, which even most Chareidi Jews just silently skip over rather than wrestle with.The great Rishonim of Spain wrote extensive pedarastic poetry, the Zohar is a completely blatant forgery which is accepted by 90% of Orthodox Jews worldwide and hugely influential in every aspect of modern Jewish practice, even when directly contradicting the Talmud. A majority of the Jewish population, including most of the great Rabbis of the time, followed Shabtai Tzvi, then quietly pretended it had never happened. The early Chasidish Rebbes were cult leaders and fraudsters, as were numerous other Rabbis throughout history. Medieval Jews were no more enlightened or less boorish than their neighbours.To the modern day:The greatest bulk of seriously religious Jews today are Chasidic followers of cults based on a forged book, with dynastic fights that would put George RR Martin today. The largest Chasidic group avoided that by following a dead Messiah instead.Non Chasidic Chareidim sacrifice their children on the alter of the Torah, forcing them all to engage in mental masturbation 10 hours a day as the only pursuit worth following. Instead their children mostly crash out and burn, living their days emptily smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee whilst pretending to learn Talmud.Traditional Sephardim’s interaction with religion is almost entirely kabbalistik gobbledeegook, with following Halacha considered purely optional. Their Rabbi’s are an endless series of fraudsters, criminals, and even outright rapists and murderers.The most religious non-Chareidi Jews are also murderers and thieves, who have elevated brutality towards Palestinians to a religious duty in the name of Zion.And what about all the rest? The non-Israeli Chareidim, the modern Orthodox and Gushniks, the Daati Lites?Yes, they exist, but in a liminal state. Their children are for the most part either extremists, or irreligious, the centre cannot hold.When you look at all of the above, do you explain each one individually? Or do you take a good hard look at yourself, and realise that even if God does exist, shes got nothing to do with Judaism. Judaism is what happens when a random religion develops in a random way, formed by the ravages of history rather than a guiding hand. It had some neat ideas at the time, but now is arguably as much a force for evil as good.Meanwhile, if God did exist, and gave us the Torah, he could trivially have told us so. Instead we explain this away with incredibly convoluted arguments about free choice, despite the Tanach happily recording explicit miracle after miracle over a thousand year period and claiming that the same people who literally saw God at Mount Sinai worshipped a Golden calf 40 days later.Our world makes sense if God doesn’t exist, but is fractally weird if he does.But mah Experience!In another article he writes:I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever believed in Hashem, but I have. I still do. Hashem exists because he does. Just like the chair in my room and the family in my life, he exists. I feel the way he affects my being. I talk to him. Sometimes he answers, in his own way. He’s simply real. I need no proof or answer to explain his existence rationally, not any more than I do the chair.Maybe he’s telling the truth. I’m not him. But in the other post he claimed that’s true of most people growing up in an Orthodox household. Well, that’s just about all my friends, and I call BS.I agree that almost all of them (including myself) have had deep moments of connection to God.When I binge a fantasy book or a computer game for a couple of days, the fantasy feels more real than reality. I’ll go for a walk and feel constantly out-of-odds when magic fails to happen. The real world feels like a game I’m playing in, people I’m interacting with feel like NPCs, but the game feels like the real world.My experiential moments of connecting to God have not felt qualitatively different from my experiential moments connecting to Neverwinter Nights 2. I don’t believe the forgotten realms are real, and I don’t believe God is either.And neither do my religious friends. They don’t act the way one who truly believes in God acts. They act in the way someone who believes in belief acts. But they have doubts, and nobody ever doubts that their table exists.The reason that mostly Autists and people with Daddy issues go OTD is because going OTD has a cost, one which is much lower for those with poor relations with their family, and most people are able to cognitively dissonance themselves enough to keep going. Autists find that harder.I’ll stop here for nowHe has numerous other posts that annoy me, like the old “how could you possibly be so confident there isn’t a God” (whilst he can be incredibly confident not only there is one, but that it wants us to put on our shoes in a particular order), and “I don’t accept bad reasons to believe in Judaism, here’s ones that a toddler can demolish in 5 minutes instead”, but as I said, I’m preaching to the choir anyway, and I’ve mostly got this out my system, so I’ll stop here.Discuss ​Read More

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *