Специально для талмудаков
To my dear and beloved Rabbi,
Unlike most of the assertions you make, this is an evidence based assertion whose accuracy (or truth) is independently verifiable and therefore our certainty in its truth is absolute, as this claim can not turn out to be false:
https://jewishpoliceassociation.org.uk/faq/what-is-the-difference-between-torah-and-talmud/#:~:text=The%20Talmud%20is%20a%20record,situations%20they%20themselves%20were%20encountering.
“The Talmud is a record of the rabbinic debates in the 2nd-5th century on the teachings of the Torah, both trying to understand how they apply and seeking answers for the situations they themselves were encountering”
Unfortunately, my question will not be easy for you to answer due to the complexity of my midlife crisis. However, not only is this question uniquely difficult for you, but it is equally important to me, and I would like to hear a real answer from you, not the standard responses you have been taught to give when you do not know the answer. I am well aware of your genius skills in behavioral nudging when making an argument, and how unbeatable you are at influencing people's thinking by never answering the question asked, but instead answering a completely unrelated question and skillfully making the person asking the question look like a total idiot. However, such "Jedi mind tricks" as telling someone they are not King Solomon in response to a completely unrelated question about what led some misguided rabbi over 1,000 years ago to claim that monogamy is now mandatory for Jews no longer work on me, dear friend. While I too love borrowing ideas from others, like Lloyd Bentsen, and saying "Joe, you're no King Solomon" instead of "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" is absolutely brilliant, I expect a real answer, not a brilliant oratorical trick—though I do love your debate style, man. As a brilliant debater, you have my total love and full respect, you do, you do!
My question is NOT whether something is simply true, as that question is clearly unanswerable in a religious context. Instead, because I am not a total idiot, I am asking you an answerable question: which theory is more likely to turn out to be true in the end, relative to competing alternative theories (as exemplified by the claims about the Torah in the New Testament or the Quran). I expect a real answer from you, as I feel it is your duty to answer such questions from your "flock" that has supported you for several decades.
My question is not about God, religion, or the Torah, but specifically about your subjective interpretation of it, as exemplified by what is written in the Talmud. I am particularly interested in how decisions are made regarding which logical claims about the Torah are included in the Talmud and which are excluded, and why. For instance, the Talmud claims that eating Chicken Kiev is not kosher, though no such prohibition is directly stated in the Torah.
Insanity (a noun) is defined in law as a mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality (see Law Dictionary). Accordingly, believing in fantasy—something that contradicts observable reality—such as thinking you are Napoleon Bonaparte or that the Earth is flat in 2024 when you can see yourself waving at a satellite orbiting the Earth, is considered insanity in law. In this sense, the hypothesis that the story of Jonah living in a fish is literally true contradicts reality, and such a claim, coming from anyone but a Rabbi, would under ordinary circumstances lead to the individual making such claims being confined to a mental hospital.
My question is simply this: How can we be certain that the claims in the Talmud about reality are accurate and true? In other words, how do we know that your interpretation of the Torah written in the Talmud is correct? What I am asking specifically is this: The Talmud makes an implicit assumption that the Torah is literally true, but it could also simply be an over 2,000-year-old version of Harry Potter—mixing fantasy and real-world events. The standard answer—that it is the consensus of the Rabbinate—does not suffice.
The problem is that while anyone can make a claim about the Torah that appears true, ranking such theoretical claims based on their subjective appeal to a group of individuals is ill-informed. It has been understood for millennia, ever since ancient Greek philosophers, that we should rank theories about reality and God based on their likelihood of being true, using independently verifiable real-world evidence and rationality rather than subjective opinions.
For example, we do not decide whether smoking causes cancer based on how many doctors believe it; that would be idiotic. Instead, we look at the facts, such as regressing the odds of dying from lung cancer on whether a patient smokes, while adjusting for other risk factors like radiation exposure. We then select the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer because it is supported by empirical evidence, not just because doctors believe in it. The odds of observing the increased mortality rate from cancer in smokers if there were no relationship between smoking and lung cancer would be so low that we choose the alternative hypothesis based on evidence and facts, not hearsay.
In this sense, if our hypothesis, despite being collectively agreed upon, contradicts real-world evidence, we always choose the alternative hypothesis that is more likely to be true given the evidence. This contradicts the Talmudic approach, which ranks claims about the Torah not based on their likelihood of being true in reality but on how many people agree with them.
Ranking the accuracy of theoretical claims based on how widely they are held is an utter and total fallacy. This fallacy, commonly known as the "argumentum ad populum" or "appeal to the majority," posits that a proposition is true because many people believe it. For example, it is not my subjective opinion but an independently verifiable, evidence-based real-world fact that there are at least three interpretations of the Torah: the Talmud, the New Testament, and the Quran. The question then becomes, which interpretation is relatively more likely to align with God’s laws, wishes, and desires for us—essentially, which is more likely to represent the ultimate truth about God and our objective reality, as the two are one and the same, according to all three interpretations. The Talmud is the least widely accepted interpretation today. Thus, according to your standard—picking a theory that is the collective consensus—the Talmud theory is the least trustworthy. However, in fact, it is the relatively more accurate theory about God than any competing alternative theory. But I want you, as the paid teacher in this situation, since I am donating money to you and not the other way around, to explain to me why this must be so, rather than asking to hear my answer.
But just so as not to leave you hanging completely, let me at least set you barking up the right tree, so to speak. The hypothesis that theoretical claims that are generally agreed upon have a higher likelihood of turning out to be true than those claims that are less widely accepted is true, but it is only true when the two competing alternative theories are derived from claims that are evidence-based, not merely axioms. For example, the axiom that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line is simply a guess that turns out to be false in the objective shared reality we all live in and experience as self-aware, conscious, rational beings. Indeed, if the shortest distance between two points in this reality were really a straight line, the GPS in your iPhone would not work—an empirical fact that proves that the Pythagorean theorem is indeed false in our objective reality. In this sense, it doesn’t matter how many people have independently proven the Pythagorean theorem for themselves in middle school; it is still false because it is based on a false Euclidean axiom, and it doesn’t matter how popular it is, or how old, either.
Have fun thinking, not just manipulating people with behavioral nudges. Engage in real thinking about how reality truly works, and what role our true God, our ever-loving Lord and Father Yahweh (the meaning of whose name you don't even know) plays in it. On the other hand, as you will soon learn, what you all really need to learn is how to just shut up and listen, as you should have listened to the one rabbi among you who wasn't an idiot, namely Jesus Christ, who intuitively understood how to correctly apply Bayesian probability adjustments using logical claim rings about 2000 years before David Hilbert invented the concepts of rings and fields in abstract algebra. You might also want to read up a bit on Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems and how they derailed David Hilbert’s program—his search for a complete and consistent set of axioms that underlies all of mathematics.
Yet those who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect don't even understand what it is or why their ideas are wrong and harmful. While I'm asking you these questions nicely, I'm not sure Yahweh and Jesus will be nearly as understanding or forgiving. You might want to remember what happens to people who don't obey God. Here I am simply referring to people who liked to fornicate (Sodom and Gomorrah) being turned into salt. What Yahweh's plans are for those who gave His Son to the Romans and asked that a thief and criminal be pardoned instead, I have no idea. However, I feel it would be a pretty educated guess that such people will likely be punished according to God's law and in the worst way imaginable. I hope and pray every day that none of us will ever find out exactly how we are all punished when we choose lies over truth and disobey God—as I believe it to be singularly horrible. And please don’t delude yourself into thinking that God forgot how to collapse the reality wave function in time—an absolutely trivial task for our one true God.
If even just our Lord Jesus, being stuck in a human body, could do copy-construct operations on fish, imagine what Yahweh—universal consciousness as described by Roger Penrose in the 1980s, to which we are all telepathically connected—can do. Some, like Jesus Christ, are far more connected to this consciousness than others, like Aristotle, Euclid, and Einstein, who also believed in Yahweh, but as more accurately redefined by Spinoza. Ask any real scientist, and they will tell you that when they discover something new, they all talk to God. Not the imitators, but the real scientists, like Einstein. Though whatever possessed him to incorrectly guess that God does not play dice with the universe is beyond me—I never assume. For that is how you always lose money trading—by assuming something is true rather than really knowing it.
In conclusion, as I explained to you earlier, while it is impossible to prove that God exists, it is possible to show that the hypothesis that 'Yahweh, precisely and specifically as defined and referred to in the Torah, is indeed our one true God and is indeed real, matching the Torah description' is not only now evidence-based and no longer just a belief, but also provably more likely to ultimately, in the future, as we evolve, turn out to be true than any alternative competing hypothesis about how our one true shared objective reality actually operates. And we, the Jews, have a legally binding covenant with God. Can you believe it? Yes, our ancestors messed up, we get it. But I know GOD’S LAW, and our Godfather Yahweh is the ultimate truth and love, and he would never punish us for the sins of our fathers unless we don’t repent for them. But can you really explain this to a Russian billionaire, who would surely ask you the exact same question, in a way that he would really believe you?
And we're not talking about your average person; we're talking about individuals who can spot dirty debate tricks and all attempts at nudging, no matter how flawless and skillful, from 100 miles away. The only way to get a guy like that to give you real money is to convince him that you are telling the real truth, and the only way to do that is to actually really know it.
Love, money, health, happiness, and best wishes to you and the family,
Your faithful friend and supporter, Joe