In most Western countries with Christian orientation, the question itself is pretty obvious. ‘Belief in God’ for a typical American would usually be accompanied by some common Christian behaviors, and since many of these are optional, it could be translated into simple everyday habits. Nothing special that can be recognized by an outsider, unless they specifically ask.

Not so for an observant Jew. The amount of strict rules enforced by Orthodox Judaism is enormous, many of which are directly related to how one is dressed, how they talk, what they eat, you name it. Hence, asking a Jewish person ‘are you religious’ – seems unnecessary. If they are, you quickly see it without asking.

So far, the minority of Israeli citizens of Jewish origins would answer ‘yes’ and be classified that way. Yet, a recent survey revealed 80% of Israeli Jews ‘believe in God’… What is the meaning of this? How can one define him or herself as ’secular’ and believe in God at the same time?

I suppose the explanation has to do with both the way we are brought up and the way our mind has evolved, but whatever the reasons are, the road from ’secular but believe in God’ to ‘religious’ is pretty clear. It is that road that poses the real danger to the future of modern Israel.

Perhaps the most striking attribute of a legend is to assign human-like behaviors to other “things”. These can be animals, plants, and of course silent objects (where does Bugs Bunny fit in this classification?). Some call it ‘personification’, and others would use the term ‘anthropomorphism’ (look up Google for the difference).

The most interesting usage of personification stories involves fooling around with the personification issue itself. Take Pinocchio for example: He (it?) started his (its?) way as a wooden puppet being assembled by a skilled carpenter. In the end… well, we all know what happened. Want another example? How about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? That is a fine example of splitting one conscious mind into several. Who Framed Roger Rabbit set the standard for a mixed human-cartoon plot. And the list grows on and on.

The ancient Greek mythology, and for that matter, many ancient mythologies, made use of their own Pinocchios, building, destroying, bringing to life, and shutting down each other. Some of these mythologies really made it to the top with Pinocchio making Geppetto, as in God making man in his workshop: First version from earth, second version from a rib.

Many legends have managed to remain under the ‘legend’ tag. Some have managed to escape.

This may be a symptom of the steep slope on which the State of Israel is quickly going down with its cultrure (and subsequently with its very existence).

However, one major point remains un-asked: If the Almighty wanted to, he would have prevented those sons and daughters from becoming a “memory” altogether, saving them from being killed in action.

Don’t you think it’s ironic to ask the killer to remember his victims?

“In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of ‘respect’.”

– Salman Rushdie

In took the Unites States ten years or more to settle the score with Osama bin Laden, the number one terrorist of the new era. In the US, just like other places around the world, people went out celebrating in the streets. Still, every commentator bothered to explain the already-known: The fight against terror is not over, and a new spiritual leader will probably pop up to fill the gap.

– * — * –

Whoever experienced talking to people who had undergone some kind of brainwashing, knows the feeling of talking to a brick wall. A sort of infertile discussion that reminds the attempt of selling a used car to someone you’ve just murdered his family in front of him. A hopeless effort to conduct a rational argument with a brain that is apparently open for emotional considerations only.

During the first Israeli-Lebanon war, IDF soldiers became aware of the phenomenon of Shiite Muslim suicide bombers. Later on, many Israeli civilians learned first-hand about the horrors of suicide bombers, who are about to embark – from their point a view – a journey to a Heaven swarming with virgins made to serve martyrs, a.k.a ’shaheeds’. In days to come, the whole world witnessed some apparently educated people – language-speaking pilots – fervently navigating their airplanes into towers and buildings, equipped with similar motivation and goals.

And here is tactics vs. strategy for you: During the first Israeli-Lebanon war, the Israeli Chief of Staff – the late Rafael ‘Raful’ Eitan – expressed himself in the media: “We shall help them reach Heaven”. The State of Israel within its private struggle, like other countries of the Western World in their similar struggles, did help some potential suiciders to reach Heaven earlier. The problem is similar to a known Hebrew phrase discussing the issue of threatening a whore with rape: It is not really clear how effective it is to threaten a suicidal person with death.

– * — * –

In the end of the Nineties, a small Israeli organization named ‘Daat Emet’ (’Knowing the Truth’) was established. In its beginning, Daat Emet approached ultra-Orthodox ‘Haredi’ Jewish population, using some pretty good knowledge of their target audience. One may say they succeeded in doing the allegedly impossible, managing a rational discussion with irrational negotiators. The reason for their partial success is a fascinating topic by itself. In some way, Daat Emet’s contents approached the believers using their own language and mindset.

And here is a very long sentence: If such a small organization succeeded in transforming itself into a well-known brand, and even demonstrated considerable achievements in changing people’s mindset, up to the point of re-educating them into more skeptic and productive thinking… then one can only assume that a similar effort based on more serious resources (like the opposite effort using much of our tax money to educate little children into irrational religious thinking), would achieve a much more significant success.

Hence the question: Why not taking the same measures to encourage skeptical-rational thinking among religious fanatic audience, but not necessarily an Orthodox Jewish audience? The Orthodox Jewish nonsense does not have exclusivity in controlling human minds, and even the greatest deniers of evolution tend to define many of the Muslims as cousins of the Jews.

Yes, it takes considerable knowledge in Islam and its rituals. It also requires time and money resources. C’mon… for the price of four ‘Iron Dome’ missiles one may finance a significant and focused educational effort, targeting both Islamic knowledge and emotions, encouraging healthy skepticism and rational thinking.

– * — * –

Bin Laden’s extermination is a pain relieving medication while fighting cancer. A touch of good feeling for a couple of hours, not very much beyond it. The right way to tackle the “Islamic threat” is, if you will, an “Islamic Daat Emet” — Curing the roots of the problems rather than its occasional symptoms. Yet what is known as ‘The West’ (Israel included) will not select the right medication, for the simple reason it suffers from the very same disease: The Western countries have not yet been able to distinguish ‘religion’ from the alleged need to ‘respect’ it. Culturally and politically they largely believe in parallel nonsense. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that if and when they are released from this complex, it will be too late for them.

Can simple processes of replication and survival really create more complex forms by themselves? I recalled the Life Game we liked so much during basic programming training. And it goes more or less like this: Let’s imagine a colony of, say, imaginary living cells, which reproduce and die generation by generation according to the following rules:

• A cell surrounded by too few other cells (one or zero) – will die of loneliness in the next generation.
• An empty slot surrounded by exactly two cells – will give birth to a new cell in the next generation.
• A slot surrounded by exactly three cells – will retain its status (living cell or no cell) in the next generation.
• A cell surrounded by four or more other cells – will die of crowdedness in the next generation.

And now let’s see what evolution does to our imaginary cells (tip for beginners – try starting from simple symmetric shapes):

Click here to try

Note two specific members of this sequence. First, there is the famous prominent rule that deals generally with observing the Sabbath – let us assume it has the sequence number i. Then, there is another famous rule delaing with saving the life of a jew – let us assume it has the sequence number j.

In order to enrich our model a little bit, we note that all those rules carry with them some considerable importance, at least from a religious point of view, since God is supposedly checking us on a daily basis for keeping them. At this stage of the model we still do not know the amount of importance assigned to each rule, so let us use a mathematical function called v to mark it. For example: v(j) is the importance of the rule that deals with saving lives.

Now let us remember some Jewish statements about the importance of these rules. One of them claims that “saving a life overrides keeping the Sabbath”. Using our notation:

(1) v(j) > v(i)

Another famous statement claims that “observing the Sabbath is equivalent to all the other rules combined”. Using our notation:

(2) v(i) = SUM [k≠i] v(k)

Now, from joining (1) and (2) together we conclude:

(3) v(j) > SUM [k≠i] v(k)

Since j≠i, we can subtract v(j) from both sides and get:

(4) 0 > SUM [k≠i,j] v(k)

Thus we arrived at a partial sequence of P, which is not empty, and whose sum of members’ importance is negative. Hence there exists at least one member of P, call it m, for which:

(5) v(m) < 0

Or, using the terms of our model, it is important not to follow the religious rule number m.

You have been warned!

Among religious preachers, especially Orthodox Jewish ones, there are many references to the amusing discussion on the alleged vast knowledge of our holy ancestors about the exact length of the moon cycle, also known as the synodic month, which is the basis for the Jewish calendar as well as several other calendars. You can see an example of this here.

The moon, as we know nowadays, has been drifting away from us since its formation, probably following the collision of some celestial body with Earth. While the Earth’s rotation slows down (causing the day to be longer), the lunar orbit time also becomes gradually longer. During Talmudic times (about two millennia ago) it was roughly 29.530586 days and nowadays it’s approximately 29.530589 days. When looking at different geological eras, we see much bigger differences measured in hours and even days.

But even if we limit ourselves to this tiny era that consists of the last few thousands of years… how could the ancient Babylonians and Greeks reach such seemingly-impossible precision, calculating the lunar cycle?

Let’s start by stating that the precision in question is not that high. When talking in days, the number 29.53059 looks pretty impressive (5 decimal digits!), however, if we translate this to shorter periods of times, we’ll notice it’s not extraordinary. The difference between 29.53058 and 29.53059 days is about one second. Not something which is unthinkable for ancient measuring. The ancient Babylonian calculation reached an accuracy of about 2 seconds per month.

Ancient clocks of those times typically used technological means such as measuring the angle of a shadow (sundial) or using “water clocks”, in which time was measured by the regulated flow of water (or other liquid) into or out of a vessel.

In these eras which we discuss here, a lunar eclipse takes a few hours and a solar eclipse lasts a few minutes. Both occur about twice a year, if we include partial eclipses, and much more rarely if counting only full eclipses.

We’ll spare you the simple explanations (learned in school) for the essence of these eclipses. We’ll only indicate that both types of eclipse occur only when the moon is in a specific lunar phase: A lunar eclipse – only when there is a full moon (middle of the month), and a solar eclipse – exactly during the time of the new moon (beginning/end of month).

All these facts didn’t go unnoticed by ancient astronomers, whose main occupation was watching the sky during ideal ancient darkness. As we already saw, they also had the ability to measure time periods of minutes with an accuracy of seconds, and time periods of days with an accuracy of minutes.

Now, suppose you – the educated reader – are a respectable astronomer in ancient Babylon. You are equipped with all the above simple knowledge, and with state-of-the-art water clocks, courtesy of your patron king. You waited patiently between eclipses and managed a detailed record of events, as precise as those times enable. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume we’re discussing two lunar eclipses, two years apart, for which you attempted to precisely measure (say, two-minute precision) the moment that is easiest to detect – the initial “bite” of the full moon by the Earth’s shadow.

Your records tell you that since that moment of the previous eclipse, 708 days, 17 hours and approximately 37 minutes have elapsed. You know this, since you measured in minutes the amount of time between sunset and the beginning of the eclipse. As we’re talking about the same season in the year, the sunset is more-or-less at the same minute of the day. If you are an experienced astronomer, you already took into consideration the small differences of the actual sunset (up to 8 minutes in our case).

Now you do some math: If 24 lunar months took exactly 708 days, 17 hours and 37 minutes, what’s the length of a single month? Exact arithmetic is a must for an astronomer who desires job stability: 17 hours and 37 minutes are 0.743 days. Thus we divide 708.734 by 24 and get… 29.53058 days. Should we stick to kosher food from now on?

The secret is of course that precision of seconds per month is more-or-less equivalent to a precision of minutes per year. It’s much easier to associate the latter with ancient measuring. The above simulation is imaginary, but similar to the real methods by which ancient calculations were performed. Perhaps there were more years and less minute precision. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe solar eclipses were used instead, and possibly several rather than just two.

This way or the other, there’s no need for “divine knowledge” and no celestial inspiration is required in order to achieve the results actually reached by the ancient Babylonians and Greek astronomers. All you need is clear sky, free time and old instruments. You also need some common sense, patience, accuracy, and basic knowledge of arithmetic – things that are not necessarily the top priorities of modern day religious preachers.

There are certain interesting characteristics of the phenomenon of the imaginary conspirative world, whether it has to do with ghosts and souls, or with aliens and flying saucers: Its rules and its habitants change slightly according to the belief and the cultural background of the addict. The rules by which that world functions, shall always complement each other, like pieces of a puzzle brought together in our mind. They will be somehow related to our basic fears. In any case, they will always be on the edge of clarity. The nature of such cosmic conspiracy is being incomplete and suffering missing pieces of data, in order to continue teasing the imagination. The so-called “proofs” integrated in it, will be, like the sayings of the famous oracle from Delphi, subject to interpretations both ways. Those who promote the conspiracy will always seek (and find) other people with certain scientific background, whose name is involved in believing similar things.

Our love of conspiracies and intrigues generates and nurtures them out of purely natural events: President Kennedy’s murder, the landing on the moon, Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination, the events of September 11. It’s very likely that some of our ancient mythologies were formed this way.

The connection to religion is pretty obvious. Some of these ancient myths found their way into our most popular books. The system itself teaches their stories. We’re thrilled by the mystical promise embedded in them. We swear on their printed version in the court of law.

In 1970, a somewhat strange story hit the media. Headlines told about a complex computer program used by NASA, to calculate planetary and lunar positions in the future and in the past. It appeared that the program was stuck at some point of the calculation – a problem that was interpreted by some as if a day was missing somewhere in the processing. Then (sparing you the gory details), a consultant named Harold Hill suggested that the missing day represented the time when Joshua made the Sun stand still (Joshua, chapter 10, verses 12-14). Some quick calculation done by the scientists indeed proved that the missing time matched the estimated delay of the Sun, as told by the Biblical story of Joshua!

This could have been a very exciting story, except for the minor issue that it never took place in real life. Still the tale became widespread, and even Mr. Hill himself – a real person – had an interesting time denying the world yet another myth.

It’s easy to believe when someone tells you what you want to hear. Carl Sagan wrote a lot about it in his wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World, where he made the distinction between science and pseudoscience.

We do not live in a dull world. There are plenty of interesting and exciting things to learn about it: From sub-atomic particles to pulsars and quasars, from chromosomes and genes to nerve cells and brains, from prime numbers to differential equations. It’s also quite all right to invent legends and tell myths – as long as we treat them as such.

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“And call ye on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord; and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God” (1 Kings, Chapter 18, Verse 24)

The meaning of ‘Hezbollah’ in Arabic is “God’s party” (’party’ as in ‘political party’). The meaning of Nasrallah’s name in Arabic is no less than “God’s victory”. ‘Allah’, so it seems, plays a major role in the recent conflict on Israel’s north border, between the State of Israel and the Lebanese-Iranian terrorist party that resides in several bunkers in the south of Lebanon.

Using an idiom set by Israeli Channel Two’s Amnon Abramovitch, we have a Muslim-Haredi politician in the land of cedars, recruiting his ‘Allah’ for fighting the Zionist heretics. The Lebanese politician, who sells arrogant preaching with pathos as tactics for raising reliability among certain people, doesn’t have exclusivity on the arrogant preaching tactics, nor on recruiting this ‘Allah’ for his private goals. He was preceded with both things by many other “good” people, some from the same era and region, such as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, as well as many other mythological figures of the region.

There’s not much difference between the ancient world, where when two nations that fought each other brought their own gods into the battle, and the modern world, where when two nations that fight each other bring God into the campaign. For that matter, it would be interesting to compare the many speeches made by Saddam Hussein and George Bush (Sr.) in the beginning of 2003. If the Christian God is the same entity as the Islamic one, he must be suffering from a split personality.

In practice, almost every politician given a microphone in front of him performs this sin of cheap godly demagogy. One should hear the speeches in almost any modern parliament (including the Israeli ‘Knesset’) in order to realize how God is recruited, often with great purpose, many times unintentionally, for the benefit of the speaker.

‘God’, ‘Allah’, ‘Elohim’, and ‘El’ penetrated not only the names of strict believers, but also our day-to-day language and purely secular names. Starting with “Thank God” and ending with names like Eliyahu, Elhanan, Emanuel, Michael and their many linguistic sibs. A similar thing happened to God’s remote relative ‘Jehova’, ‘Yehova’, ‘Yahweh’ and ‘Yah’ with names such as Ovadia, Yehonathan, Yehoram, Hallelujah, John, Judy and many others.

‘El’, as we know, was the top god of the ancient Canaanite-Phoenician pantheon, also revealed in the excavations of Ugarit from the 14th century BC. We don’t know for certain how did these ancient Lebanese inherited El’s name, and from which even more ancient civilizations, if any. We do know how its name later evolved into ancient Israel’s ‘Elohim’, and ‘Allah’ of the Muslim world. How ironic it is that “El’s party” and the terrorist preacher named “El’s victory” appeared nowadays in Middle East history in the same geographical region where their name had originally showed up, to the best of our knowledge.

“El’s victory” and the victorious ‘El’

Recruiting “force majeure” for the benefit of man is a result of our characteristics, and a natural thing to do under many circumstances and difficulties. When we endure great suffer, we tend to call every god upon which we were brought up, even upon its name alone. We may do so silently in our heart, or we may do so explicitly and loudly. There’s nothing wrong with that, and nothing to criticize. This is how we are built.

The much-needed (and often absent) criticism is about the cold manipulative and well-planned usage of these “super forces” to justify horrible acts on behalf of the user/recruiter. Sometimes meant for the ears of the audience, and many other times as self-justifications for the preacher himself. ‘Allah’ in this sense has turned into just another weapon in the arsenal of war politics. And those who use various weapons should not wonder when these weapons lose their high position together with the results of using them.

“The difference between physics and metaphysics is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.” – Robert W. Wood

On a scale of 1 to 10 – how high do you rank the possibility that vampires are real?

If you answered anything higher than 1, it means you still give the old vampire myth a chance. Rationally, of-course, there’s no real chance for any talking creature to survive hundreds of years by drinking blood, and certainly no real vampire has ever been interviewed. Yet, knowing all that (hopefully), you still gave it a chance.

Why so? Is there something scientific in the old myth (some parts of which are actually not that old)? Not really, but still it’s much more exciting to believe in vampires than to resist this widespread story. This myth, like many others, has its own roots and origins, and has evolved during the years.

Not only it is more exciting for you, it’s also more exciting for others. This means that books and movies about vampires will sell much better than books and movies about carpentry during the French Revolution. Even better than books and movies and TV shows about the real history of the vampire myth. We actually grow up with virtual vampires around us.

We love the adrenalin. We adore watching scary movies. We prefer the mystical solution to the simple one. In many instances when there is a simple solution, we tend to reject it because it’s too boring. We seek supernatural reasons, and invent ones in our minds when it means more adrenalin. We’re addicted to believing in myths and legends.

So let’s try a short weaning process. Find a place where no one can hear you. Now repeat loudly after me:

There are no real vampires, nor were there ever any. This is a myth, largely based on ancient tales and false interpretations of old diseases, as well as some more recent books and films. Count Dracula is no different than any other imaginary hero, including Frodo the Hobbit, and Pinocchio.

The story of Frankenstein is a nice legend. There’s no way one can put life into a body that’s been dead for quite a while. There are no functioning organs to support life in a dead body.

There are no werewolves. People cannot turn into wolves nor can they turn into sheep, turkeys or cockroaches.

The continent of Atlantis never existed. Its story is based on old writings by the Greek philosopher Plato, which is probably based on even older stories about some disaster – maybe the volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini (Thera).

Airplanes flying over the Bermuda Triangle and ships sailing through do not just disappear or move to some other dimension. Accidents, unfortunately, happen (and will happen) everywhere, including the area of the Bermuda Triangle.

There are no witches, and since there aren’t any – they also don’t fly on brooms, vacuum cleaners, or any other appliances.

There aren’t any moth men that predict the future. The closest thing to that legend may be ugly men who predict the past.

No flying saucers suck electricity from power lines. Companies sell the stuff that’s running in power lines, and would yell like hell if it was stolen from them.

Okay, by now you deserve a break. You probably get the picture and can keep practicing this method with the rest of your favorite demons, magicians, mummies, and Freddy Krugers.

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