Israel, Tel Aviv. A few years ago, I took a taxi. The [male] driver did not wear a “Kippah”. There were no religious papers visible around. Not even the common religious stickers you can find on many cars in Israel. The busy Ayalon Highway 20, however, inevitably established the necessary atmosphere for a driver-passenger conversation. […]

I’m not sure to what extent this is also the case in some other countries, but the political division into “right” and “left” in Israel largely (even if not perfectly) corresponds to a citizen’s “religiousness”. And the affiliation seems relatively clear: “Religious” Jews (of any kind) will usually associate themselves with the “right” wing, while […]

I have heard this line of thought several times — You talk with a religious Jew about the borders of the State of Israel, you raise all kinds of considerations: The need for a Jewish majority, the need for secured borders, the much-needed support of the various countries of the world, the Palestinians, the economy […]

The debates between religious and secular, between “believers” in some god and “non-believers” – are as old as human imagination. In the ancient world where scientific knowledge was much inferior to nowadays, most of these debates tended to favor the religious side. Yet, even then there were quite a few people who opposed the simple […]

Religious thinking must have a solution for any problem, especially one that puts the religious thinking itself in risk. Hence, when many millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including some million innocent children – there must have been a good religious reason for this. Thus the great minds of religious thinking came up […]

The recent couple of weeks have been chaotic in Israel. Even though the struggle against Covid-19 seemed to succeed – new challenges have popped, in particular the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and its implications inside Israel on the relationships between Jews and Arabs. This is not the proper place to describe the […]

This topic came up during a correspondence of mine with a creationist. I find it quite interesting, so I bring it here as is. Steve: The big bang is a hypothesis. It cannot be directly tested. God’s creation cannot be tested either. Me: Scientifically speaking, the Big Bang is an established scientific theory. God is […]

Here is a common situation: You are arguing with a creationist about the origin of all the processes in the universe being based on the laws of nature, and then they come up with the strange question: “And who created the laws of nature?” Who told physics to act in certain ways? The real answer […]

The Doctor Analogy This argument is often used by religious preachers to explain why God’s morality is strong and has nothing to do with the suffering we see in our world. The story goes like this: A little boy enters an operating room in a hospital, in the midst of a complex operation. He sees […]

The word “logic” is used quite hastily nowadays. We tend to assign it to almost everything we think. We often blame others that they’re logically mistaken if they don’t think like us. Mathematically speaking, “logic” is a very well-defined area. If B is derived from A and A is true, then B is true. This […]