“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.

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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.

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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.

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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“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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This method is most popular among Jewish players of the game, some of whom have turned it into a real art. Rabbi Zamir Cohen, for instance, has produced a booklet named Bible and Science, where he masters this game and allegedly exposes certain mysterious knowledge found in the Bible and in the Jewish Talmud.

In general, these so-called findings are nothing more than simple manipulations of old contents, combined with lack of knowledge and aimed at the young and the bewildered. Want an example? Sure you do!

The tractate of ‘Rosh Hashanah’ (in the Talmud) tells us of Rabban Gamliel, who is explaining to the other sages about the synodic month – the time between two consecutive conjunctions of the Moon and the Sun. In other words: The exact length of the Jewish (and also the Muslim) traditional month. Apparently Rabban Gamliel is quoted as specifying this period of time with precision that is equivalent to five decimal digits after the decimal point (i.e., 29.53059 days). Does it mean we should all start eating kosher and keeping the Sabbath?

An old Russian joke tells about a peasant named Ivan from the region of Smolensk. According to the news he won a prize for producing the largest amount of wheat during the last year. A commission of inquiry was established and found out that his real name was not Ivan, but rather it was Vladimir. He did not live in Smolensk, but in Moscow. It wasn’t wheat what he was growing, but rather it was corn, and the prize was for actually producing the smallest amount of it.

In our case, the story is similar. Research of the text and other related passages in ancient Jewish literature, demonstrates that some of Rabban Gamliel’s words were put there at a later time, and were probably associated with his name retroactively. Rabban Gamliel is himself quoted as saying some contradicting things later. Moreover, this amount of precision is nothing to be proud of, since it is the result of a simple calculation, which was known to the ancient Greeks as well as to the Babylonians. Similar results were found, in fact, in archaeological excavations such as those associated with the ancient astronomer Nabu-Rimanni, and dated more than half a millennium before Rabban Gamliel’s time.

Part of “The sages knew it all” game indeed tends to retroactively associate later masterpieces with earlier alleged authors. For example, we are used to link The Zohar book (that deals with the Jewish Kabbalah) with the name of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, from the Roman times, while in practice it was published in the 13th century in Spain, by a Jewish author named Moses De Leon.

(iv) Prophecy – a good example is the ‘She’ar Yashuv’ case mentioned above. There have been many similar attempts by followers of various religions to find clues in the Biblical text for their being on the right side. Muslim preachers, for example, may quote various uses of words similar to ‘Muhammad’, ignoring the fact that they simply mean “precious things” in Hebrew. Of-course, enthusiastic Christians find traces of Jesus there. Certain fragments of text from the book of Psalms were associated with names of Zionist leaders from the middle of the 20th century. The list of ridiculous manipulations does not seem to end.

Give yourself a task: Try and search for some current event of your choice in the text of the Bible. Given enough time and resources, you’ll be sure to find something. Some ancient clues (in the right state of mind) can easily be interpreted to predict your chosen event. Cute game!

A few additional remarks are worth mentioning:

First (and not very surprisingly), none of this funny hocus-pocus stuff has ever been used to actually predict the future. It has always been used to explain past events. As the famous saying of Niels Bohr (also quoted in the above mentioned Michael Shermer’s article): “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Second, the only real prophet we know about is the scientific approach. It can predict vast amount of things: Future weather, volcanic eruptions, the sex of an unborn child, the next lunar eclipse, and the odds of a sick person healing. None of our past mystical prophets ever came close to such ability.

Finally, even if we prove with high probability (which we didn’t) that some person in the 2nd century came to possess certain specific knowledge of our universe – why should we start praying to God or Jesus? Does this imply there’s a god who constantly keeps an eye on the deeds of our specific species on our specific planet?

It appears that once we really want to believe in something, nothing will stop us, including the truth.

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“Fools never die, they are merely replaced by others.” – Unknown

In February 1997, the Israeli Air Force suffered its worst disaster ever. Two transport helicopters carrying troops collided in mid-air over the village of She’ar Yashuv in northern Galilee, resulting in the death of 73 soldiers. The small country mourned, and a commission of inquiry was established to determine the cause of the disaster.

During the days that followed the disaster, several religious radio stations quoted Isaiah, chapter 7, verses 3-4:

“Then said the Lord unto Isaiah: ‘Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, in the highway of the fullers’ field; and say unto him: Keep calm, and be quiet; fear not, neither let thy heart be faint, because of these two tails of smoking firebrands …”

The phrase ‘Shear-jashub’ (pronounced She’ar Yashuv) is mentioned several times in the book of Isaiah – sometimes as the name of Isaiah’s son. In fact, the northern Israeli village was named after this reference. Still, it was easy for some to make the association between the name ‘She’ar Yashuv’, the two burnt helicopters, the phrase ‘two tails of smoking firebrands’ and the fact that Isaiah is considered a prophet.

Six years later, in February 2003, the world watched in horror as the space shuttle Columbia broke into burning pieces high in the sky. During the week after, the righteous were busy again rummaging the Bible for clues. It eventually came out in the shape of some other claptrap called Bible code sometimes also referred to as letter skips. It appears that if you take the current Hebrew version of the Bible, start somewhere in the middle of the 7th verse of Genesis (that talks about the sky), and skip 1822 letters at a time, you reveal the phrase ‘Death to Columbia’. Of-course, the discovery is made with computers, courtesy of simple software that you can write at home over night.

In this game of hocus-pocus there are typically two sides – the instructor and the audience. They share the enthusiasm of finding mystical clues in allegedly God-given texts. They typically also share the lack of basic knowledge in statistics, or at least have the will to ignore it.

The game is most effective when the instructor possesses good presentation skills, and the student is a teenager at the age of “asking yourself questions” about important stuff, such as life in general and the world around us. The game is even more effective when there is a large and efficient organization or system backing up and supporting the instructor, perhaps even with some public funding. The background and environment of the students have strong relation to the expected outcome of the game. In a Jewish environment, the student may become an Orthodox Jewish believer. In a Christian atmosphere, he or she may eventually become a good Christian. In an Islamic environment, the game has been known to produce faithful Muslims.

The game itself has various flavors. They may be used separately or together. Let’s examine some of the most common approaches to this mind-blunting game:

(i) Bible Code (also known as Letter Skips or ‘Dilugim’ in Hebrew) – in this version of the game, we use a trick similar to the one explained above with the Columbia disaster. We scan the Biblical text and locate combinations of letters (that have a fixed distance from one another) which make some sense. Then (this is the tricky part) we tune our mind to believe that it cannot be a coincidence. It must be some secret message coded into the text by the Almighty – how else did it get there?

In practice, fooling around with the text enough time – with any sufficiently long text – will yield almost any desired result. You can probably locate your own name (if it’s not too long or complicated) as well as obvious hints to most famous disasters in human history. Just ask Michael Drosnin, the author of The Bible Code. If you proceed to read the Skeptic column of the Scientific American, June 2003 issue – you’ll find an outstanding article named Codified Claptrap by Michael Shermer. There you can discover in other masterpieces, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, some interesting messages coded using this method. You can also read about the discovery of messages denying the method of the Bible Code, found in the book Bible Code II itself.

By the way, if you continue with the Columbia trick above and count two additional letters, you’ll get ‘No death to Columbia’. It’s also interesting to note that opposing religious trends have been known to find conflicting messages in the Bible. Jesus seems to be a major star of this scheme, for example, unless of-course you’re an Orthodox Jew. The other interesting thing to note is that the Biblical text itself – according to recent research – has changed quite a lot, especially (but not only) during the first millennium BC.

(ii) Numerology and Gimatria – these are other tricks to fool around with letters and numbers. Gimatria is a Hebrew version of numerology, where each letter is assigned a numeric value, based on the decimal method of counting.

The trick here is to sum up the values of all the letters in a certain word, name or phrase. Then to sum up the values of some other word, name or phrase. If by some coincidence the result is the same, it means, of-course, that God meant it to be that way. So – there must be some relationship between the two.

Example: During the first Gulf War in 1991, some wise guy found that Saddam Hussein is equal to Amalek in Gimatria. ‘Amalek’ is the ancient enemy nation that was allegedly defeated by the ancient Israelites with some help from God (see Exodus, chapter 17). Apparently, this brilliant finding did not help at the time with the total defeat of Saddam Hussein. It also did not help to defeat the use of this funny method by Israeli spiritual leaders, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who discovered that Evil Haman (book of Esther) is equal to Yosef Sarid (a left-wing Israeli parliament member, hated by ultra-Orthodox Jews). Ovadia Yosef himself, by the way, is equal to Talks of Nonsense, using this same trick.

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“Tell me yourself, what will cause you to quit believing… Is there anything that will stop your belief?”

Now, let’s analyze for a moment the possible answers to this question. Your friend may answer something that boils down to “nothing”. If he/she does so, then this is a declaration that his/her belief is not based on any evidence whatsoever. If it were based on some findings and conclusions, then the potential discovery of contradicting findings would be sufficient for him/her to generate different conclusions – a thing that he/she says will never happen.

In other words, he (or she… well you know…) who gives such answer, declares his faith to be blind faith; and it’s pointless to argue about it, since he declares in advance, that every claim presented – even if true and overwhelming – will not be sufficient to change his belief.

A different kind of answer may be: “If XXX happens / if I see XXX, then I’ll stop believing”. Such an answer opens up a possibility for an interesting discussion, as the person who uses it declares his faith to depend upon extraneous factors. He stipulates certain conditions to God, and pretends to understand better than him when this god is right and when he is wrong in his deeds.

A belief that presents conditions to God is in contrast with, say, the principles if the Jewish faith, as phrased by the Rambam and the Talmud (and others), stating that one should never doubt, and worship God for “no prize”.

Your religious friend may of-course reciprocate the question to you: “What will make you start believing and being religious?” However, this is what’s it all about: The rationalist skeptic, whose ways of life are derived from self-choices and logic conclusions, should have no problem stating he will decide according to what he will see and be convinced, subject to future changes, if and when new things will be revealed. The scientific approach gives here pretty clear answers (which also demand a more precise definition of what “religious” and “God” are).

Taken from Hebrew: http://hofesh.org.il/articles/jew/faith-and-jewish-flavors.html