The ultra-Orthodox members of any religion – Judaism in particular – find themselves in a new kind of problem. Building walls between themselves and the outside world has always been a good strategy for nourishing religious contents, as silly as they may be. Alas, here comes the end of the 20th century with television, cellular […]

The name ‘Red herring’ has become associated with the logical fallacy of introducing irrelevant material to the issue being discussed, so that everyone’s attention is diverted away from the points made, towards a different conclusion (see here). For a long time I’ve been suspecting that preachers use this tactic on purpose, in order to try […]

The common myna is a songbird, quite widespread in Israel. It can easily be identified by two distinct characteristics: The yellow spots around the eyes – standing out against its dark color, and a remarkable collection of sounds. In fact the myna is known to mimic sounds of animals and even people. Another less prominent […]

I had a long correspondence with someone, about the Jewish concept of ‘chain of tradition‘. One specific argument mentioned had to do with how impossible (or difficult) it is to fool “wise” people (whatever ‘wise’ means). This was part of a bigger claim, trying to explain that old traditions must be true, especially given that […]

For tens of millions of years the Tethys Ocean covered the reef and its neighbors. “Cretaceous” – this is how we use to name this era. Millions of generations of dinosaurs roamed the distances somewhere, and even more generations of old crabs and shellfish were born, lived and died in the reef. Millions of grandfathers […]

Yesterday I saw a movie about Ireland in the beginning of the previous century (“Jimmy’s Hall”, recommended). True it had also some political contents, left-right and all that, but lots of religious stuff. You’re “evil” if you’re “anti-Christ”. You’re banned from society if you don’t believe Jesus is the son of God. The beginning of […]

Our mind has evolved to grasp the world as having absolute rules and definitive purposes. In our day-to-day life – things must have well-defined locations, events must occur at well-understood times, movements have clear directions. The reasons for this tendency are easy to explain. For millions of years, our survival has been depending on a […]

There is a well-known story about a woman who attended a lecture, and heard the lecturer say that the universe was going to self-destruct in a hundred billion years. The woman fainted immediately. After being woken up she was asked whether the reason she fainted had to do with the hundred billion years mentioned. She […]

It hit me. The solution to all our problems. And it’s all based on a mathematical attribute named ‘Transitivity’. Quoting Wikipedia: In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is transitive if whenever an element a is related to an element b, and b is in turn related to an element c, then […]

There are many misconceptions and contradictions in old religions, yet the “best” must be those associated with outdated knowledge of our place in the universe. Thinking of Earth as the center of everything, and of one’s own location as the center of Earth — this perception might be considered arrogant, but it comes naturally with […]