Godly Innocence

Have not read such a moving and well written article in a very long time! Hope to read more from your golden pen.

A small note: Poor god, what do we want from him/her? What can we expect from a nonexistent being? Is it god’s fault that he does not exist? He sure would’ve loved to exist and help, he just didn’t yet figure out how to create himself…

P.S. Since god does not exist, we need to spell it “god” with a lower case “g”.

“P.S. Since god does not exist, we need to spell it “god” with a lower case “g”.

Forgive the pedantic aside, but I believe it depends on whether it’s a proper noun or not. If you’re using the word without a definite article (“a,” “the,” etc.) then it’s a proper noun. Any grammar experts here want to confirm that?

Reminds me of poet and translator Willis Barnstone’s poem “If God had an Apartment.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=ays5Q2IjAHgC&pg=PA82#v=onepage&q&f=false

HR, as a grammar freak, I’d say that’s more or less right. There’s more behind it than the inclusion of an article, though. I’ve always seen the word “God” capitalized when referred to in a Judeo-Christian sense, generally monotheistic sense, or even an abstract/philosophical sense — for example, in translations of certain Greek or Roman works, in which a divine force or power sometimes appears as “God.”

The use of “god” or “gods,” on the other hand, is found in polytheistic contexts. Even then, one refers to “a god” or “the gods”; I’ve yet to see a standalone, uncapitalized “god.” (Biased? Yeah, maybe….)

I suppose you could use “God” as a kind of catch-all term for any/all divine forces, as Yochan seems to be doing.

SL, you’re correct. Robert Wright, in The Evolution of God, describes the change from polytheism to monotheism, and often refers to it as the change from ‘god’ to ‘God.’

And HR is probably also right, that in a polytheistic society, one would use an article, lots of article, and I mean lots and lots of articles before each god.

People always say, “How can their be a kind, loving G-d who killed six million Jews in the holocaust”. I have always found that a rather strange question. Why do they have to bring up one of the greatest horrors of human history to deal with the problem of suffering. Every time a child skins their knee playing ball, or anyone catches a cold or gets a paper cut we have the question of suffering vs. G-d’s goodness. Its all suffering. Yet the only thing people bring up is the six million or some other personal tragedy.

Of course suffering is a problem for the believer. Of course we can’t answer why certain people get certain terrible illnesses or go through other tragedies.

Nonetheless, in my humble opinion, suffering is NOT the main the message that the universe is sending us.

If any honest person would look at his life and count how many miracles and kindnesses that have occurred to him vs. how much
suffering, it would become clear that the message of the universe is one of love and kindness. I do not mean only big things like winning the lottery or sitting on the beach in Hawaii and eating fresh pineapple.

The fact that you can see, that your eyes can notice people whom you have not seen for years and recall their name and favorite baseball team, that your ears can hear and all of a sudden hear three notes of song you have not heard in 25 years and know what it is, when you last heard it and whom you heard it with… Just for the human eye
to work properly it takes millions of constantly occurring miracles. If any one little thing is off kilter the whole thing falls apart. Then there is the heart, circulatory system, reproductive system, brain, memory, deja vu, dreams, the pleasure of laughter or scratching an itch on your back, the Beatles. Endless miracles and incredible acts of love and kindness seem to be happening all the time, non stop all around the world, every second of every day.

I used to think the prayer Nishmas which we say every Shabbos morning was totally farfrumpt and exaggerating. Then I realized that it is dealing with the micro level of every human being in the world. The act of breathing every second, seeing, hearing, walking, memory, speech, etc… The billions of connections that go on in your body every second to keep you alive and have been going on every day in your life and in all the lives of everyone in the world every day for all time. Your ability to read these words is only happening because billions of cells and connections from your brain to your eyes are taking place every second.

Now we can understand that Nishmas is not farfrumpt or exaggerating at all! It might not even be metaphorical “Were our mouth as full as the song of the sea and our tongue as full of joyous song likes its waves….

I was recently in Florida and stood in front of the Atlantic ocean. It is VERY large to say the least. The thanks that we are unable possibly offer enough of are the billions of miracles going on all around us all day. Again, the important thing to realize is that miracles do not just mean seas splitting or the earth opening up and swallowing people. It is talking about the daily non- stop miracles that people foolishly call the “mundane”. If you add up all those miracles on personal basis and for all the people in the world for all time you will see that NISHMAS is not farfrumpt but rather the pshut pshat in the Universe.
“Were our mouth as full of song as the sea, and our tongue as full of joyous song as its multitude of waves, and our lips as full of praise as the breadth of the heavens, and our eyes as brilliant as the sun and the moon, and our hands as outspread as the eagles of the sky and our feet as swift as hinds — we still could not thank You sufficiently, HaShem our God and God of our forefathers, and to bless Your Name for even one of the thousand thousand, thousands of thousands and myriad myriads of favors, miracles and wonders that you performed for our ancestors and for us. At first You redeemed us from Egypt, Hashem our God, and liberated us from the house of bondage. In famine You nourished us, and in plenty you sustained us. From sword you saved us; from plague you let us escape; and from severe and enduring diseases you spared us. Until now Your mercy has helped us, and Your kindness has not forsaken us. Do not abandon us, Hashem our God, forever. Therefore the organs that you set within us and the spirit and soul that you breathed into our nostrils, and the tongue that you placed in our mouth – all of them shall thank and bless and praise and glorify, exalt and revere, be devoted, sanctify and declare the sovereignty of Your Name, our King. For every mouth shall offer thanks to You; every tongue shall vow allegiance to You; every knee shall bend to You; every erect spine shall prostrate itself before You; all hearts shall fear You; and all innermost feelings and thoughts shall sing praises to Your name, as it is written: “All my bones shall say, ‘Hashem who is like You? “

emes rocker
if it floats your boat keep saying nishmas until you are blue in the face.
as for me, all the ice cream in the world doesn’t change the fact that god “molested” me and can’t be loved and trusted.

@HasidicRebel: you’re 100% right. Proper nouns are always capitalized. Be it God, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Santa Claus, Dubya.. no matter the mythological god or demi-god to which one refers, one always capitalizes

Zev

I understand the pain you must feel. Nonetheless I know other people who have been through horrifying experiences but yet find a way to still connect to G-d.

The whole world with its billions of stars, planets, grass, trees, wind, and everything else is really only about six inches big. It is the six inches between your two ears. It is all a matter of how we choose to perceive the world.

I wish you love peace and great simcha.

Have a good Yom Tov
EMES

rock on emes rocker

emes

thanks for pointing that out to me. if only my grandparents had known this pearl of wisdom i’m sure that their going up in smoke would have been alot easier.

Zev,

I can’t attempt to explain your grandparents and I realize how hard it is to deal with that.

I also can’t explain how a million connections are being made right now from your brain to your eyes and back to your brain so that you can read these words. Especially after you have attempted to pull people away from belief in the Being that created your eyes. Wow-I would love to be able to be so kind to those who don’t like me!

Nonetheless, although I do not understand a single thing about the ways of G-d, I still maintain that the overall message of the universe is one of kindness and love. It is too irrational to believe the universe in all its complexity just “made itself”. I do not possess that level of “faith”.

I have no problem admitting that we have no real understanding of the Creator. However, not understanding the ways of G-d does not mean you do not have to believe in G-d.

I happen to think that not understanding G-d deepens my faith. Why would I want to worship a being whom I could understand? If I could understand G-d then perhaps I should just worship myself or others who also understand G-d.

Best,
EMES

whatever floats your boat. some people need to believe to make it through the day. that’s not to say that i don’t believe in god. i just don’t know. but even if god exists i don’t/CAN’T believe that it is kulo tov and that was the point of my essay.

No one said this was going to be easy. Faith is a lifelong project. Its not something you can just pick up at the store.

Just keep looking, keep searching for G-d’s fingerprints all around you. That is the best we can do. We have to humble ourselves. The more we humble ourselves the more it will open our eyes and hopefully we can catch a small glimpse here and there of something beyond.

Best,
Emes Rocker

YOU JUST DON’T GET IT, DO YOU?
BECAUSE HIS FINGERPRINTS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE.HE IS GUILTY. YOU THINK THAT A PIECE OF HOT KUGEL AND SOME FEFERDIKA CHOLENT BALANCES OUT ALL THE PAIN. I’D RATHER NOT BELIEVE IN YOUR GOD THEN BELIEVE THAT ALL THIS PAIN AND SUFFERING IS GOOD. BUT THAT’S JUST ME. IF SOMEHOW YOU CAN TWIST YOUR MIND INTO A PRETZEL BE MY GUEST. GOD KNOWSW I TRIED.

I THINK WE ARE GUILTY and HE is the only innocent. Do I undertand His scoring system? No. Not at all. There are many things I don’t understand. I can live with that.

Nonetheless, there is no pretzel logic here.

The world is overwhelmingly kind. If you were to add up all the suffering in the world vs. all the goodness that is going on–you will see that it is not even a ratio. It is like trillions to one. You just have to lower you expectation of what constitutes goodness and kindness. It is not just becoming wealthy and sitting on a sunny beach with a pina colada in Hawaii. It is the fact that you can see, hear, taste, listen to music, smile, yawn, breathe.

Have you ever truly thanked G-d for the incredible pleasure of laughing? For the incredible pleasure of scratching an itch? Going to the bathroom? For a hearing a moving piece of music that tears at your heart and gives you goose pimples? Have you ever thanked G-d for your nose hairs that keep out so many dangerous germs? How about cream cheese? How about the pleasure of cream cheese on matzah? How about the pleasure of how great your clothes feel on your body or that great belt you are wearing that has ready made holes that hold your pants up. What about your knees that move along so smoothly with some kind of WD40 ball joint fluid? Have you ever thanked G-d for your elbows? For your bike? For your air conditioner? How about the fact that you can see someone whom you have not seen for 20 years and instantly remember his/her name? I could go on but their is not enough memory in your computer to list all the kindnesses.

Before you start throwing away G-d and become just another angry cyber-apostate writer, please let me know if you really truly feel that you are not a Cafui Tov(Denier/non recognizer of the good).

Go ahead make your own list. Then get back to me. Consider yourself challenged. In fact I challenge anyone reading this to do the same.

Best,
Emes Rocker

maspik

>The world is overwhelmingly kind.

Yeah right Emes/Mitch, because humans taught God how to heal the sick. Outside of your cosy circle where medicine is less widely available e.g in Angola 2 out of 10 babies still to this day don’t make it to their first birthday, and life expectancy is 38.

Now I know, Of course black people dont matter to god, something to do with Noah, right after the flood, a story that is both impossible and stupid. But in the middle ages something like one in every ten would die each year.

Tell that to all those who end their life’s of pain and suffering at Dignitas.

Tell that to all those animals who feel very real pain and fear, who meet their fate at the teeth of predators.

You must first prove god’s existence, you must then prove your god’s existence. You can do neither.

Jason my friend,

First of all if I was able to rationally prove the existence of G-d and the truth of the Torah do you have enough courage to change your life? Are you on this website because you actually are denying the truth of your upbringing or are you just trying to punish your parents? As Pink Floyd once said, “You bought a guitar to punish your Ma”.

Are you angry at G-d or are you angry at your own life and the way it has worked out so far? Are you feeling loved or unloved in this world?

Of all your friends and relatives, how many are currently in the hospital? Why is it that so few people you know are in the hospital? Why are the vast, vast majority of people in the world not in the hospital? How many people dropped dead on your block today?

As the musician Regina Specktor once said, “No one laughs at G-d in the hospital.”

What is going on here! I mean according to you the world is not overly kind. Gosh, then it would seem that most people just cant even get up and walk, brush their teeth, eat breakfast, play baseball, make love, sing, dance, eat dinner, belch and everything else in between? Why is that most people on the planet (even if you include places like Angola) can do all of these things?

Could it be perhaps, that the world is overwhelming kind?

“Regina Specktor once said” ROFL, lots and lots of people do say fuck god in hospitals though.

>Torah do you have enough courage to change your life?

Mitch, you don’t know a thing about my life. You also have no clue how much suffering I have or have not endured, or how much courage I have or don’t have.

Do you have the courage to change your life if something you hold true due to an accident of birth was actually false? That’s the real question.

I would have loved it were god real when I was looking for him. Sadly he isn’t, and to say so takes more honesty and courage than you can imagine. You were born into it, we make the changes buddy.

>Could it be perhaps, that the world is overwhelming kind?
Nah that’s not it, we evolved to do all that and lots more..

You don’t seem to be making that many life changes though, you listen to kol isha!!

JK

First of all, I was not born into it. Very far from it actually. Public school all the way through. I chose it all by myself–thank G-d.

I do not think what you are doing takes honesty and courage. I think it takes cognitive dissonance. That is not courageous.

I find it very hard to buy that in your heart of hearts you believe the whole world formed through some cosmic evolutionary accident. If you do, then I would suggest you give up your drivers license and voting rights as you are no more valuable than an amoeba in a swamp.

Face it my friend. You are angry. You are full of hate towards some creepy “religious” people you may have met. I have met quite a few myself. What can you do??. Its galus.

Whoever wronged you in the past will pay the price eventually. That does not mean you have to take it out on the Big Guy.

Now that you think we have evolved and somehow you wound up a human and not a goldfish in a ziplock bag does that mean that there are no rules, no laws, no right and wrong? Do you do whatever you want? Are you totally free or do you feel like a dog that’s been beat too much so you spend half your life just covering up?

What are the underlying taivas that are fueling this “angst”. Hmmm…I wonder….

emes rocker,
i hope that your boat never gets rocked. i mean that sincerely.
the point of my piece was not whether god exists or not. whatever we decide to believe it is just that, a choice. and we make that choice based on many factors. i’m sorry that you are incapable of understanding the last sentence – “It was only many many years later, many sacrifices later, many children and grandchildren later, and a small fortune wasted, that I let myself accept what I had discovered at the young age of five: the knowledge, deep in my bones that the God I was trained to love and trust was not worthy of either”.

Your darkness is shining forth and it radiates like cold shafts of broken glass.

Its long lonely road when you do not think you are going anywhere.

I wish you love, tranquility and happiness.

EMES

>I find it very hard to buy that in your heart of hearts you believe the whole world formed through some cosmic evolutionary accident.

You would need to study evolution properly before you would be able to understand that.

JK,

Now that it is spring, please go outside and find me one tree that has two branches directly above one another. Notice that all branches on every tree have direct access to the sun. If not they would die. Please find me one tree that is not arranged this way.

How is it possible that this was programmed into the seed of every tree? What is the math equation that can produce such a wonder?

Please enlighten me with your evolutionary studies.

It is not true that there is not one tree arranged that way, there are plenty, since shoot apical meristem placement is in some plant species simply random, although the lower branches may not thrive and will wither away due the lack of CO2 production in them. In many other species it is is not random but meristem growth is on a spiral scaffold and a golden ratio appears simply because of curved cellular expansion.

It has nothing to do “seed programming” as you suggest. Tree branches may also arise due to stimulation and physiological modification as a result of photoreceptor cells which may activate meristem growth.
The opposite is true as well, “If not they would die” and so they do do just that where they must. if a branch or a leaf in some plant species is now in permanent shade it can undergo abscission or it can in realign itself in another angle.

You know very very little about how complex a process this all is in some ways, nor how simple and uniform it is in others. So instead of repeating Miller’s nonsense here, join a plant physiology course and make an informed judgement. I can recommend a good text book or two if you truly wish to be enlightened.

Jason my friend,

You are clearly far too intelligent to allow your knowledge of science to sway you from the Torah. Clearly your skepticism on spiritual matters and your doubts on the Torah outlook are based on reasons that are much closer to home than your scientific “chiddushim.”

What I am trying to say in a nutshell is that anyone can “geek out” with science textbooks and read all the big words and think they have stumbled across true intelligence. Once you get passed the hyperbole and the academic facade you are still left with the question of Divine Intelligence.

The fact that you can go to any university library and see thousands of science textbooks and never see the word G-d in any of them is a clear proof of their intellectual dishonesty. This by the way, whether you want to admit it or not, is one of the most clever activities of the yetzer hara over the last 100 years to pull people away from G-d. It has done a magnificent job of fooling many of the worlds greatest Jewish minds. We can discuss that some other time though…

As for your comment that I am just spewing Rav Millers “nonsense”. (apparently you have rather large shoulders! Smarter than Rav Miller, wow I would love to meet you!!) Again, I challenge you to go outside your home and find me a tree whose branches are directly on top of each other and blocking the other from the sun. You have not done that yet. You can post the picture when you find one.

Here is a little more details about trees: Go outside, enjoy the weather and check it out yourself!

Simple rules of growth can lead to interesting patterns in the way trees grow and branch. No two trees grow exactly alike. Within any tree some branches are thicker and some form odd shapes and wiggles. The leaves may form an umbrella-like cluster to get the most out of sunlight. The way a tree grows and branches is determined partly by its genome, but mostly by its interactions with the environment. Each branch somehow knows how to shape itself to get the maximum sunlight. The growth of such a tree is self-organized, and the shape it takes is an emergent property of the tree-environment. .

Complex branching patterns can be induced by a simple set of rules that are applied to the components of the tree. The pattern is dependent on mutual interactions between the components and the environment as well as on life-time selection. “Life time selection” is the intrinsic “intelligence” that each tree is filled with. It is a vast internal mechanism that allows the the patterns to dynamically modify itself based on these interactions (self-organization) and leads to emergent properties (bends, clusters, umbrellas, varying thickness paths). Variety stems from the complexity of the tree’s environment. A slight variation in the position of a shade may cause an entire branch to disappear or new branches and turns to appear.

It is as if there is a supercomputer within the tree sending out instructions to enable the tree to have the utmost maximum efficiency.

It is clear that each seed that creates a tree as wondrous as this is something that could not have possibly created itself. The set of instructions in the tiny seed would fill hundreds of textbooks. Nothing as complex as a tree seed could ever possibly randomly appear. It is a statistical impossibility.

Sorry to be so blunt but it is really out of love. If you want to ruin your life in this world and the next because you are unable to see this obvious truth then you might not be chiyiv because you are possibly a halachic shoteh.

emes,
ok, ok. i give up.
jesus is lord.

http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_what_is_plagiarism.html

Emes, plagiarism is fraud. Fraud here compounded by the fact that his conclusion is the exact opposite to yours even if you may not understand why. You are clearly out of your depth here.

Religion makes good people do bad things…

Judaism is not a religion. So it must be something else that causes me to do bad things.

“Life time selection” is the intrinsic “intelligence” that each tree is filled with. It is a vast internal mechanism that allows the the patterns to dynamically modify itself based on these interactions (self-organization) and leads to emergent properties (bends, clusters, umbrellas, varying thickness paths).

Yep Emes, isn’t natural selection just marvellous. But fraud is still fraud and Judaism a religion.

I read the essay. Didn’t have time to read all the comments yet. I just discovered this site. Yes, brought back a flood of memories. I didn’t see the crying every day, just the intense sadness that hung over her like a wet blanket. Still does. Our parents, Holocaust survivors, Chassidic, how they coped, how we coped. I lived in Williamsburgh when we first came to America. I now recall being surrounded by Holocaust survivors. I spoke Magyar, Yiddish and Spanish I learned from Chico, the boy next door.

The younger folk don’t know these people as well. They are your grandparents and great grandparents. We recall. How our beloved (I loved my father, my mother, that’s another story) plodded on, but the remnants and scars of the Shoah are all around us. That personifies our generation, we the Second Generation, the doomed baby boomers. How we survived this, those of us who did so successfully and went out in the world, that’s a miracle.

I used to think. All that fervent love of God. It’s masked. It’s anger, deep rage, suffused. If I am not pious, it’ll happen again. All that davening, the constant davening my 96 year old mother engages in now all day long.

“All that fervent love of God. It’s masked. It’s anger, deep rage, suffused. If I am not pious, it’ll happen again. All that davening, the constant davening my 96 year old mother engages in now all day long.”

i still can’t understand that. having gone through what they went through. is it a variation of the stockholm syndrome?

U ppl. Make.me.laugh. God exists whether u like it or not. U can choose to live with god or just live a meaningless life. Like emes said look at the world explain it to me how this “happened” it doesnt make sense any other way. I didnt have a solid youth to put it mildly but I am still firm.in my belief of god because if someone does u wrong its that persons mistake. God doesnt make any mistakes. Hes perfect. And he wants us to have a perfect life. Ita the attitude. My life is what I call perfect. If u would livw it u woukd say a horror story but its all a matter of attitude so chevra feow up and stop being in denial it wont help for very long. God will remind u and I wish u all many happy urs in whatever path u chose for urself in life

rikki,
whatever gets you through the day.
i think that you missed the point of what i wrote.
i didn’t say that i deny god’s existance. maybe god exists and maybe not. but if god exists i can’t love or trust that god.

Rikks, I don’t so much have a problem with your beliefs. But could you, um, maybe get an education. It can’t hurt, you know. Learn to write, spell, pick up some grammar, that sort of thing?

Okay, Alright already with you two. “I don’t believe in the G=d you don’t believe in either.” Is all you are saying. And why blame G=d for man’s yetzer ha ra; his evil impulse; it took millions of allied troops to stop the Yetzer Ha Rahs of the Germans and some Europeans, evil of that magnitude had to be stopped. And by the way 91 members of my family died in the Shoah; mom was mashugenah from it, but we never blamed G=d for it, as far as I could tell Hitler and the German people perpetrated this evil genocide. And who cares if you believe in G=d or not, there are 613 mitzvot and only a few deal with belief in G=d and by the way, the atheist and Deist, each have a 50/50 chance of being right. And if the atheist wakes up after death and finds out there is a G=d, he will say, oops, I’m sorry, and the person who believes in G=d will be happy, and if there is no G=d then there probably wouldn’t be an afterlife so then there would be nothing anyway, so what’s the big discussion here?