Fear is at the Root of Fundamentalism

Fear of uncertainty.
Fear of ambiguity.
Fear of meaninglessness.
Fear of insignificance.
Fear of death.

Letting Your Opponents Save Face

The other day, I was driving on the highway and I witnessed what was almost a very bad accident. The car ahead of me was driving normally when suddenly, a large pickup truck to his right turned right at it, apparently shifting lanes without looking. The car swerved evasively to the left, rocking back and forth, almost spinning out and just barely maintaining control. It was clear to me, an unbiased observer, that the truck driver was entirely at fault.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the truck driver screaming and gesturing furiously at the other driver. The car driver, with his great reaction, saved them both from a terrible accident at 70 mph, but the truck driver instantly convinced himself the other guy was at fault.

The fact is, people don't want to be wrong. They'll lie to you and even to themselves to maintain the illusion that they're right, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Early on in my blogging career, I tried to get people to admit that they were wrong. This was almost always counterproductive as people will often do everything in their power to avoid admitting that. They'll spin, bend, contort, and outright lie in order to save face.

Now I just make my points and move on. I know that people aren't going to admit I've changed their minds, but that maybe in the future, they'll accept my argument. They might maintain, of course, that they've always believed my argument, in order to preserve the illusion that they were never wrong while bringing their beliefs more in tune with reality.

We see this transition often in theists who begin to think for themselves. Their views change radically, but they find ways to pretend they've been consistent throughout. Maybe it's a good thing that someone can go from worshiping Pat Robertson's Big Daddy in the Sky to Bishop Spong's atheism-with-a-different-name or from young-Earth creationism to barely-theistic evolution while thinking themselves consistent.

For a long time, I was frustrated with the slipperiness of the word "God." Now I'm thinking maybe it's a good thing. Better reasonable people who believe in "God" than a nation of fundamentalists who believe in "God." If defining words so loosely they barely mean anything is the price we pay for such improvement, it might be worth it.

The Torah, Pedophilia, and Subjective Morality

Here is a list of sexual acts banned explicitly by the Torah in Leviticus 18:

1. Uncovering the nakedness of one's close kin, which includes your father, mother, step-mother, sister, half-sister, granddaughter, step-sister, aunt, daughter-in-law, or any woman and her daughter.


2. Marrying two sisters.


3. Uncovering the nakedness of a woman "as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness." (KJV.)


4. Lying with your neighbor's wife.


5. Ejaculating into a fire for Moloch.


6. Lying with a man as with a woman.


7. Bestiality.

Have you noticed that pedophilia isn't among them? The Torah spends 14 verses spelling out whose nakedness one may not uncover, and even a whole verse forbidding ejaculation for Moloch, but not one word against pedophilia. Nor is premarital sex explicitly prohibited. Finally, it offers no age of consent for either sex or marriage.

The Talmud later corrects some of these omissions, of course. A girl can't be married until age 3 or 12, depending on what page you're reading. Still, it's interesting to note that the document Jews point to as the source of objective morality contains not a single word against pedophilia.

It's obvious to me that pedophilia is worse than every sexual offense mentioned explicitly in the Torah, as I think it's obvious to most Orthodox Jews as well. I believe this is evidence that despite claims of objective morality stemming from the Torah, people turn to subjective morality in cases where the "objective" version is lacking or incorrect.

Edit: It doesn't mention rape, either! In other words, although the Torah bans sex during a woman's period and male homosexual sex, it does not explicitly forbid what any reasonable person would say are clearly the worst two sexual offenses: pedophilia and rape.

Why We Can't Win in Iraq and Why Israel Can't Defeat the Palestinians or Lebanese

I've realized over the last few years that Americans have some misguided notions of how war works these days and this is the cause of some of our bad decisions regarding war. The War Nerd has an excellent piece about asymmetric warfare which is applicable to Iraq as well as most of the conflicts in the world, including Israel's struggle with the Palestinians and its neighbors.

Too many Americans and right-wing Israelis are still under the impression that you can win asymmetric wars by killing your opponents. (I'm looking at you, Ezzie.) The reality is that they only need a "few hundred urban guerrillas" if they have civilian support. You'll never kill enough of the enemy that they can't muster a few hundred bloodthirsty young men. Asymmetric wars are un-winnable. We should have learned that in Vietnam. We could -- and did -- easily take out Saddam and his conventional military. We're just wasting our time, lives, treasure, and goodwill trying to defeat the insurgency.

His summary:

1. Most wars are asymmetrical / irregular.

2. In these wars, the guerrillas / irregulars / insurgents do NOT aim for military victory.

3. You can NOT defeat these groups by killing lots of their members.

In fact, they want you to do that.

4. Hi-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.

5. "Hearts and Minds," meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.

6. Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: "my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.

Some excerpts:

[Old-fashioned] wars are rare, and going to get rarer. Because there's a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn't require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don't need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge -- and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of...

Most of the "armies" in the world right now avoid battle and focus on killing civilians. This is the hardest thing for Americans to understand: armies that don't aim at victory and actually avoid battle...

[You cannot win by killing the enemy.] In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered...

[Lo-tech beats high-tech.] If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. After two years, those simple weapons are still effective -- and they're actually getting lower- and lower-tech...

Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing...

We have a problem with the Iraqi Sunnis. There are about seven million of them. All you need for an effective insurgency is a few hundred urban guerrillas (with a much bigger base of civilian supporters). So they're never going to run out of young men. And no overwhelming force short of neutron bombs will solve the problem...

[People don't care about democracy.] Look around the world and you'll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet's one big San Quentin. All they want is for their gang to win. If they have any ideology beyond that, it's more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that's exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They didn't want peace, democracy or any of that shit. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these "civilians" and lost 18 Rangers and Delta operators. And the Somalis made the anniversary of that fight a national holiday. It's worth giving a moment to let that sink in: these people fought to the death against overwhelmingly superior US forces, because they wanted their clan to win by starving rival clans to death.

Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that People are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: we're tribal critters. We'll die for the tribe. More to the point, we'll kill for it. We don't care about democracy. And I'm not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia, I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists. We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers.

Who Causes More Jews to Leave Orthodoxy? Me, or Cross-Currents?

Assuming blogs have any significant impact at all, I wonder sometimes which blogs do the most to cause people to leave Orthodoxy. Is it skeptical blogs like mine or religious ones like Cross-Currents?

They've been on a roll the last couple days.

Shira Schmidt, not content to merely juxtapose homosexuality with bestiality, goes one further:

With deep psychological insight the Midrash points out that God did not regret his Creation even when, in the era of Noah, homosexuality and bestiality took place. He did not bring the Flood upon the world because homosexual couples conducted parades. Rather, the last straw was when they drew up contracts conferring the veneer of normality on aberrant behavior.

The Midrash rabba observes: "The generation of the Flood was not blotted out from the world until they wrote marriage deeds for males and males, and males and beasts, thus fully legalizing such practices."

That's right. With "deep psychological insight," the Midrash "observes" that God destroyed the world because of gay marriage (and, of course, man-beast marriage, which I'm sure was all the rage back then.)

Next, Yitzchok Adlerstein argues that Ted Haggard was less of a sinner than an openly gay person:

As long as we are uncomfortable with our sin even while committing it, we are better off than those who welcome it into their homes as a welcome guest.

Finally, Yaakov Menken implies that God Himself caused the parade to be canceled:

This is the third time that the parade has been canceled due to other demands on police resources, the latter two having been entirely unforeseeable. Mere coincidence? You decide.

Wow. If I were still an Orthodox Jew, I'd tell them to pipe down for fear of scaring off the others.