Atheists are Wrong and Evil!

LOL!

Now This Torah is Exciting!

Let me explore this bright Torah!

Torah Bright, the most famous Australian Snowboarder:

Damn, she is a mormon. I guess that explains her first name though.

Another Awful Amnon Yitzchak Moment

In the clip below, so aptly put together by NuBemet, Amnon Yitzchak is asked a question by a 17 year old kid. The kiruv clown shows his true face: a smug, condescending idiot.

The question was a simple one: All scientists believe that the world is older than about 5770 years old, so doesn't this contradict the Torah?

Amnon's answer is basically that everyone agrees at least that the world is at least 5770 years old, whereas there are doubts about the scientific estimates made, so why not stick with what we know for sure?

This, of course, is an extremely weak argument and at best a play of words. It also makes me wonder why he doesn't use Gerald Schroeder's more sophisticated arguments like the one he published on Aish haTorah's website. I guess he is afraid his viewers won't understand them or he doesn't understand them himself (likely option for someone with such a track record of lousy answers).

Even more interesting is his premise that the Torah says that the world is 5700+ years old. Where does it say that in the Torah? It is brought in Seder Olam Rabbah, but it is not an article of faith anywhere whatsoever.

If Amnon manages to convert tens of thousands of people to his primitive, fundamentalist beliefs, what does this say about his followers?

Wednesday posts

Excellent post by Larry Tanner called Do You Really Believe in an Afterlife? with an excellent question to ask your local kiruv clown:

Imagine you have a blue pill and a red pill, and you must swallow one of them right now and not the other. 

If you take the red pill, you will die immediately. If there is an afterlife, all your sins will be pardoned and you will spend eternity there. If there isn’t an afterlife, you will just be dead.
If you take the blue pill, you will live a long, happy, and fulfilling life on Earth. You won’t die early of illness or injury. You will be an asset to society. But if there is an afterlife, you will not partake in it when you die. When you die you will cease to exist, even if there is an afterlife for everyone else.

Which pill will you choose?

 Study probes religious teens' sexual guilt (YNet), via FailedMessiah.com:

Asif was relying on testimonies by interviewed teens. One of them described his emotional reaction to watching pornography as "a feeling of self-loathing, inability to be in close proximity with myself, repulsion from being with myself, nausea, vomiting, and general disgust".

Another described religious quandaries: "Every time I battle the urge, I don't know how to describe it, I feel pressure, fear… waiting for the punishment to come already because I know I deserve it."

Please Bring a Photo of Your Inner Beauty for the Shadchan, by OnionSoupMix, responding to an article about eating disorders in the religious community:

That whole article is so incredibly ironic in light of  the kiruv machine's continuous insistence that following the laws of tznius will ensure that  women are valued for their inner beauty

Who wrote the Zohar? Not Rashby, by DovBear, citing 8 reasons why it was not written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai:

There's a book we call the Zohar that is attributed to someone who lived long ago. For those unfamiliar with the background, the Zohar is a work of Jewish mysticism alleged to have been written in the second century by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (ie Rashby) and passed, teacher to student, until the 13th century when Moses de Leon published it.

Tuesday Posts

Lakewood’s Reasons for Supporting the Vos Iz Neias Ban on FrumFollies:

Otto Von Bismarck once quipped, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” Bans are like sausages, a melange of ingredients that are only held together by the casing of the final printed product. If you want to understand a ban disregard the text. Pay attention to the players who came together to stuff the casing and then sell the sausage. This ban is about factional politics. It is about Vito Lopez and David Greenfield against Dov Hikind and some other politicians. It is aboutMatzav and Yeshiva World News attacking a very successful competitor, Vos Iz Neias. It is about the business interests of BMG. It is about politics, not about tzniusor kovod hatorah.

Eating disorders a problem among haredim on Ynet:

Israel has one of the highest rates of anorexia, bulimia and binge eating in the world, said Dr. Yael Latter of the University of Haifa. No organization tracks the numbers of eating disorders among Jewish women, which experts say is partly because of a cultural reluctance to divulge the illness. Studies in different countries and Latzer's research, however, indicate a high rate in Israel.

Reversing the Hierarchy on Rationalist Judaism:

For anti-rationalists, the Gedolim are much more important than the Rishonim. But even the Gedolim are only respected and followed insofar as their views concord with what the anti-rationalist himself considers legitimate. Amazingly, the hierarchy of rabbinic authority that they loudly claim to be true, is the complete opposite of the one that they actually follow. 

A Narrow Bridge, film about Sexual Abuse in the Frum Community now on YouTube via FailedMessiah:

Not very professional but, hey, it's a start.