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.