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July 15, 2008

Philanthropy: Being Deceived for a Good Cause (Audio)

General Jewish Thought

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Article

G-dless Goodness (1966)

The question is often posed to us, sometimes by ourselves: can I not be good without being religious? Is it not possible to be decent without accepting all the minutiae of religion? Is not good behaviour sufficient without observance of all the rituals? That question has recently been answered ‒ in a sophisticated fashion ‒ by a number of theologians who have declared ‒ borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, the German philosopher ‒ that “G‑d is dead.” This means that G‑d has no relations with our world, that He is unconcerned with man, and that therefore He is irrelevant and meaningless. Hence, they conclude, we must construct a morality in human terms ‒ without reference to traditional religion; we must devise a secular ethic and propound a G‑dless goodness.How shall we respond, we who | are believing and observing Jews, we who deny that — Heaven for-bid — "G-d is dead,” but who insist instead, on affirming un-dying faith in the Torah’s Elohim hayyim, the living G-d of the Bible?First, we cannot deny that there are good people who do not believe in G-d. We have all met such people in our own personal experience. However, Judaism maintains that such goodness can-not last forever. The moral instincts that prevail today among the non-religious are but the residue of a religious reser-voir which is rapidly drying up. They are living off the ethical I interest from the quickly dwind-ling religious capital of two or three generations qgo.For ethical living is the branch of a tree of life, of which the roots are religion. When you cut off the root, the branch does not wither immediately, but eventually it must die. So, ethics is a natural consequence of religion. Reject religion, and within a few generations ethical living and ׳ moral instincts must die as well. .Why Good ... and to what extent?Secular ethics, G-dless goodness, is inadequate for yet another reason, as the late Dr. Isidor Epstein has pointed out. It simply is not inwardly compelling. There comes a time when…
General Jewish Thought

Note

Philo 18 (1971)

Add the following to discussion of Maimonides on Free Will and Determinism. Maimonides distinguishes between actional attributes, which may be positive, and essential attributes, which are all negative – such as: existence. Not only with regard to scriptural attributes, but even the four intellectually conceived attributes (life, power, knowledge, will) are actional. Hence, all of them must be accepted as homonyms, and their use is strictly equivocal. Therefore, when we speak of knowledge as applied to God and as applied to man, they are of different orders of meaning, and have nothing in common but the word itself.
General Jewish Thought

Speech

Kavod Habriyot (1988)

Rabbi Lamm explores the topic of human dignity in Jewish law and thought.
General Jewish Thought