Tag: religion

Why Science?

I think that, if I hadn’t grown up hearing casually about their existence, I would be utterly floored by a lot of miscellaneous facts about the modern world. Humans have set foot on the moon, for one example. Y’know, that little white dot you see at night, that’s much larger than all the other white dots but otherwise still seems pasted onto that blue-black dome of the sky? That’s a place. Humans have been there. Ascended into the heavens on towers of fire, to go where no man has gone before. If you’d waited to tell me about it until I was sentient enough to understand its magnitude, I would have screamed.

I’m not advocating that we stop teaching young children about the moon landing, but I do find it curious that we grow up jaded to all of this.

What you grow up with feels like the way the world has always been. Unless you make a deliberate effort to remember history, you will not realize the smallness of your exact state of partial knowledge about the universe, wherein people have walked on the moon but you don’t yet know how consciousness works. This is a tiny, tiny, infinitesimal slice of history that you are living in right now.

But people don’t realize this, and so it seems like their tiny slice of history is the way the world has always been, instead of being the product of hundreds and thousands of years of human ingenuity, building and building upon itself, increasing exponentially with the advent of the scientific method.

If walking on the moon is a product of Science, and the last thousand discoveries have been the products of Science, it follows that the next thousand discoveries will be likewise, assuming we haven’t found something better by then. This isn’t anything in particular about Science: if the first people to walk on the moon had been, say, Orthodox Jews, who had arrived at the moon by faith in God, and if the past thousand discoveries had likewise been products of faith, I would be saying the exact same thing about Judaism. (Actually, there’s a book with roughly this premise.) It’s not the process, but the results.

But if these results are based in Science, then it seems that we should go about using that, since it’s the process that works. How, exactly, does Science work? By, in essence, knowing Reality so well that we can manipulate it to do what we want. This manipulation can’t be done the way you might manipulate a human: Reality, unlike humans, is both shockingly stubborn and astonishingly consistent. So, we have to play by Reality’s rules, but once we know those rules, we can play to win.

When manipulating a human, being able to come up with clever arguments is infinitely superior to having empirically correct answers. With Reality, this is not so. If you don’t know Reality’s rules, you can do nothing. You cannot persuade gravity; if you step off a cliff you’ll just fall. You cannot persuade gravity; if you try to build a rocket and you don’t take gravity into account, it will simply not fly. Even when you get to something as uncertain as uncertainty—probability theory, to be specific—Reality’s stringent rules don’t cease to apply. If you judge incorrectly under uncertainty, you will get a wrong answer. Unlike with gravity, you may not know it right away, but that doesn’t change the actual correctness of the answer, only your assessment thereof.

People often don’t realize most of this, because they’ve grown up with the products of Science, and so it doesn’t feel like a big deal that we have cool houses and warm clothes and literate populations. But these things have, for the overwhelming majority of history, not existed. It has only been since the Enlightenment that they have become a possibility, and since even more recently that they have actually come into common use.

The difference between Science and faith is not a question of personal preference. It’s a test, where choosing the right answer gets you to the moon, and choosing the wrong answer gets you poisoned by mercury.

Why My Rabbi Asked, “Who Here is an Atheist?”

One morning in autumn many years ago, I was sitting in synagogue with my family. My granddad used to drag us there when he came over for the high holidays. Most of the service was spent on ritual prayers and readings in Hebrew, so I wasn’t paying much attention.

That is, until my rabbi asked a very odd question. “Who here is an atheist? Please raise your hands.”

I blinked in confusion as I watched the hands go up around me. From my vantage point (standing on top of the chair so I could see when the rabbi blew the shofar, which was always my favorite part of every service), I could see that maybe three-quarters of the synagogue had put their hands up.

Seeing the hands of my family raised around me as an indication that it was socially acceptable to do so, I put mine up as well. None of us had ever really believed the God stuff, after all, but I’d always thought we were a minority in this respect. Evidently not.

The rabbi nodded. Though his speech has eroded in my memory, it went something like this. “Faith is a tool to be used towards the goal of doing good deeds. If you wish to use that tool, you may; though I see many of you are not in need of it. But all of us must remember that it is just a tool. If you have all the faith and love for God in the world, but you are cruel to your fellow man, you are not a good Jew. You cannot fall into the Christian trap of worshipping the tool in absence of its purpose; you would not praise a hammer except for its ability to pound in nails.”

I came away from this with the realization cemented in my mind that Judaism is not fundamentally a religion. It is fundamentally an ethnicity and a culture.

If Judaism were primarily a religion, it would have some pretty major problems. For one, Jews aren’t allowed to proselytize: that thing that Christians do where they try to convert you to Christianity, we can’t do that. Nowhere in our holy books does it say that you’ll go to Hell if you’re not a Jew. And the reason for that is another reason that Judaism wouldn’t work well as a major religion: converting to Judaism is really hard. The two main ways of converting are marrying a Jew and being adopted by a Jewish family.

If you look at Judaism as a culture and ethnicity that simply arose from a religion, though, these things make sense. The quality of “Jewish-ness” is within my family, within my bloodline, and unless I choose to marry or adopt you (either of which would add you to my family), I can’t convert you.

Further, all Jews have what’s called right of return. Since I have it, I would be able to immigrate to Israel and gain Israeli citizenship if I wanted to, because it is my homeland, albeit indirectly. This right couldn’t exist if Judaism were much of anything besides an ethnicity.

Because Judaism isn’t primarily a religion, being a good Jew is the same thing as being a good person in general: be kind, don’t break just laws, have good morals, etc. Again, this makes pretty intuitive sense: we can’t be judged against our faith, so the only thing we can be judged against is our morality.

By contrast, when you have an actual religion (I’m going to use Christianity as an example, but I’m not picking on Christians; many religions work this way), there tends to be a problem with morality. A good Christian is someone who puts their love of God first. But sometimes, people tack “to the exclusion of all else” onto the end of that sentence, and the religious leaders don’t seem to mind. Actually, frequently the people who think that way are the religious leaders.

As a result, you have a lot of Christians (some of whom I’ve met) who say they follow Christ, but who seem to have completely missed the whole “love thy neighbor” thing. They were praised for their faith instead of for being a good person.

But, as my rabbi said, you shouldn’t praise the tool in absence of its purpose. Don’t praise faith in absence of its ability to help you be kind.

Explain Your Culture

I answered a lot of questions about culture growing up. As an American Jew, my culture was a minority, so nobody really knew about it. They didn’t know what I believed, what foods I ate on what holidays, what purpose those foods or those holidays had within the culture, etc.

Like many people in minority cultures, I was always happy to answer these questions. My family has had several non-Jews over for our holidays over the years, and when our goyish (informal term for non-Jewish) guests inevitably ask questions about the rituals or foods, we tell them. Once time I brought in kosher macaroons to work for Rosh Hashanah and I got to explain both the holiday and the concept of kosher.

These are highly informal and easy explanations. Our goal isn’t to proselytize—Jews aren’t allowed to proselytize anyway, but even if it was allowed, that’s not our goal so we wouldn’t do it—our goal is simply to educate. For example:

“This little funny hat is called a yarmulka, and men are supposed to wear it to bring them closer to God. Women don’t need to wear them because the ability to give birth brings us closer to God.”

“We prepare these foods because they’re culturally significant, or just because we like them. But we need to make sure that if we make something just because we like it, that it follows our dietary rules for holidays. Those rules are called kosher.”

“Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year. Our holidays run on a lunar calendar, not a solar one, so they shift around on the Christian calendar. And the current Jewish year is 5779, because our years don’t start from the birth of Jesus, they start from the birth of the Jewish race.”

Christians in America have it completely the opposite way. They can practically assume that their culture is ubiquitous, which has a lot of implications.

If your culture is ubiquitous, you never have to explain your holidays. You can just presume that people know about them. You can talk in depth about highly specific issues with just about anyone, because you can presume they have the necessary cultural background. Every business closes its offices in observation of your holidays.

To help my American Christian pals understand what it’s like to not be a cultural majority, consider this.

Imagine you had to ask your boss for time off to celebrate Christmas, which he has never heard of. Imagine driving over an hour to get to the only church in your area, when at the same time there are three different synagogues within a two-mile radius of your house. Imagine your entire culture decides to make Labor Day into a huge celebration, because you’re all sick of not doing anything while the rest of the country celebrates Rosh Hashanah. (This is exactly what happened with Chanukah. It’s actually a very minor holiday that American Jews made into a much bigger deal because they wanted something to do at Christmastime.)

Unless you decide to move to a non-European country, you’re probably not going to experience any of this personally, but that’s fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong or right about being a member of either a majority or minority culture.

There is, however, one thing that members of majority cultures could learn from members of minority cultures: an attitude of explanation.

Growing up Jewish, I never really understood Christianity. Not for any lack of Christians around me, for a lack of Christians around me who were willing to answer questions. People in majority cultures aren’t used to answering simple questions about their culture; if I asked who Jesus was, people would look at me like I’d just said I’d never heard of toilet paper. In their eyes, I’ve just said I don’t know about something they thought was both ubiquitous and completely impossible to live without. By contrast, however, I’ve had a ton of people ask me who Moses is.

Similarly basic question, different culture.

But if every member of a majority culture has this attitude, then the small percentage of the population that wasn’t raised with that culture is left out of the loop. They didn’t learn about the culture growing up, and they never will.

So, the best thing to do if you’re a member of a majority culture is to be willing to answer questions. Even questions that seem like they ought to be obvious.