Ugh

As a follow-up to that same question: did you research other religions with the same effort that you researched Judaism? Did you try to give them a chance? I mean in terms of investing in the material and so on, not giving them a chance emotionally, since as stated that’s more complicated

I understand you’re not satisfied. You were probably expecting a knockout answer. That’s the childishness I was talking about in the previous message.
And as for your current question: no. But I didn’t investigate Judaism very deeply either. I study it a lot, but that’s not part of the inquiry into whether it’s true. I didn’t devote much time to that inquiry (see in The First Available the relation between the discussion of God’s existence and the discussion of Judaism). A person has to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, and it’s impossible to go through all the available options (all religions). So you do what seems reasonable, and that’s it. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not come with excessive demands upon His creatures, and the Torah was not given to ministering angels.
Moreover, as I wrote there, it also doesn’t matter all that much who is right here. The exclusive discourse that rules others out is for internal needs. If a person does the best he can to serve God, it’s likely that he will receive the appropriate treatment, even if he made a mistake. And in general, it’s possible that he didn’t make a mistake. Every person serves God according to what he understands, and that obviously also depends on the environment in which he was raised.
Now probably another “ugh” is coming…

I never understood this argument. In any case, if there is a true faith, then there are people who belong to it. To say that the low probability shows that my judgment is probably wrong and that I probably think what I think only because of my environment makes any discussion of faith pointless.

With God’s help, 24 Kislev 5784

To Avi—greetings,

As for your question, why not examine the other religions, which are the majority, before accepting Judaism, which is the minority?

A. The monotheistic religions whose believers number in the hundreds of millions—Christianity and Islam—are offshoots of Judaism. Why look for imitations that filled the world with violence and cruelty when we have the original?

B. Christianity and Islam are based on claims of revelation to their founders, witnessed only by a few. By contrast, the divine revelation at Sinai was witnessed by millions, who passed on what they saw to their children and descendants, who preserved the tradition that imposed upon them a heavy yoke of commandments and hatred from the nations, and through all the trials the nation remained faithful.

C. The spread of Christianity and Islam was imposed by powerful regimes in which these religions were the ‘state religion’ and their opponents were suppressed and persecuted. By contrast, Judaism flourished, preserved its strength, and even influenced all of humanity דווקא in situations of weakness and fragmentation. This is also evidence of the credibility of its messages in the eyes of the members of the nation, and also evidence of the power of the God of Israel, who ‘guarded His lamb against seventy ravenous wolves’ that sought to destroy it.

Regards, Fish”l

As for pagan religions, there’s nothing to talk about at all in a world where we see that the same uniform laws of nature operate from the largest stars down to the smallest particles. The uniform law testifies to ‘one ruler of the palace.’

It should also be noted that precisely because we are a minority that needs to defend its position before the ruling majority, the sages of Israel were required to grapple constantly with the arguments of the cultures and religions among which they lived. Therefore, when one studies and delves into Jewish thought throughout the generations, one is in effect examining all the counterarguments of the world’s cultures and religions. We “accept the truth from whoever says it,” while sifting out the chaff and the dross.

Regards, Fish”l

Rabbi, do you have a more up-to-date argument regarding peer disagreement than the previous one?
Because the previous one doesn’t seem convincing enough to me, and that’s a problem in the face of postmodernism.

Thanks to all of you, beautiful answers.
The problem I pointed to wasn’t claiming that it’s impossible to check what the truth is, but that it’s very hard to check it. You brought me all sorts of nice proofs for the truth of Judaism, and they definitely strengthen it, but the fact that you found all the proofs in Jewish books and didn’t even bother to check literature from other religions—that’s the problem I was pointing to.
For example, without checking deeply it suddenly turns out that there are laws of Hammurabi that predate and resemble our Torah; that’s an example in relation to claim A.
I remember once seeing a Ben Shapiro debate with an Arab student, and the Arab argued that the Six-Day War was an offensive war intended to conquer more territory and not a defensive war. I remember it really struck me how radically different the narratives can be.

Rabbi Michael’s argument goes in a different direction. The problem is that he says explicitly that he doesn’t know whether Judaism is true; he only hopes that God will judge him according to his sincere intentions