Are you claiming that a Christian who believes in Christianity will receive reward for that?

You don’t receive reward for belief. Either you believe or you don’t. You receive reward for service. And yes, I’m sure that if there is reward, they too will receive it.

I don’t understand, but if he doesn’t believe in Judaism then he won’t keep the 613 commandments.

And therefore? He is doing what, to the best of his understanding, the Holy One, blessed be He, demands of him. See post 441 on intention and action.

How can the question of who is right not interest you, if in order to serve the Holy One, blessed be He, to the best of your understanding, you first have to figure out who is right?

So doesn’t the Torah say that it will punish you if you worship other gods? That’s what the person believed, no?

So how can the Torah say it will punish for idolatry? That’s what the person believed—what is he guilty of?

Would an atheist also receive reward if he acted according to his understanding?

Oren,
The question interests me personally in order to make decisions for myself. I’m not interested in whether someone else who made a different decision is mistaken or not. That is between him and his Creator.

Menachem,
The Torah punishes someone who does this deliberately. Idol worshipers who truly believed in it are not punished. They are coerced by their understanding. I have explained this here on the site more than once.

N,
There is nothing for which to reward him. For going to the beach on the Sabbath? If he does a moral act, I assume the Holy One, blessed be He, will recompense him, but not as fulfillment of a commandment or as his service of God. A Christian’s commandments are, from his perspective, service of God.

So someone who truly believed in idolatry—the religious court would not execute him? Someone who didn’t believe in the Torah and desecrated the Sabbath would not be stoned?

That seems to be what follows from the Chazon Ish regarding the law of “they are not brought up and not taken down,” Yoreh De’ah 2:16…

The Chazon Ish wrote that today we do not do this (I hope nobody thinks we should), but I was asking about when there was a Sanhedrin. Did they ask the person whether he really believed it or whether his impulse had simply overcome him? That sounds less plausible to me.

Of course. Someone who does not believe is coerced by his understanding. But it does not necessarily follow that they asked, because they clarified it through the formal warning, and there was also a presumption that a Jew believed, and if he sinned it was because of his impulse. The situation of Jews who do not believe as a widespread phenomenon is new.
By the way, they almost never actually executed anyone (perhaps also for my reason), so the question of what they did in practice is also rather hypothetical.

Miki wrote that what matters is that anyone who truly served his god (Jewish/Muslim/Christian) probably will not be punished, and may even benefit from it.
That still leaves a question about “religion” (after all, the overlap between belief and religion is really not complete). Would a Christian (an idol worshiper) who conducted himself as a very religious person and slaughtered Jews in the Crusades because, from his perspective, this was the word of God—not be punished?

But let’s set that aside.

The real question being asked, in my opinion, is the question of “inherited belief,” and that is a very strong question about every religion.
It goes like this:
Miki believes in the God of Israel and in Judaism because he was born Jewish.
It is highly likely that if Miki had been born Muslim, then we would be reading his words on some Muslim blog, basking in the wisdom of the Muslim philosophers (instead of the wisdom of the Sages).

In other words—Miki, you do not have anything serious and objective in favor of the Jewish religion (independently of God). Bottom line, you believe it simply because you were born into it.

If a person did what he was obligated to do to the best of his understanding, then of course he will not be punished. Will a Jew who slaughtered Amalekites by command of the Torah and the prophet Samuel be punished? All of these are coerced (or correct), and therefore are not liable to punishment.

The question of “inheritance” can be raised regarding any position and any opinion. All of these are influenced by the home in which we grow up. So does that mean there are no correct opinions and no correct positions? There are columns on this site about that.
In any case, given your extreme decisiveness, I would have expected somewhat more serious arguments.

Wow
Are you really saying that cruel Christians and Muslims who slaughtered people endlessly and mercilessly will receive reward from God for that?!! That sounds a bit…

Are you reading what I write, or am I violating the prohibition of needless destruction with the keyboard?
I wrote that they will not be punished. Where did I write that they will receive reward?
But to your question, it is possible they will also receive reward. After all, their intention is desirable even if their actions are not, and it is commonly accepted that one receives reward for good intentions.

By the way, why does that sound stranger to you than those who slaughtered Amalekites or Canaanites cruelly because they were instructed by the prophet or by the Torah to do so?

Because I am convinced that I am right and they are wrong. Therefore I will receive reward for fulfilling God’s command, while they are mistaken and should have thought things through, and therefore they will receive punishment. You, on the other hand, are not sure that you are right, and that is why I asked you.
As for the reward, that is how I understood what you wrote at the beginning (and it turns out I was right).

And you are also convinced that the Holy One, blessed be He, is utterly wicked, who comes with complaints against His creatures and does not exempt the coerced from punishment. They are convinced of their view exactly as you are.
I indeed am not convinced of anything, and I also think that anyone who is convinced either is fooling himself or fooling me.

Does the Rabbi think the philosopher in the Kuzari is right?

A quote from Miki’s words regarding future reward and punishment (can be found on Google):

“I have no position on these matters. It seems to me these are speculations, and clearly one cannot know this without a source from heaven. I was not convinced that their source is Sinai or prophecy, and therefore it is possible that these are innovations that arose over the course of the history of Jewish law (for fairly obvious reasons—it solves quite a few difficulties) and became fixed as principles of faith, and therefore I do not know what to say about them.”

On the one hand, you don’t know what to say about them, and on the other hand, you write contradictory things here:
“If a person did what he was obligated to do to the best of his understanding, then of course he will not be punished.”

Miki, even though you write that you are not convinced of anything, if you do not even have a basic position regarding the truth of reward and punishment, it is better not to raise all kinds of guesses and conjectures. After all, you do not even know whether reward and punishment in the World to Come are real, so how have you already reached conclusions about how God operates?

Regarding inherited belief, my decisiveness was not about “Judaism is true” or “Islam is not true” or “Christianity is definitely true.”
My decisiveness was that someone who grows up in a certain environment and chooses religion will, with a probability close to 100%, grow up to mirror his environment.

Maimonides’ explanations (or those of any Christian or Muslim philosopher)—some are good, some are not convincing.

It may be that the Christian’s argument against the possibility of an Oral Torah received at Sinai is excellent.
On the other hand, the Jewish religion also has nice arguments of its own, and if you read arguments of philosophers from Islam’s golden age you will also find nice things in favor of the Islamic religion.
And vice versa—everyone has less good arguments too.
One thing is nearly certain—no one is objective.
I can show many weak points in your fifth notebook (if I remember correctly, that is the one that shows why specifically the Jewish religion), and it is easy to see that you are not objective and are entirely biased.

But that is for another discussion.

Why is it impossible that He comes with complaints against His creatures? In our reality, we see that a person who puts his hand in fire gets burned even if he did not know that. Why, in another world or in spiritual reality, can there not be something similar? Why should God separate the reality here from metaphysical reality? How does the Rabbi infer this?

A wicked person is defined relative to his condition in behavior according to God’s laws (at least in classical religious terminology), and therefore God decides what counts as wicked and He cannot be wicked.
He can also determine in advance who goes to heaven and who goes to hell arbitrarily. That is in fact what the Calvinists claim.
I do not see a logical problem here.

Rabbinic literature also sees those gentiles as wicked (just as many Christians see the Jews as wicked), even though they acted in the name of God. Likewise, idol worshipers presumably also believe in their religion. I do not understand how a person can worship idols because of impulse.

Dvir,
In what respect?

Parve,
You are not reading what I write, but entrenching yourself in your nonsense. There is no point in continuing.

A,
Nature operates according to fixed laws. But reward and punishment, if they exist, are carried out by decisions of the Holy One, blessed be He. Decisions are supposed to be made justly. That is how He Himself testifies about Himself (“A God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He”), and that is also what He demands of us. As for the logical problems you mentioned, this is not a question of logic. There is no logical problem with anything. The question is what is true, not what is consistent or contradictory.
Worship of idols because of impulse is described by the Sages and in the Hebrew Bible in several places (such as the aggadah about Manasseh and Rav Ashi, and many others). And your inability to understand it is itself described in the aggadah about the annulment of the impulse for idolatry by the Men of the Great Assembly. Its meaning is that idolatry underwent sublimation over the generations, and now we no longer have such an impulse, and therefore we do not understand a state of idolatry out of impulse. But once, people had an impulse to worship idols even though they knew there was nothing to it. To understand this, I usually compare it to sexual transgression (for example, a married woman). There you can certainly understand that a person would do it even though it is clear to him that it is not right, because his impulse overcame him. That is how it once was regarding idolatry. By the way, in that same aggadah it is also told that regarding sexual transgressions too, the Men of the Great Assembly annulled the impulse, except for a married woman.

In the Kuzari, the king of Khazaria meets the philosopher, who lays out the religious doctrine that as long as a person sincerely intends to worship God, the path does not matter.
Does the Rabbi agree with this claim of the philosopher in the Kuzari?

No. And I did not write that either. What I wrote is that if a person acts sincerely, they will not come to him with complaints, and perhaps he will also receive reward. That does not mean there is no path that is more true or less true. On the contrary, I wrote that in my opinion it is reasonable that Judaism is truer.

Miki, it’s really cool that you know heavenly accounting.
How awesome that in such a weak generation we have merited a person with immense knowledge of the ways of God!

Friends, for all those who are upset by what Michi writes—that it is possible Christians and Muslims will receive reward if their intention was for the sake of Heaven—there were later authorities (Acharonim) such as Rabbi Jacob Emden who held this view: that any gentile whose religion is for the sake of Heaven, even though he is mistaken, will receive his reward, and he is *close* to the status of one of the righteous among the nations. Rabbi Kook also wrote similarly, that the wise men of the nations of the world, by intellectual reasoning, will merit the persistence of the soul, which the Torah did not define. In practice, there are even hints to this in the verses themselves, which emphasize that Balaam and the people of Sodom, for example, have no share in the World to Come—and that the wicked gentiles who oppressed the Jewish people are judged to Gehenna and destruction—which very plausibly implies that the other side of that same coin is that gentiles who are not wicked like them will not be punished. It is possible that they return to a beneficial persistence of the soul from some endpoint (and some commentators interpreted it that way). This opinion is really not some astonishing and amazing innovation. Although, of course, the opinion that every gentile who erred and did not practice the correct religion will be punished and ultimately cut off—also has sources.
So in the end each person decides according to his straight reasoning. What is wrong with that?

The point was not about the righteous among the nations and their sages. Of course they will receive reward.
The question was about gentiles who did “bad” things in the name of their faith, such as murder and the like. It seems to me that every person has a conscience and basic morality that should make him check thoroughly before brutally cutting someone’s head off. Every court examines things in depth before issuing the death penalty (those that execute). So to say there was no wickedness here but innocence seems far-fetched to me.
If, theoretically, there were a really foolish person who did this out of simple faith, then maybe he would not receive punishment.

“Relatively Rational,” this is just wonderful!

Amazing to discover that suddenly statements of sages (which are not related to Jewish law) are supporting evidence for Michi’s opinion that someone who commits transgressions innocently will not be met with complaints from Heaven.
I was sure Michi held that one cannot really learn anything from the views of the sages aside from Jewish law.

But nice that suddenly this is being used to strengthen his opinion!

Just to emphasize my own view—it does not matter to me what Michi holds: whether someone who killed (innocently) in obedience to God’s command will not be punished or will be punished. That may be an interesting discussion for someone who cares about it, but it makes no difference to me.

What matters to me is that someone at all thinks he knows heavenly accounting in these matters—that is delightful.
And when it comes to Michi, who does not even know whether there is such a concept as “reward and punishment,” then it is pure pleasure indeed!

Sorry for the sarcasm, but things just do not add up.

Parve.
I do not see a contradiction. Michi has written several times on the site that one really cannot know the mechanism of reward and punishment or what goes on in the World to Come. But it is reasonable to assume that there is reward and the persistence of the soul. He also wrote that he thinks it reasonable to assume that someone who is coerced in belief—that is, mistaken and not acting maliciously—will not be punished. There too he wrote that these are his reasonable conjectures—and from his perspective this is also the case regarding reward and punishment among the nations of the world. I did not see in this post any emphatic statement by him that there is 100% reward or that there is 100% no punishment.

I did not come to defend him and present his position. I was surprised why the statement that there is reward also for gentiles surprises so many people, since there were already sages who wrote this. I did not write this in order to argue that if the sages write so then it is necessarily correct, but rather that this is a logically possible reasoning even from the point of view of someone who believes in Judaism. Fact: there were believing Jews who wrote so. Notice that I also wrote at the end that there are sages who say nearly the opposite, so everyone decides according to his own straight reasoning. What is the problem with that?

Menachem Rosenthal

With this view presented by Michi about fundamentalist murderers from among the nations of the world, I agree less. I was more responding to A’s astonishment about the idea of reward for gentiles who are generally mistaken. Though maybe it is not really far-fetched to think that just as people always say there are levels even among the biggest criminals in the Jewish people, maybe there are such levels also among the nations of the world. It is not far-fetched to think there is, in Heaven, a difference between a simple SS soldier or a standard Wehrmacht soldier, for example, and Eichmann and Hitler, in the severity of punishment()