Question

During the podcast, 5 points became clearer to me that bother me about your position.
A. Why, in your view, is external/psychological influence on our perceptions and opinions irrelevant to a discussion with a person? In many cases there are two persuasive arguments, each with a certain truth to it, and in the end you choose a particular side based on your inclination and your intuition. Sometimes this already happens at the stage of the premise of the argument, which is entirely based on a subjective feeling. And so the debate shifts from “is the claim true or not” to “do you really hold this opinion, or are you influenced, in which case there’s no point in discussing it with you.” Sometimes these are just speculations, but if there is a clear indication that the person is influenced (for example, someone who has never changed his positions since the day he was born and will always justify the opinions of the society he lives in), that should definitely carry weight in the discussion. We’re not always analyzing issues in the abstract; sometimes we’re discussing what our opponent’s real outlook actually is.
B. Why do you always remove responsibility from leaders and influential figures? In the current podcast you mainly argued that the responsibility lies with the individual person, but in other cases too you removed responsibility from the influencing side. For example, in the issue of surrogacy and Merav Michaeli. Many people were angry at her because while she fiercely opposed surrogacy procedures and caused many parents to live with infertility, she herself underwent such a procedure. You argued, on the other hand, that whoever chose not to have children did so of their own accord, and that Michaeli had no hand in the matter. I wonder whether consulting a doctor of physics, a rabbi, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is not, in essence, similar to consulting a physician, and perhaps even more serious than that. People seek advice because they think they are consulting an educated, learned person who has read, thought, and delved into the issue far more than they have, and therefore if that person presents an opinion they are uncertain about, or even one they do not themselves agree with, they sometimes subordinate their decision to that opinion, since it supposedly comes from someone whose understanding surpasses their own. If so, why remove responsibility from that authority?
C. You said that you think religious experiences are, for the most part, illusions. The question is: in order to reject something, isn’t it advisable and necessary to experience it first? We’re talking here about experiences on many levels, of millions of people around the world. How can one make such a determination? After all, for the same reason you argue that one cannot reject the experience the Jewish people had at Mount Sinai, because we ourselves did not experience it.
D. Regarding Asperger’s: I didn’t understand whether you said it sarcastically. Do you really think the ideal human being is a robot? A human being is a social creature, one who affects others and connects. As far as I’m concerned, if someone comes to a meeting exactly at 7:00 but leaves at 7:30 while we’re in the middle of an important conversation, just because we agreed it would last exactly half an hour, then he is a defective person. As a robot he is perfect; as a human being he has a very serious bug. Maybe this explains the previous 3 sections. In your eyes, emotions are a bug, religious experiences are an illusion, external influences on discussions are irrelevant, and our decisions are always rational and there is no responsibility for an outside authority figure—because we are basically robots, and if we don’t behave like robots it’s because we are lacking, but that lack should not be taken into account in discussions or in how we conduct our lives. But I think (and it seems to me like a reasonable thing to think) that emotions are an important tool that drives the world, and they are the human being. They are not secondary and not a deficiency in a person. And if, for example, we do not develop our emotional system and do not know how to read other people’s emotions correctly, then we also won’t be able to influence others (even though that is what reason says to do), so by definition that would not be the right thing.
E. A topic that has been discussed to death: miracles. You said everything is statistics. So I just wanted to note that, speaking of statistics, read what intelligence people said about the night of the drones from Iran: Omer Ellali, a strategic intelligence researcher, formerly an intelligence researcher in Military Intelligence and in the Prime Minister’s Office, in interviews on Channel TOV and on the Epoch website:
“There was an unprecedented success here of the aerial defense systems. We’re talking about between 85% and 95% success rates. On the global level there is no other system like this, that reaches an 85% interception success rate. Parallel estimates for similar systems in the world speak of a 20% interception success rate. That’s the gap.”
Development of the Arrow missile system began in 1990, and since then only two ballistic missile interceptions have been made with it, both in the current war. That means that the first time the system went onto the field and dealt with a real threat from the moment it was developed was on Saturday night. According to him, “It’s like someone who hasn’t played basketball for 20 years going up to a game against Michael Jordan and beating him 20-0.”
“I’m a software engineer, and I know what it means to develop something and move it from the development environment to the production environment. There’s no way you put something this significant into production, after so many years of development, without bugs. And here not only were there no bugs, but the results were unprecedented in world history. So a religious person will say this was a miracle, and a non-religious person will say this is science fiction, but it’s something that lies between those two extremes,” said Ellali.
These remarks join statements published in the name of Dr. Mordechai Avitbul, an electro-optics engineer and doctor of physics, who claimed that this was a more obvious miracle than the War of Independence and the Six-Day War: “The great number of events that had to be handled, when each missile or drone is handled independently, multiplies the chance of error. Even with all the high technologies, the expectation was that the defense of the skies of the State of Israel would be breached. What happened was that everyone, absolutely everyone—the pilots, the system operators, and the technology operators—acted as one person at one moment in complete unity. If that is not a divine act, then I no longer know what a miracle is.”