However, I have debated with many Christians and they all insist that the resurrection is historically well attested to, and the most likely explanation is that it happened.

Fine, let’s say it happened and “Christianity” is the right religion. Perhaps as C.S. Lewis said, “Mere Christianity”. My question is, what does one actually have to do as a Christian? Once they pray for salvation to God, and repent of their previous sins, and accept Jesus’ free gift of full payment for your sins on the cross, then what? Are they saved no matter what they do?

If Paul says that “we are dead to the law” and “the old covenant is obsolete” then what guide *do* we have as to what to do?

Specifically in the areas of masturbation, pornography and premarital sex, can Christians continue to engage in these things as long as they are consensual from all parties?

I challenge any Christians to simply answer these questions in a way that anyone can clearly understand. They should

1. be able to understand what your answer MEANS in specific, actionable terms, for example a vague answer such as “You Must Do God’s Will” can and has been interpreted in a myriad different ways by Christian groups all throughout history, many of which vehemently disagreed with each other

2. be able to trace HOW you derive your answer. Was it from something Jesus taught? Paul taught? Is it based on a translation? Is it something a pastor seems to get out of nowhere?

3. be able to respond to follow-up questions regarding the meaning of terms, and how their answer is affected by things such as: accurate translations of the original text, strong positions on these issues by people in the New Testament, and so forth.

It’s okay if you are not able to do 3, perhaps another Christian will be able to. The goal is to find out what Christians actually have to do, and why they have to do it, without being so vague as to mean practically anything. Things like “you are rebelling against God” can and have been co-opted to support all sorts of positions from war to abortion to persecution of homosexuals.

In short, we don’t want the following situation:

Picking and Choosing Christian Values

We want knowledge and reasonable explanations!

Paul, I have read many of your essays, and I’ve witnessed the “let’s break hollywood” initiative that you started, and I pretty much know where you stand on the SOPA issue. I also read your interesting analogy between content on the internet and air on the moon/earth. I feel you, I have been in the internet industry myself for many years.

BUT, I wanted to suggest to you what I think is a balanced / practical view of the matter, because you are a man who has a lot of great influence in the startup community, and I think your stance on the copyright issue makes a lot of difference. If any of my viewpoints resonate or affect your position, I think would help everyone.

Our society has grown up with this notion of “copyright” and “patents”. (I do not call them intellectual property because that is a loaded term.) They are simply government-granted monopolies to the authors and inventors, and their original goal is to promote the PROGRESS of science and the useful arts. The goal is to benefit the public.

Today, the situation has largely changed. Software patents in particular should be abolished (as I argue here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2948724 ). However, copyright is quite useful:

* It gives some recourse to blatant plagiarism. I do not think our society is ready for a completely wikipedia-style approach to art. Even Creative Comments licenses have attribution.

* It allows authors to feel that their “intellectual property” will be protected and frees them up to work on it. As a result there is less fear of freeriding — and yes, economic viability. Copyright makes the proprietary publisher / record label / magazine / news outlet model work.

(Note: this reason in no way justifies extending existing copyright durations forward or backward in time. We must fight that practice.)

* Copyright is what gives teeth to copyleft! If you want the biggest reason I think that copyright should exist, it is this: if enough “copyleft” type activities are organized over time, there is a competition between the open source (group-based) products, and the proprietary products like the ones you built with ViaWeb back in the day. Overall society wins from this competition. Over time, open source software can copy everything that the proprietary software does, provided there are enough people to put in this work. In fact the reason we can abolish software patents is because software is already copyright-protected, so to rip off a proprietary app, you need to write it from scratch! So the freerider problem is already solved for software.

Now I get into the one that causes the big controversy: Big Content.

* Copyright can be leveraged to justify big-budget productions, such as hollywood movies, and TV shows. The whole industry has grown up around this. Now, granted, they can command ridiculously high margins, withhold movies for years, and so forth. But this is the free market allowing them to do it. If you want to fight price fixing, fight the cartels that they form. At the end of the day each movie is a product that competes with any other movie. Just because we want to watch a movie, and get instant gratification does not change the economics of it. If the movie cost $20M to make, those bankrolling the movie should expect to have a chance to make a profit. Forcing the content industry to change their entire business model misses the point that laws are supposed to apply across the board. Copyright is certainly useful for helping small indie productions make a profit. You would have to lobby to have the law changed for the big budget productions, and justify why.

(Copyright makes movies, songs, etc. into “products”, which creates a mismatch: physical products have physical distribution and limited supply at each retailer. Songs and movies are just content and can be copied easier than ever. Government has to enforce this unnatural monopoly. But the problem is that for the little guys, copyright does protect them. It is true that every copyright holder, including the big guys with the popular movies, can withhold the content they create from us and artificially control the supply. But this is only painful because we crave their big budget movies, because they are not as interchangeable as we may like.)

. . .

Look, the entertainment industry may have lied about the number of jobs they are creating. The individual may be stuck in the past with their business models. All this is valid criticism. But what we must do is focus on their cartels, their old boys clubs, their culture of trying to sue grandmas with conglomerate agencies like RIAA and MPAA. We should discourage the price fixing they do to get huge margins. With today’s tools, more content can be created by less people, and more cheaply. That means there should be plenty of people competing with Hollywood soon, with Adobe AfterEffects and other new tools helping them. The question is only about the cartels and breaking into the industry. And frankly speaking, similar things exist in the tech space with Google/Facebook/Microsoft buying up companies, and VCs bankrolling startups. It’s just that in tech, there is much more variety and opportunity to do good, besides just delivering content to passive viewers.

If by “let’s break hollywood” you mean let’s break their ego-based, old-boys-club cartels, by all means we should challenge that. But if you mean that we should go after their copyright protections, I do not think there is a way to do it without huge collateral damage to our society.

PS: One last thing - about SOPA.

We all know it sucked. But the concern of the copyright industry was this — US produced movies were being downloaded by US citizens, from foreign sites more and more. Citizens that “might” otherwise pay for the movies (nevermind that they were screwing Netflix and taking their movies away).

I think there is a valid issue here, of enforcement and jurisdiction of the US government. There is a reason a “pirate bay” can’t grow to that size here in the US. It’s because the government takes down domestic sites dedicated to “intellectual property theft” if they are large enough to go after. That is part of the copyright protection.

But, of course, there must be due process. An insignificant pirate hub doesn’t become big overnight, and by the time lots of people know about it, the site can be brought to the attention of the government, and it can be sued. It may have taken years for the site to become that big. What’s another 30 days for due process to take place.

Similarly with SOPA! Personally I called my congressman and suggested the following amendment to SOPA:

When the dept of justice (or whoever is tasked with prosecuting these sites) finds a site, they contact it and issue a invitation to participate in domestic proceedings, and the invitation is good for a certain period (30 days for example). During this time, the site can respond, realize the problem, maybe make amends or reach a settlement. If they do not respond within the time period, then they are considered in default, and US financial institutions, search engines etc. could be compelled block them. However, at any time they can start legal proceedings within the US, and try to get reinstated, until the statute of limitations runs out (a few years).

This would have introduced the proper concepts of due process (inviting them to participate and offer them an opportunity to resolve the matter before taking drastic measures), jurisdiction (only US financial companies would be compelled to stop dealing with them, and possibly search engines, etc.) And IMHO it would be a good compromise.

To everyone reading this — thanks for getting to the end. I guess this letter is as long as one of pg’s essays. I have felt like many people  in the startup community, and I have tried to be open minded and get all the facts. I feel it is vital to bring this to pg’s attention as he and his batch of YC companies have a lot of effect on the world

Courageous and forward-thinking libertarians like Ron Paul follow the idea to its logical conclusion. They decry the “quantitative easing” by the fed (claiming its meddling causes malinvestment by those eager to find alternatives to government bonds), the crony-capitalism (as a result of lobbying and government favoritism), and the increased borrowing by the government (causing long term inflation), in an effort to correct the current perceived problems. The solution, they say, is taken from the pages of oft-overlooked Austrian economics. Trust in the invisible hand of the market — allowing cycles of booms and busts — is preferable to government regulations attempting to solve collective action problems — even the ones that seek to outlaw insider trading, front-running, excessive “vulture” speculation, and so forth. And for the most part, they could very well be right.

However, I want to talk about something else. Something deeper, that has to do with long term trends. The conclusions below are taken from what I wrote to my friends lately, and represent what I’ve come to think on the matter.

The challenge is automation

A lot of our problems today — unemployment, high cost of education, medicine, etc. — can be traced back to automation and increased efficiency by employers. They are problems today, but it is better to frame them as challenges. Since I will speak about long term trends — 10 to 30 years out, what I say below might sound a bit far fetched today.

Socialism in some form is inevitable as automation progresses. The Luddites were right, but they were a few hundred years off. As things become more automated, we will not require people’s services in more and more areas. Robots will become cheaper and more efficient even than workers in China. So, eventually the “jobs” will return to the USA, but in the form of robots.

Capitalism makes sense when things aren’t automated, when the employer honestly needs his workers and the value of their labor is above their cost of living. However, things change with time, as more and more things become automated. The less people are needed to run a company, the more supply there is of available workers, the more wage repression there is for the majority of people (workers). You can try to inject life into their economic lives by borrowing from the future (credit cards, coincidentally taking off in the 80s, gave regular consumers debt instruments to mitigate their situation), but at the end of the day their wages will simply go down, and there will be an ever growing divide between the rich and the poor. This plutocracy will happen because there won’t be enough jobs for average people, and only jobs for highly qualified people. So the average people will have to be supported in a different way than wages.

As usual, stuff has to find its way to the people, to satisfy their needs: air, water, food, shelter, sex, fun, etc. Some people have a very small economic footprint, and these people need a welfare economy to get their needs met. Just because you are not in that group right now, you might think, “out of sight, out of mind”. But as more jobs get automated, a lot of people (especially uneducated people) will become completely redundant in the workforce and they will have a very small economic footprint (not producing or earning much). So inevitably, social programs will grow as technology improves. That doesn’t mean you can’t have capitalism on top of the safety net. It just means no one will die in the street from a preventable disease as a result of not being able to find a job.

We can see some of it today

People who lose their jobs, or don’t have a college degree, find it harder and harder to get new jobs. They just aren’t qualified enough for the new marketplace and its demands. But college education is now too expensive. If only they could learn on the internet (like they increasingly can in many technical fields), and get qualified enough to enter job sectors in which there is a lot of demand… but the universities are currently the gatekeepers for the degrees in many non-software fields, and companies look for these degrees, so I would say the main blame right now can be put on the lack of reform in education.

Do you notice that the cost of everything is becoming ridiculously high in the USA? Take two high-profile professions:

• medicine - http://www.businessweek.com/blogs/money_politics/archives/2009/11/us_medical_pric.html
• lawyers - http://www.quora.com/Why-are-lawyers-so-expensive-even-with-the-excess-supply-of-lawyers

isn’t it a mystery?

Education is tremendously more expensive than before, and some unconventional libertarians have been pointing it out for years. I think it mainly has to do with wage repression, and it’s only going to get worse. Here is an illustrative example:

An average middle-class family sends their kid to med school or law school or whatever. They get student loans they can never even discharge in bankruptcy. So then when they become doctors or lawyers, they start out trying to charge a lot to cover their loans. And the places compete to offer them these positions. Their salaries just go up and up, even though there are tons of unemployed lawyers now.

This feeds a bubble of education, as people try to get those high salaries and go into law school. But it’s unsustainable … there are too many people trying to become lawyers now, who may not have jobs when they graduate. Not only that but automation will make the manual work that lawyers do less and less necessary, so you will have even less jobs for lawyers.

So where will these out-of-work lawyers go? They will live with their middle class parents or do something else. Their services are not required at the moment. They might move out, take a low-paying position and defer their loans as far as they can. At the end, though, something’s gotta give. They will probably pass a new law allowing you to discharge your student loan in bankruptcy and lose your law degree as a result. The lenders will stop lending. And the education bubble will burst. Either that, or middle-class families will realize that the job prospects for a law school graduate aren’t as great as they used to be, and the bubble will gradually fizzle out that way. But it will leave less jobs in that sector, and the question will again arise … where are the jobs?

Long term basically (10-30 years), automation WILL make wage repression so high that more people will have to switch to an economy that will support the majority of the population in some other way, besides wages.

Welfare?

In a society where the value of individual human labor is not that high compared to the work automatic systems perform, people will have to sustain their costs of living with something other than work in redundant positions. They can become entrepreneurs, they can sell products for the entertainment of others. Capitalism will always be alive and well. But below, it a social safety net will grow, one that supports the unemployed and gives them access to increasingly cheaper (or free) medical care (by robots), food, education and information (internet), and who knows (sexbots?), we will move closer to “socialism”, an economy where every can enjoy a minimum standard of living without having to work. This will usher in true social freedom. Not having to work to survive, people can focus on enjoying a healthy lifestyle, getting enough sleep, traveling, spending time with each other, great entertainment, and bettering themselves by getting a much more in-depty education, even if it is for free via a vastly superior education system. Women won’t have to choose between career and children.

But, as experience in ghettos has shown, it may also lead to more restlessness and a feeling of uselessness in society, and more violence. People want to feel needed. Perhaps some will satisfy it with entrepreneurism or space explorations. But most will have to be content with raising their family and bringing up the next generation with love. Men will no longer need to serve society as most men’s services will literally not be required. I wonder what will happen then. In ancient times, men went to war, and not all came home, and that’s how polygamy made sense. Perhaps sex selection through genetic engineering would once again bring that about. (I will stop going off into left field now.)

The Freedom to Innovate

As technology accelerates innovation in various fields, the elements of an economy built for an older time will start getting in the way — as they already are in the software industry. Patents will become an increasing burden, a tool wielded by companies relying on old business models to protect their profits, something that is already happening with the powerful copyright lobby. Patents have been a great tool and contributed to the success of society over the last couple hundred years, but as an industry accelerates, free access to knowledge becomes more and more important. The watershed moment in an industry comes when a group realizes how to outperform systems built in “proprietary” silos, such as WebKit vs Internet Explorer, Wikipedia vs conventional encyclopedias, or eventually Linux vs Windows. They haven’t figured it out yet, but once this happens, the group will become a formidable force for innovation. At that point, patents only serve to slow everyone down and impose an innovation tax on the industry and the public. Perhaps “individualism” and “greed” will not always provide the most fertile soil for innovation, as they admittedly have been up until recently. With greater connectedness, people will have great education. With better tools, they will be able to accomplish more together. Movements built on free innovation through patentleft will give the proprietary silos a run for their money. And then, we will have to re-evaluate our economy.

• Fundraisers (e.g. walkathons) for various diseases
• People can contribute prize money at any time
• Prizes offered to researchers who submit a breakthrough in an area people have funded. Hopefully they will become prestigious.
• These prizes will be in the millions of dollars. But they will be given out in stages as the drug goes through stages: research results, human trials, distribution. Some of the prize money will come from certifying of distribution companies for a minimal cost, etc.
• Labs, human trials, distribution companies, can all be standardized and funded by the foundation. But the R&D has to be incentivized with prizes.
• Any research submitted his way will be OPEN SOURCED to everyone. Meaning, patents will be granted such that anyone can freely use this information provided that if anyone who gets a patent based on them, they must also release their findings under the same “patentleft” license.
• I believe that large companies which reap the benefits of our research will start giving money to the foundation in order to spur open source drug research, similarly to how Google and Apple give money to Mozilla and Apache Foundation etc.
• Companies will compete on distribution, brand names, etc. But the underlying information and results of the R&D will be available to all.
• People should be able to fund things in stages, ahead of time, based on what they need.
• Universities will be able to align themselves with free information and build prestigious names for themselves, similarly to how Nobel Prize winners can improve the reputation of the university that employed them.

Visit this link to learn more about patentleft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentleft

Open source was originally modeled on scientific research. I want to bring the economics of biotech back to what they are in the scientific research domain, where scientists can build on each other’s work and peer-review it. How come people in the physics department can built on each other’s work, but biotech researchers are snapped up?

There is one area where this would be different than the patent system. Under the patent / copyrightgovernment monopoly system (affectionately referred to by many as “intellectual property”), funding can be granted either by a committee or by a rich individual or entity which was convinced that they may turn a profit. This is the way funding is obtained for movies, etc. The danger with the “free information” system may come from mistakes made by a committee. How do we know which drugs or movies will succeed if the funding comes from the public, and a committee has to pick winners? We don’t.

In the “intellectual property” scenario, those who fund a new movie or drug may often be taking a long-shot, unpopular speculative position. Also it is usually “all or nothing” — either the movie and drug is a hit and they make a profit, or it’s a bust and they lose their money.

In the “free information” scenario, we break the prizes down into stages, so it’s not all or nothing. A researcher can still get funding from a private entity and split the prize with them. Maybe their drug doesn’t pass human trials and then they don’t get the larger prize, but their work is now in the public domain and someone else can build on it. Anyway, prizes are awarded when a drug goes to the next stage — human trials. I predict that the biggest problem will lie in the gatekeepers who will promote things to the next stage, i.e. awarding prizes. So his should be composed of a group of foremost experts in that field, who I think would be excited to evaluate the latest research (it’s FREE INFORMATION) and award what would be a very prestigious prize. Unlike the low-paid, nameless patent examiners, being on this committee would be a prestigious thing since our goal would be to attract the leaders in each field to vet new discoveries for promotion to the next stage. It would be a privilege to get the prize, too. Submissions for prizes may cost $10,000 each or require support from peers to discourage frivolous submissions and overwhelming the committees with a glut of submissions.

I personally think this system should be much more efficient in the long term at advancing the state of the art, and producing things that people actually want, just as open Free and Open Source software has eventually supplanted proprietary solutions (e.g. Firefox, Chrome vs IE). The economics are that big companies are now funding the free software foundations, because of all the wealth being created by them.

On the other hand, patents are getting more useless with time as a way to promote the state of the art, because as the industry accelerates, they build up and increase the cost of new innovations. Similarly with copyright where derivative works cannot be created for almost hundred years without consent of the copyright holder, but we are talking more about utilitarian contribution to society. But even so, in both copyright and patents, we should have a force to balance the greedy, proprietary systems that have arisen on the back of this government protection. We don’t want to take away patents, but start to counteract them with Free Information. Companies may grind their teeth at their inability to make profits off the information financed by the public (as they do now with the walkathons etc.) but after a while the people shall take their information back and everyone will have the freedom to make use of any idea in the portfolio of Free Patents.

Basically I want to make a Free Information alternative to patents when I have the money to do so. It would be a huge undertaking, but, I think, a very rewarding one. What do you all think?

Greg

First of all, I realized that there was evidence from lots of sciences and history going against the Biblical story. Indeed, the Bible made falsifiable claims, and they seemed to have been falsified. For example, the global flood — which pretty much all orthodox Jews and the Talmud believe happened literally — also must have happened around 2104, but this contradicts Egyptian history, as well as other things. So, studying science causes one to have serious doubts about Judaism, and in fact all Abrahamic religions. Even if you had faith, then, you would have difficulty reconciling what you believe with what people who are aware of science, history etc. believe about the world.

For a while I thought this all but proved religion was untrue. Judaism, Christianity, these were the main religions under consideration for me. If entire chapters of their books described what seemed to be fictional events, that couldn’t be compatible with the claim that an All-Knowing God, a God of Truth would dictate these entire chapters and stories to the Jews. Case closed, I thought. I would continue to observe certain major commandments on the chance that I was wrong, but meanwhile I would question rabbis and Christians and see, how could I be wrong? How do they deal with this? I have encountered lots of guesses and incomplete answers, but no one seems to know.

It was harder to come up with evidence for the other side, but eventually that came together as well. And this is what I want to tell you about.

JUDAISM IS UNIQUE

First of all, Judaism is extremely unique. It is the only religion which does not have the “major problem” every other religion has: that the religion itself says it was started by one or a few people. If no one in the religion has seen the founding events, except a few people, one can only have so much rational belief that the natural order was suspended. Christianity started with a few apostles, and Paul claimed he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. Muhammad claimed he heard God’s revelation — not to everyone, but to him. So far as I know (and I have been checking a lot, as have other people), Judaism is the only religion that claims to have started with roughly 3 million people who were direct ancestors of the Israelites. (600k males.) Now, this would give a lot of credibility to the religion, because it’s extremely hard to get this kind of thing started. You can imagine a religion like Scientology or Christianity or Islam getting started with a few people claiming stuff that didn’t REALLY happen. And indeed, all these religions continue to preserve the story of how they started — and it was with a few people. But once you have a religion where people say God spoke to ALL THE ANCESTORS, and that ALL THE ANCESTORS wandered for 40 years in the desert, it’s very hard to come up with a plausible explanation for how this happened. Try it yourself.

The above is called the Kuzari argument, and is argued very well by Lawrence Kelemen here: http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/proof-torah-true/ . Dr. Dovid Gottlieb, a famous rabbi with a Ph. D in logic, penned a book leading everyone through the argument of why Judaism alone is unique: http://ohr.edu/992 .

Here are the really powerful parts:

1) Out of all the different religions in the world that we know about, past and present, we do not find any other group of people that believed ALL THEIR ANCESTORS witnessed the founding event of their religion: a supernatural deity speaking to them. This would give a religion a lot of credibility, but precisely because it would be hard to start a conspiracy — anyone could sell you out easily, and one can argue that that’s why no fake attempt has ever taken off. The only way it could have been accepted was if it’s true.

2) Jewish people religiously (no pun intended) follow a set of laws all about the God that spoke to ALL THEIR ANCESTORS. The law concerns every part of their lives, including seemingly insane things like: NO ONE in the country planting for a whole year, because they supposedly saw God give twice the harvest the previous year; or ALL the men leaving all the women and children at the borders to go worship at the temple, because they believed God’s promise that Israel won’t be attacked at this time. Jews took these laws seriously, but why would they do that unless they already believed that God gave them this law at mount Sinai? It would be hard to introduce a written book where the story is recorded once and for all, and then get everyone to accept it even though no one has ever heard of anything like this, and then make them follow the very counterintuitive laws in the book.

3) If this was a NATURAL thing, and explained through natural causes, how come it never happened again? The main principle of history is that history repeats itself. The main tool of science is repeatable experiments. Out of all the religions of the world, this was never repeated.

This last one is the key to the uniqueness I am talking about. I am not saying Judaism is unique in the sense that “everyone is unique in their own way.” It is unique in the exact way that makes every other religion questionable: it doesn’t claim to start with a few people spreading the word! Here is the strangest part:

4) The Torah itself calls this out! The book of Deuteronomy issues this challenge as proof that Jews should know Judaism is true, and to this day, the challenge has remained unanswered. Everyone had a chance to do this, but they didn’t.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+4%3A32-40&version=NIV

THE JEWISH PEOPLE ARE UNIQUE

Out of all the nations that existed 2000 years ago and before, there are very few that are left. One might put China and India in these categories — countries with huge populations and lots of land. But there has only been one nation that survived in the Western world, despite persecutions, despite being kicked out of their land, despite living among other people all around the world, and despite the efforts of a lot of nations to convert, integrate, or otherwise get rid of the Jewish nation. The only things they had uniting them were a common ancestry and a common religion written in ancient Hebrew.

Jews are unique as being the only people who survived in these conditions. But once again, the uniqueness is not some arbitrary uniqueness. It is once again significant as very improbable thing. Ask any historian and they will tell you the conditions in which entire nations are subsumed by other nations, disperse, or integrate with the general stream of humanity. Mark Twain noticed this when he wrote an essay called Concerning the Jew (http://ohr.edu/judaism/concern/concerna.htm)

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” - Mark Twain

Jews, of course, are ready with the answer. In fact, the answer is right there in Deuteronomy: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+29&version=NIV and http://bible.cc/deuteronomy/4-27.htm . The amazing fact is, that not only is the dispersion into other nations predicted (Deuteronomy must have been written before the Babylonian exile, otherwise how would Jews in different parts of the world have exactly the same religion), but also the return to Israel! No nation that we know has ever achieved this. Why would Deuteronomy make such claims? The same claims are echoed over and over. God says that if the Jews don’t keep his commandments, they will be cast of Israel. But then he will return them into Israel. They will be eternally his people. Here are the powerful points:

1) God in the Bible says the Jews will always be around. Against all odds, this is correct 3000 years later!

2) Deuteronomy says they will get kicked out of their land, live among other nations, worship gods they have not known, and then after a very long time, God will hear their cry and they will come back to Israel. Not even Jewish zionists of the 19th century thought it would happen. They were happy to get land in Libya.

3) Was the writer of Deuteronomy just extremely ambitious with his unprecedented claims, and later got extremely lucky that Jews were the only people to whom this happened?

TAKEN TOGETHER

When I was using science to disprove stories in the Torah, I argued that a combination of independent results which come true is stronger than the results by themselves. So for example, if we Egyptian history said that there were pharaohs around in 2400 BC, it might be mistaken. Or if we carbon dated the mummies in the pyramids (or whatever) and they were around 2400 BC, then by itself our method might have given a wrong result. (It’s happened before. See http://www.science-frontiers.com/online/search.cgi?zoom_query=Carbon%20dating&zoom_per_page=50&zoom_and=1&zoom_sort=0 , and find the real scientific articles linked from there). Looking at the wax-like seals of the egyptian pharaohs might establish some sort of history. But taken TOGETHER, if they paint a coherent picture, it’s very hard to doubt them.

This is what caused me to really doubt Judaism. But look at it from the other side now.

Take just the two unbelievable phenomena I mentioned. The first is that Judaism alone claims to have started from a large number of ANCESTORS — in fact, ALL of them. Other religions all admit and record that they started with a few people who spread the ideas. Deuteronomy itself points this out and dares you to find another religion like that! It uses it as proof that God really did lead the Israelites out of Egypt, and reveal Himself on mount Sinai. The second claim of Deuteronomy is equally bold (for a human writer) and equally fantastic that it came true: the Jewish People will always be around, they will be few in number (not like Indians or Chinese), they will be dispersed among the nations, but will always be around, and eventually God will gather them back in Israel.

I should also mention that in their own book, God said the Jewish people were meant to be “a light unto the nations.” Mark Twain also remarks on the disproportionate amount of Jews who are intellectually affecting the world through science, art, philosophy, etc. and their disproportionate economic impact, in both business and philanthropy. But I will not really go into this because I think it may be related more to the Jews’ emphasis on intellectual study for hundreds of years. It may just be a cultural thing to promote intellectual excellence. But it is undisputed: the number of Jewish nobel prize laureates is far, far greater than would be expected if the number of Jews in the world is considered as a fraction of the world’s population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

Karl Popper, one of the greatest philosophers of science in the 20th century, came up with a theory of science is that is widely accepted today. It is based on the idea of Falsifiability. (His 1969 essay here: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html ) . According to Popper, a theory is scientific insofar as it makes non-obvious, testable predictions. If they come true in the real world, the scientific theory gets more support. If they fail, the scientific theory needs to be re-evaluated, and revised if it has any chance of remaining correct.

Earlier I applied this principle to the claims of Judaism and Christianity, such as the flood, etc. And I have found lots of studies (history, radiometric dating, etc.) that seem to contradict the Biblical claims. These theories have been subjected to scientific scrutiny, and while the methods aren’t perfect, they have been shown to be quite reliable because they made non-obvious predictions that came true.

But now we have seen that the Torah makes amazing non-obvious predictions that have come true. And not just random predictions, but predictions that have a direct relationship to God, the Jewish People, and the story that God spoke to the Jews and through this experience their very religion, Judaism, started.

According to Karl Popper’s view or indeed any sort of rational and unbiased viewpoint, Judaism has a lot going for it. At the very least, Judaism and the Jewish People have some astounding and totally unique things about them, that attest to their truth, and that their book predicted beforehand. Maybe it’s just a giant coincidence. But that kind of thinking leads me to my conclusion:

CONCLUSION:

I have met many Jews who believe the world is literally less than 6,000 years old. When you sit with them and explain about all the geological processes, tree rings, and light from the stars, many of them have already heard some of these. And they say, “yes, the stars really are millions of light years of away, and yes we do see them. But this is because just like God created Adam to be 20 years old right away, He created the world to look as if it were old.” Indeed, here’s the interesting thing: the Talmud says this kind of stuff before we ever suspected the world was that old.

But what I hear when Jews say this is, “Fine. You have employed lots of different reasons and arguments. You have convinced me to a great extent that the world looks millions of years old. But… it’s not. It only looks that way!” This response happens not because someone is insane. On the contrary, it signals that they believe their OWN position so much, that they need a way to reconcile it with what you are telling them.

Similarly, I have started to see in atheists the same kind of dismissal of the various strong evidence that Judaism may be true. When I tell them about the Kuzari argument, they say “well, yeah it’s hard to explain how it came about, but there’s gotta be a natural explanation because this stuff never happened.” Once again, this is not because the atheist is insane. It is because he so firmly is educated to believe that nothing supernatural has ever happened, not even in the past, and “science” has so convinced him that he is willing to dismiss any evidence pointing the other way.

In essence both sides are engaging in a form of “I don’t care, your evidence must be wrong somehow, because my position is right.” They must engage with one another and work with each other to find out the truth!

I see this as very similar to special relativity and quantum dynamics. Both are amazing theories that predict amazing non-obvious things, and in their own domain, the evidence is very compelling. But when they enter each other’s turf — when relativity enters the micro domain, or when quantum mechanics is extended to the macro scale, they don’t work. They completely contradict each other in the other’s domain. Does this mean that a person doing special relativity should say “something’s just GOT to be wrong with the theory of Quantum Mechanics” and vice versa? Would he turn a blind eye to all the predictions quantum mechanics makes? If it works all the time, he would consult quantum mechanics researchers in those matters.

Thus it is with Judaism and Atheism. Both are very valid and self compelling world views on their own turf. Both have evidence for them. And proponents of both have a quick reaction to dismiss the “theories” of the other. Scientists have been working the better part of the 20th century, and until today, to find a “theory of everything” to reconcile the two.

One thing is exciting: if Judaism and scientific theories are both true, we may find out how they come together in the future!

As living beings, we have various needs, ranging from the basic (necessity to breathe air) to the complex (feeling aligned with a greater purpose). When our needs are taken care of, we are content. If there would ever be a moment when all of our needs were taken care of and we were completely content, it would be easy to recognize things we merely want, rather than need — because the degree to which we don’t need them would be reflected in how content we are without them. However, it seems that such a moment hardly ever presents itself. There is always something to strive for, and some unfulfilled desire. What we can do, however, is approach the issue of what we need in stages.

As a starting place, let’s look at our most basic needs — like breathing air, and getting adequate nourishment. They concern our immediate survival, and since you are here reading this, you have probably been able to satisfy those needs to an adequate extent. How would you feel if these needs were ever threatened? What if you knew there was no more food tomorrow in your village? Realize that this is a real concern for many people around the world. If it isn’t a concern for you, then you are luckier than many people to have that kind of security. In this way, you can work our way up from the basic needs — to your own situation, and understand your unique individual desires. Consider the conditions holding true in your life, including the ones you may take for granted, and ask yourself, how important would it be to you if your expectations were seriously threatened? In this way, you can determine the importance of your own unique needs. As we grow and change, our needs change with us, and thus, we would have to re-evaluate what it takes to make us happy. We can do this periodically, or after major life events.

Having done this, we can prioritize our needs and distinguish conditions we really need to be true, from things we merely want to experience. Usually, we can clearly tell a need from a want by the fact that we can visualize the need as a clear condition you expect to be true, whereas the want is a more vague experience that you hope to have.

When we focus on our needs that are met securely and by a wide margin for error, we feel content. When we consider the many people who don’t have these needs met, we feel lucky. On the other hand, when we focus on something we want, but don’t have, we feel a desire to get it. This desire is our ambition — the opposite of contentment.

This is where many people make a mistake that leads to stress and unhappiness. They go after things that they want, before securing for themselves the things that they need more. As we will see later, being in a situation where the conditions you need to be in place are threatened, causes people to take unnecessary risks and make promises they would rather not keep. It makes them depend on others without a backup plan. Has this ever happened to you?

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make sure your most important needs are secure, and know what risks are acceptable to you. People who already have everything they need (everything important to them, anyway) are in a great position to select among their options. You can spot a person like this because they treat every new opportunity as optional. They are usually more concerned with picking a good choice, and will often throw away perfectly good opportunities if they are not really convinced they should invest their resources.

In contrast, people who feel like they need something will often chase the best opportunities that present themselves at the time. Far from throwing away perfectly good opportunities, they are hoping to find at least one good opportunity and seize it. These two approaches are at opposite sides of the spectrum — one comes from a mindset of abundance, the other from a mindset of scarcity.

As we will explore, being content with what you have — being secure in your important needs — will actually help you get a better deal on what you want. And when we get a good deal on what we want, we feel happy.

Happiness, then, depends on our ability to accept what is really going on right now, and to first focus on the areas of our life where our needs are being met. The more basic our needs are, the simpler it is to take care of them. To know yourself in this way is to have control over your happiness.

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1. being well dressed
they say clothes make the man. The clothes you buy should fit well, and stop short of having a style that screams “metrosexual”

2. having a car
especially one that feels awesome to get into. Bonus points for nice stereo system and comfortable seats. Make sure her leaning over doesn’t shift your gears

3. having enough money
you should be able to afford to take her out on a non-crappy date every single day without too much damage to your bank account. Not that you would, but you could — it’s a non-issue.

4. having a good social circle
people that really respect you, bonus points if it includes females in it. Oh, this is like he #1 thing that timid, intelligent guys need.

5. having your own place
bonus points if you have interesting things back there you can show her, or activities you could do together

6. having a style

be well groomed. Try going to a gay hair stylist. They might give you some good pointers. Something that fits with your actual personality, and doesn’t seem like a mishmash of frankenstein parts. Own your style, and have it together.

7. confidence and decisiveness
Confidence says you know you’ve got it going on, so focus on your good qualities. Also as a man, you should be able to be decisive, while at the same time having enough respect for social norms to not force people into awkward situations.

8. having an identity, a job
Be prepared to talk about what you do and a few things about how people you’re talking to might relate to it. How does it connect to who you are? Show, don’t talk, about what makes you unique and interesting.

9. working out and having a well built body
Women subconsciously ask, how is a man who can’t take care of himself going to take of me? Not to mention, a powerful man can make women feel weak in the knees This is especially true when she doesn’t know you well enough yet.

10. clean face, teeth, hair
It goes without saying, bad hygiene is a turn-off, although the standards vary a bit by culture. Use conditioner in your hair and try shaping it with paste. Some women like body hair on men, others don’t. If you’ve got a huge bush, try using a beard trimmer, to prevent itching as the hair grows back.

11. smell good, manly cologne
For the times one of you leans in to whisper sweet nothings in the ear of the other. Remember though, women on the whole have a more acute sense of smell than men do, so don’t put on so much that it’s overpowering. Consider getting a nice shower gel. And definitely use deodorant where needed.

12. be successful at something a woman can admire
There are so many things, I can’t even begin to list them. Okay, I can: cooking, photography, poetry, art, playing an instrument, etc.

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The two factors

It seems to me that most of the dynamics we observe in male-female relations stem from two main factors:

1. Society’s restrictions on who we may meet, how many partners we may have, etc.
2. Attraction triggers in men are much more universal than in women.

Let’s take a look at each of these. The wide-ranging effects of the first factor can be observed by looking at different societies, both throughout the world and throughout history. Some societies are very restrictive and essentially enforce courtship and marriage (sometimes arranged) as the only legitimate option. On the other extreme, we have free love movements, where people can freely express their sexuality without necessarily shutting off all other options for the rest of their life. The changes brought about in this country by the sexual revolution of the 1960s affect us all throughout America. Older ideas about chastity, properness, dating and marriage, are hardly as widespread as they once were.

The second factor polarizes male-female relationships, and leads to interesting phenomena depending on the society. It can be characterized like this: place a beautiful woman in 10 different situations, each with 10 different men, and they will all find her attractive. Place a man in 10 different situations, and in some he will come out attractive (such as when he is in a band or captain of the football team) to pretty much all women present, and in others he will be looked over by almost all women (such as when he’s in a starbucks getting coffee). Now, it is true: certain physical traits are attractive to most women … height, well developed musculature, and so forth. But on the whole, they do not dominate the other attraction triggers, as women’s looks do in men.

Women have long learned that looks are extremely important in attracting the opposite sex. I should clarify, though, a woman’s sex appeal is not just based on looks — as is commonly said — but also the implications such as being in shape, physicality, etc. … in short her sex appeal is universally tied to how physically satisfying the potential sexually charged activities would be with her. (This is what most men imagine.)

Men, on the other hand, may shine in some situations but not others, even sporting the same exact look and style. There are lots of nuances but the bottom line is this: traits that women consider attractive — whether they realize it or not — are almost always correlated with the man’s social circle and his status within it. For example, a man who is confident and uninhibited — let’s call him the “bad boy”. This man is attractive not only because he is more exciting, but there is a deeper implication: his social status among his friends is different from the men who are proper and try to fit in. Those men probably occupy average positions in social circles. The bad boy doesn’t try to please everybody, so those people who remain with him do so because they love to be around him. Thus, when a woman is out with him, she knows she is also surrounded by a social circle that gives him a lot of respect (which in evolutionary terms leads to better protection and resources, and in modern terms leads to more fun). We can see lots of similarities to this in nature, with the “alpha male” expressing himself without trying to fit in, etc. These traits may run counter to other qualities the woman is looking for — tenderness, responsibility — so her search is a more difficult one.

Consequences

Let’s start with some direct consequences of this situation. Because women’s beauty is a much more universal attraction trigger for men, it is polarizing. Women who are really beautiful, from the time they are teenagers, start realizing that men are always after them wherever they go. In societies where men can meet women freely, the majority of men are fixated on these women as their main choice whenever an opportunity arises. This leads beautiful women to believe they can get almost any man at any time.

Traditionally, women were to be sheltered and protected, and it was a man’s role to take risks and physical challenges. Nowadays, our society is very different and diverse, but these gender roles endure — even though they are outdated and sometimes wind up hurting both genders.

As an example, here is the typical way these historical ideas about gender roles hurt people today: it is commonly accepted that the man should make the first move and approach a woman. He should “ask her out” and possibly risk getting a polite “no”. Sounds fine, except let’s combine it with what we already learned about, above. The men will wind up asking out lots of beautiful women — because they are the ones the men are attracted to the most. The beautiful women are a small part of the overall population, and they are almost always seeing someone, because every time they go out they can meet men who’d like to date them — and some of those men do.

But there’s a dark side to all of this: many women are tired of constantly getting “hit on” by men everywhere they go.  Their responses are no longer polite — the man might come up all nice, and they’d give him a scathing look or ignore him altogether. That leads to the modern notion of beautiful girls “all being bitches”, or something similar. It’s true that their life is different and even their friends might be jealous of it. Some do become conceited or have high expectations (e.g. money to be lavished on them). They want to enjoy their time as much as they can, because their beauty is temporary (which is another factor). They are less willing to settle down than their plainer-looking counterparts, as can be readily seen in the studies.

Men’s experience is much more varied. Most men don’t have qualities that automatically draw women to them (such as fame and money, which can constantly put a man into situations where he appears attractive). So unlike beautiful women, it is up to them whether to engage with the opposite sex. On the average, men get approached much, much less often than women. So it’s up to them to choose how they will meet someone. Some men take the shot whenever they see a woman that they like — be it on the street, in a coffee shop, or in a bar. Almost all these men get rejections the majority of the time. And these are not your grandmother’s rejections. Looking at what we’ve established about modern male-female relations, we have the following:

• free dating — meet pretty much anyone, no social pressure to make a long term commitment
• this leads to lots of men asking the women they want out
• social stigma from having too many partners (being “such a slut”, etc.)
• this leads to women being as selective as possible, to protect their image
• this, in turn, leads to more women being obnoxious to the random guys, because there are no consequences
• this leads to nice guys getting tons of emotional abuse, and bad boys playing the field
• finally, this means that these days the men who don’t have a problem with constantly chasing skirts, get most of the women. Because the others just get out of the game because rejections are too paintful, and settle down.

Social Dynamics

Women are social creatures. You’ll rarely see woman out at night by herself — she is either with friends or with a guy. Obviously, this is for protection, but it also developed a secondary function — social display. Women spend hours getting ready to go out for a reason.

We already spoke about how most of a man’s attractive qualities are tied to his social circle and his standing within it. It would do well for men to appear in groups, then. A solitary dude has a much lower chance of conveying his social circle status. Yet most men are pretty much “each man for himself” when they go out — completely the opposite of women. It’s true, they don’t need the “protection” that women seek, but they also significantly reduce their opportunities to display their social circle. At that point, their best bet is to show their social skills among the ad-hoc group that forms in the bar, or at the party. The man who masters this consistently becomes one of the most attractive men in the room.

Among animals, there is a behavior called lekking. This is where males put on competitive displays to attract females. Some women in today’s feminist-influenced society may talk badly about “macho behavior” or “guys always being so competitive”, but there is a counterpart in human society which attracts women despite anything they say. It is when a group of guys comes in and starts having competitive fun. Not only do they put on a loud display that everyone else in the room takes notice, but also the winners of the competition are seen as very attractive. This is an example of how social circles can help men be consistently seen as attractive.

to be continued…