Audio Version Of The Blog – 05.30.15
Posted on May 30th, 2015
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Question: What is the difference between the religious and secular approach to life? For example, I consider myself a secular person, but I always have an internal conflict, and it is difficult to figure out where in me the secular person ends and the religious one begins. The same division exists in the entire Israeli society.
According to the latest poll: 50% of the [Israeli] population are completely secular, 17% observe the traditions but do not consider themselves religious, 13% observe traditions and consider themselves religious, 12% are religious and 8% are Orthodox religious.
Answer: Secular people believe that the world is governed by laws of nature and there is nothing else except what we see and discover through science. The secular approach to life means that the world should be taken such as it is, according to one’s feelings, without relying on any upper forces, destiny, life after death. Any unsolved phenomena are no more than a figment of our imagination and fantasy.
The secular approach is the real approach. Inside it are many varieties that define man’s relationship to himself and society, but they are not to the level of the difference between the religious and secular approach.
The religious approach is based on the belief in the upper force that created the world and puts us in the conditions that we have to perform. If we fulfill all the wishes of the upper force, we deserve the award, if we do not fulfill them, we will be punished.
There are different kinds of relationships with the upper force, of attitudes to reward and punishment, to a person’s participation in this and one’s freedom of choice. But the point is that religious people take into account the existence of the upper force, a higher design, program, the purpose of creation. Thus, the center of creation is no longer the human being, but the Upper Force, the Creator.
Because people believe that the Creator arranges and organizes everything in response to one’s behavior, they have to continuously relate their lives to the Upper Force. That is, they think that one is dependent not on the laws of blind nature, but on the Upper will. Therefore, it is necessary to pray to the Upper, ask, be ashamed, repent for one’s past actions.
Many different religions and beliefs once existed and vanished or are still existing today Religion has a great influence on the world and on humanity. During the past two thousand years, humanity has evolved under the influence of religion, first after the destruction of the Second Temple Judaism arose, and then from it came Christianity and Islam.
All these religions are fighting among themselves, and there are very complex relationships between them. Each religion has many movements: Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christianity, Shiite and Sunni in Islam, and many streams of Judaism.
Every synagogue in Israel is somehow different from the rest. Not to mention the conflict between the secular and religious who are not able to organize their lives so as not to interfere with each other but want to impose their own view on others.
I do not want to judge who is right and who is wrong. But such a conflict exists only in Israel. For example, in the US or in Europe there is no conflict between religious and secular people. If you are a Jew, no one cares whether you attend the synagogue on Saturdays or only on major holidays.
The Jews abroad feel they belong to one nation. In Israel, there is a conflict, because religion is not separated from the state and is involved in a power struggle. Thus, it appears into the area of general interest, where our desires clash. Over the years, this conflict increases because everyone believes that the opposite side wants to grab a piece from it.
This confrontation in society is gaining strength, leading to such hatred and division, which had never existed among the people of Israel. And I do not think that it is the result of a different approach to the world. It’s just a struggle for power in our lives—desires of some to control others and the state so that it serves their interests, be that of the secular or religious community.
The struggle is for the state, for power, for the state treasury, and using it for their own benefit.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 5/21/15
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The weekly chapter of the Torah “Bambidar” tells us how the Israeli army was built. We learn how they gathered around the Tabernacle and what was displayed on the flags of each camp, etc.
This speaks about the building of the general soul: about the forces, intentions, and attributes of which it is made. The structure of the general soul reminds us of the structure of an atom, where only those parts that can withstand the radiation of the nucleus, the radiation of bestowal, can be close to the nucleus. It is according to this principle that the camps gather and are classified.
It says that it is forbidden to come close to the Tabernacle since one can die (“the stranger that approaches will die”). This means that your vessels, your desires, may not be able to hold on, and so become egoistic, causing you to die spiritually.
Comment: But all of humanity accepts these words as rigid laws and a threat of physical death.
Answer: The laws of nature are indeed rigid because the system that governs the world is very tough and uncompromising, but everyone still follows the stream of goodness.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 12/31/14
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In the News (from scmp.com): “Construction work has begun on the first factory in China’s manufacturing hub of Dongguan to use only robots for production, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
“A total of 1,000 robots would be introduced at the factory initially, run by Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co, with the aim of reducing the current workforce of 1,800 by 90 per cent to only about 200…
“Robots are set to take over in many factories in the Pearl River Delta, the area of southern China known as the ‘world’s workshop’ because of the huge export manufacturing industry there, as labour shortages bite and local authorities face the need to spur innovation to counter the economic slowdown.
“Since September, a total of 505 factories across Dongguan have invested 4.2 billion yuan in robots, aiming to replace more than 30,000 workers, according to the Dongguan Economy and Information Technology Bureau.
“By 2016, up to 1,500 of the city’s industrial enterprises will began replacing humans with robots.
“The provincial authorities of Guangdong said early this year they would spend 943 billion yuan on replacing human labour with robots within the next three years. …
“The provincial capital, Guangzhou, has set a goal of fostering a robot-manufacturing industry with an output value of more than 100 billion yuan by 2020, as well as automating more than 80 per cent of the city’s manufacturing production.”
My Comment: The development of robotic technologies should lead to a reduction in the number of laborers and a reduction in the work week. But this isn’t happening because the ruling class recognizes that people with free time are dangerous: They begin to demand change in the social structure.
Society prefers us to work more instead of increasing our free time so we can increase our (superfluous) consumption, meaning that we will be involved in the creation of useless things and carrying out meaningless activities just to be busy. Workplaces are intentionally created to employ us. Every year more and more people are forced to engage in meaningless work, but endless economic growth on Earth is limited; it is impossible. We will have to return to an equivalent exchange market and produce only essential goods.
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Opinions: Eugene P Wigner: “It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality” (Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, page 169).
Erwin Schrodinger: “Consciousness is not measurable with a natural formula. For consciousness this is an absolutely basic conclusion. It cannot be explained from the point of view of something else. What we see in the form of physical bodies and forces is none other than forms and different versions in the structure of space. Plato was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it—against reason—as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience…”
Albert Einstein: “If we think of the field as being removed, there is no ‘space’ which remains since space does not have an independent existence. Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it. It is understood that there is no physical space, ultimately in nature everything is present or not, depending on human thought. This is the function of our conceptual schema (of the mind). Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
In his later years he said, “It is necessary to find possibilities of refraining from the temporal sequence (space together with time) in general. But there is no hint of an idea, in which of the elementary concepts it is possible to use a theory like this.”
Max Planck: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Niels Bohr: “The general view of the world in terms of objects that really exist ‘out there’, without any connection to our observations (objective reality), was absolutely destroyed from the perspective of the quantum factor. Everything that we call real is composed of things that cannot be considered as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet”.
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