Monday, September 24, 2012

כפרות טויגט אויף כפרות

Can you imagine a ritual that would stimulate repentance less effectively than kappores? I suppose I could--if I expended great effort.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Atheist by De Morgan's Law

There are different versions of De Morgan's law, but the basic idea is as follows:

Suppose A, B, and C stand for propositions. If it's not the case that A is true and B is true and C is true, then it is the case that either A is false, or B is false, or C is false.

To believe in standard Orthodox Judaism, you need to believe in a whole bunch of propositions: god exists, created the world, and spoke to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai; the Talmud reflects what god told Moses; etc.

By De Morgan's law, standard Orthodox Judaism would be false if only one of those propositions were false. So it's much easier for me to be right than y'all to be right.