This might also be of interest: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

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* The horizon.
* The testimony of explorers such as Magellan, Perry, Amundsen, et al.

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Libertarian solution?

Start a podcast/youtube series/whatever promoting quality older television.

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Oh, that’s okay. Just refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding because it goes against your religious principles and then you’ll find out shortly.

I’m glad you’ve decided to mock me rather than clarify your meaning, since it means we can drop this unproductive sidetrack of this discussion.

What do humans’ values and goals have to do with whether certain lessons are clearly evident in a widely-read text?

…But in any event, I feel like you’ve shifted the goalposts enough from the original question I intended to ask (“where [does a non-Jew] get off telling Jews that they ‘ought not’ to take the Talmud as authoritative?”) that it’s not really worth pursuing this that much farther anyway. The question you have shifted to is ‘Is the principle that men’s laws are not to be elevated to be equal to God’s clearly evident as a primary lesson of the Torah?’—but whether or not the answer to that question is even relevant to the normative question of whether Jews “should” take the Talmud as authoriative depends on values, goals, and background principles that are not presumptively shared or understood by non-Jews.

By the way, the text of the Torah does not say that Passover begins or ends on Shabbat.

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Say it’s 1960 and you are one of the vast majority of white people in your South Carolina community who oppose racial integration. Not that you have anything against Negroes, you just don’t think they should be in the same schools or train cars as your children.

Now say you raise your children in this community and they maintain its ideals completely. They now live in a 2015 where buses, swimming pools, etc. are more or less integrated (though perhaps they choose to send their children to all-white private schools). In what ways does an anti-integreation viewpoint benefit your children? In what ways does it harm them? I’m guessing the harm – of being considered racist by employers and many of the people they encounter, and of being disgusted and uncomfortable every time they see now-commonplace sights like an interracial couple at a movie theater – is greater than whatever benefit one is supposed to derive from maintaining opposition to a particular “agenda” that the rest of the country accepted decades ago.

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don’t know what you mean by “stomping on the first-amendment rights”.

Oh, that’s okay. Just refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding because it goes against your religious principles and then you’ll find out shortly.

Maybe laws in the Talmud are supposed to be simply a more detailed exposition and analysis of laws in the Torah, but they haven’t remained limited to that.

Nowhere in the Torah, for example, does it say that Passover should be celebrated with a tedious four-hour process of reciting prayers, occasionally sipping ritual wine, and staring at food you aren’t allowed to eat until around midnight. But this is how observant Jews insist on celebrating the holiday, and it’s become canonized to the point where there are prescribed responses to children who object or ask a lot of questions. There’s even a standard (and rather thick) Jewish prayer book just for the holiday.

The Torah’s instructions for Passover are simply that it should last from one particular Shabbat to the next one, that there is to be no leavened bread in one’s home, nor may one eat it for the duration, and that there is to be a spiritual “coming together” on each of the two bookending Shabbats. Consider that if a Jewish family celebrated Passover this way, onlookers today–even devout Jewish ones–would not recognize the holiday they were celebrating.

What do humans’ values and goals have to do with whether certain lessons are clearly evident in a widely-read text? Either those lessons are there or they aren’t. Sure, the person telling you this may not share your values and goals, but to ignore him for that reason is folly.

If a British person can read and understand our Constitution, should we ignore that British person if he offers an insight into how the gay rights movement ought not to trample on people’s First Amendment rights, simply because he doesn’t share all our values and goals?

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Most observant Jews will tell you that the laws stated in the Talmud are the merely a more detailed exposition and analysis of the same laws stated in the Torah, not “a collection of laws unequivocally written by men” that supersedes or contradicts the Torah.

If you’re giving Jews advice on what actions to take, they should (tautologically) only follow that advice if doing so will aid them in reaching their goals and acting in accordance with their values. If you don’t share those goals and values and your advice is derived from principles ignorant of those goals and values, then what reason to Jews have to consider your advice relevant to them?

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Most observant Jews follow the Talmud (which is a collection of laws unequivocally written by men) as if it were divine law, despite the fact that the Torah says not to elevate men’s laws to the status of God’s laws. If you ask an individual Jew, he’ll agree that this is what the Torah says.

I hope that makes the analogy clearer.

If I’m talking about the Torah, then Jews’ perspectives and values and goals don’t matter. Those things change. Those are human things. The Torah is what we’re talking about, and the arguments I’m making are what we’re evaluating. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m a Jew or a space alien.

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