[Avodah] Religion and Falsifiability

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' David Riceman conjectured about an imaginary
> survey showing that observant Jews were evil in that way
> more than <picture your favorite control group here>. Would
> that affect you?

I responded:
> ... the behavior of a religion's adherents has no bearing on
> the truth of that religion itself. ... Judge the religion by
> its beliefs, not by its believers.

RDR wrote back:
> The Rambam says that the function of divine law (=religion)
> is to induce moral and intellectual perfection. ...
> If, however, a religion has no effect on its adherents, then
> of what value is it?

Of course a religion does have an effect on its adherents. But other things affect them too!

Therefore, regardless of whether you see a person acting nicely or wrongly, you can't presume that he's acting that way because his religion taught him to. He might be acting that way *despite* what his religion teaches.

This can even be true in cases where the person explicitly says, "I am acting this way because my religion says so." Unfortunately, I myself have been in situations where an otherwise-frum Jew rationalized his behavior by explaining to me how the Torah justified it.

Somewhere, I've forgotten where, someone defines the idea of Kiddush HaShem along these lines: "You should act in such a way that when people see how you act, they will say, 'Blessed be the G-d of the Jews for teaching His people to act that way!'" This definition does NOT contradict the rest of this posting, and I'll tell you why:

What I have written in this thread has been addressed to the Avodah membership, who have shown themselves to be serious, thinking people. They don't jump to conclusions, but carefully weigh the evidence. They are an exceptional bunch, and I'm proud to be among them. But the masses, regrettably, are not so thoughtful.

The masses *are* easily influenced. And so the above definition of Kiddush Hashem is indeed valid. A typical person in the street (let's call him ABC) meets someone (let's call him XYZ), and forms an opinion about him. Regardless of whether ABC admires XYZ or is disgusted by him, the odds - unfortunately - are pretty high that ABC will not only feel this way about XYZ personally, but he'll probably presume that other people from XYZ's community are similar. (This will apply regardless of how ABC chooses to define XYZ's "community" - by ethnicity, race, salary, age, or whatever.)

The ironic result is that I must try to be on my best behavior whenever someone might tend to extrapolate from my behavior to that of other Jews -- even though I think that his doing so is an unwarranted generalization.

Akiva Miller