[Avodah] Religion and Falsifiability

[David Riceman]

I'm somewhat perturbed by the responses I've been getting, so I'm going 
to summarize what's been going on.

RMB cited someone anonymous who asked: <<What information would you need 
to be presented to take off your kipah? >>

I suggested the following:  <<Suppose, however, that someone asked you 
for an example of evil behavior, and then produced a survey showing that 
observant Jews were evil in that way more than <picture your favorite 
control group here>.  Would that affect you? >>

To my surprise no one has claimed that that couldn't possibly happen in 
a well designed survey.  Instead three people have responded with 
apologetics which have left me stunned.

RMB himself responded <<To be honest, all it would do is prove my 
suspicion that there isn't a statistically meaningful population of 
people who actually follow the Torah.>>  If I can translate, RMB says it 
would make him question, not the Torah, but how we implement it today.  
The Torah is Morashas Kehillas Ya'akov, and RMB suspects that nowadays 
it really belongs only to a favored few.  Shouldn't such a result induce 
RMB to rethink how we implement the Torah so that more people "actually" 
follow it? Maybe I'm taking the initial question too literally, but see 
Tshuvos Maharshal #72 that wearing a kipah is part of the implementation 
of Torah.

RRW responded <<I can posit that we follow Hashem's commandments because 
he acquired usfrom Par'oh.; IOW the religion is now about serving God as 
a slave serves his master.>> See Rashi Berachos 33b s.v. "midosav", 
disagreeing with the Rambam I cited in my initial post.  I'm too much a 
product of the modern world to find the analogy of God as an arbitrary 
tyrant palatable; RRW may also be because he continues, not following 
that Rashi, <<I would posit that hashem's over-arching agenda - the 
preamble to ourconstitution so to speak - is taht we be mamleches 
Kohanim v'goyKaddosh. [iirc Dayan Grunfeld says this in his intro to 
Horeb] The Torah is not about SELF-PERFECTION but creating SOCIETAL 
perfection, i.e a mamlehces kohanim>>. I don't understand the solution: 
how can a society be perfect if it's members lack basic middos?

RRJ responded <<Because maybe the A's were by nature worse and so their 
current equivalence to B's results is a great difference from where they 
would have been without religion!>> If I understand correctly he's 
suggesting that we are so vicious that we need the Torah just to keep us 
mediocre.  I find that flabbergasting.  Does any one here work in kiruv? 
Is it your experience that the people attracted to your operations are 
the particularly vicious ones?

David Riceman