[Avodah] Dollar Bills In the Bathroom?

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 08:41:59AM -0500, Prof. Levine wrote:
> From http://revach.net/article.php?id=4955

As I commented there... 

    Who said that the "God" in "In God We Trust" necessarily refers to
    the Creator, the notion of Deity that Yahadus teaches?

    To most people making and handling the bills, it refers to a
    trinitarian deity, something so different from what we believe
    in that it's not just slightly different beliefs about the same
    G-d. Even according to Tosafos's famous heter, it's their notion
    of the Father who is an imperfect understanding of Hashem. "God"
    refers to all three persons of the trinity.

    And according to the obverse side of the Great Seal of the United
    States, printed about an inch away, the God in question is a Grand
    Architect (shown by the lines and numbers involved in the pyramid)
    who is above the world and passively watches it (the eye floating
    above). There is a picture represtenting a Deistic concept of deity
    on the same bill.

    Would, a parallel to the Sheivet haKehasi's answer would work in
    reverse to permit idolatrous references that were produced by machine?

To explain that 2nd paragraph further, since someone commented in reply
something that reflected a lack of clarity on my part:

Tosafos famously suggest the heter about trinitarianism being shituf.
But what they suggest is that when Xians speak of "the Father" they
mean the true G-d, and therefore the other two persons of the trinity
comprise a shituf. But that means the word "God" on the bill doesn't
refer to HQBH, it refers to Him plus two others working together. If
we were to follow the Sheivet haKehasi's logic with Tosafos's opinion,
the question would only arise if the bill said "In the Father we trust."

A major question is what do we call a mistaken description of HQBH
and what do we call a description of a different Deity? Hashem doesn't
have attributes. Otherwise I would have thought the issue was between
differences in Essence and difference in Attributes. Maybe it's whether
the other monotheistic religion differs about what G-d is/isn't or
whether they err in how He appears to us. Still, it makes for a very
difficult line to define.



In light of today being Rosh Chodesh (and which month it's Rosh Chodesh
of) I would like to make the oilem this offer:

I will gladly remove all she'eilah ufiqpuq from your homes of any avaq
AZ or shituf. Email me for an address to which you can send any bills
with the offending statement or picture, and I'll make sure to get rid
of them for you.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "Fortunate indeed, is the man who takes
micha at aishdas.org        exactly the right measure of himself,  and
http://www.aishdas.org   holds a just balance between what he can
Fax: (270) 514-1507      acquire and what he can use." - Peter Latham