So Who Was Behind 9/11, Dick?

Dancing this past Simchas Torah to Toras Hashem Temimah, we arrived at the words “eidus Hashem ne’emanah, machkimas pesi” and the following occurred to me:

Elsewhere, the possuk defines a pesi as a “ma’amin l’chol davar,” one who’ll believe anything. Now, it was G.K. Chesterton who famously observed that when one stops believing in G-d, it’s not that henceforth he believes in nothing, but rather that he’ll now believe in anything.

This, then, is Dovid HaMelech’s paean to the Torah — it wises up the pesi. That is to say, Hashem’s testimony teaches the pesi, whose standards of truth are so low and whose inability to think subtly is so great that he’ll believe anything so long as it suits his physical and ego drives, to search for and believe in only that which proves itself to be the truth.

For a living, breathing example of how this works in practice, consider this gem from an interview last week in the Guardian of Dick Dawkins, who, for those thankfully unfamiliar with him, makes a living writing atheistic best-sellers and does a little teaching on the side:

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told — religious Jews anyway — than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolize American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.

So there you have it, folks. Meet Richard Dawkins, Oxford don, evolutionary biologist, militant atheist, raving conspiracy theorist. And now, confirmed pesi.

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9 Responses

  1. Yehoshua Mandelcorn says:

    Wrong, the “pesi” described by King David just needs to learn some Torah and will be become wise.
    It will not be so easy to do so with a militant atheist. In fact the more they know about any G-d based religion the more they will use that knowledge to disparage G-d and religion.

  2. Bob Miller says:

    I don’t believe Richard Dawkins exists. There is clearly some conspiracy afoot to create this imaginary personality to confuse and demoralize Western society. Those who say they’ve seen Dawkins can’t be relied upon; they must have run into one of the paid actors the cabal sends around, or perhaps they were hallucinating or paid off.

  3. David says:

    Good point. From my anecdotal experience, it seems the 9/11 Truth movement is overwhelmingly populated by atheists, even if not in raw numbers, for sure from a statistical view. I’m wondering if anyone else out there has noticed this.

  4. David says:

    See also Tuesday’s New York Times Science section for a fascinating article by John Tierney regarding ‘consensus’ on certain issues that were held to be true by scientists despite the fact there was no proof whatsoever.

  5. Ori Pomerantz says:

    The actual article is available here. However, may I respectfully point out that it does not claim that Richard Dawkins believes any conspiracy theories about 9/11? This post attacks Dawkins on what he says and writes, which is good. The headline, however, implies without stating that he has a conspiracy theory about 9/11. Is there a reason for choosing such a headline?

    Dawkins is an annoying character who wants to use his alleged superiority to control education (“I would free children from being indoctrinated with the religion of their parents or their community”) and interfere in the domestic affairs of another country (“But I think that this country is so powerful and what goes on politically here is so enormously influential, the rest of the world is entitled to have a say.”). Doesn’t he give us enough ammunition to attack him without resorting to innuendo?

  6. Nachum says:

    I’m pretty sure that religious Jews are not in the forefront of the pro-Israel lobby, at least not as much as Dawkins thinks. So he’s a double fool.

  7. Ben Zoma's Apprentice says:

    “Raishis Chochmah Yiras Hashem”—The sine qua non for real wisdom is the fear and awe of G-d; without this, even brilliant people see the “real power” everywhere and anywhere.

  8. Michoel says:

    I am reminded of Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s teaching that these things are revealed to us to learn from them to related cases. Just as his words in this area are completely agended and empty, so too are his workds on evolution. He is not a person who values truth and therefore we do not need to give weight to anything he says.

  9. Binyamin says:

    The NYT article is Here.
    ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=science )

    It deals with the specific issue of low-fat diets.

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