Category: Jews behaving badly

Jews on a plane: A reader’s take

May 1, 2015 • 11:00 am

Today seems to be shaping up as “Readers Weigh In Day,” for I want to post the content of two emails sent to me by readers, emails that I thought might be of more general interest. This one, and one I’ll post later, are reproduced with permission.

I’ve posted several times (and had one guest post) about the bigotry shown by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who refuse to sit next to women on planes (see here, here, and here, for instance). In some cases the airlines try to be “accommodating,” with flight attendants asking passengers if they wouldn’t move to accommodate these requests.

My readers, especially women, continue to be upset by both the religiously-based misogyny of the Jews as well as the desire of airlines to accommodate these requests.  One woman emailed me with a strongly-felt objection to this “accommodationism,” pointing out, correctly, that while this biogtry is tolerated out of respect for religion, it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t connected with religion:

of respect for religion, it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t connected with religion:

As an example of how society ignores bigotry against women, imagine the same scenario on a plane if a white-supremacist religious wingnut said it was against his religion to sit next to someone who had dark skin.  Would the airline personnel ask the black passenger if he would kindly move to another seat?  Of course not, because the request would be seen for its true nature—pure bigotry combined with abject ignorance.
Airline personel who ask a woman to move in order to allow a fundamentalist bat-shit crazy mad-hatter to exercise his fear of the female sex should consider what it is they are doing.  The airline should be sued for discrimination against women and against THEIR freedom of religion.
If the bastards are fearful of sitting next to a woman, let them buy three tickets for themselves so they can be certain their seat is empty.

I have to say that I agree.  Bigotry in the guise of religious belief is still bigotry, as we’ve learned with all the recent “religious freedom restoration acts.” If a flight attendant wouldn’t accommodate a racist passenger, why would he or she accommodate a sexist one? Or is sexism somehow sanctified if it’s based on faith?

Curiously, Andrzej just posted a relevant video on his Facebook page:

Guest post: Why is it okay to discriminate against women for religious reasons?

April 23, 2015 • 9:10 am

JAC:  Reader Diane G. and I have had some email exchanges about the bad treatment of women by hyper-Orthodox Jews, including the several incidents I’ve reported when they wouldn’t sit next to women on a plane. These men also have religious strictures against touching or shaking hands with women. I asked Diane if she would mind writing a post about it for this site, and she kindly complied. Her mini-essay is below:

*******

Why is it okay to discriminate against women for religious reasons?

by Diane G.

Here at WEIT Jerry’s written more than once about the Hasids-on-a-Plane culture clash (e.g., here and here).  For anyone who’s been out in the field for the past several months, in brief this involves Orthodox Jewish men taking commercial flights and refusing to sit near women because their religion prohibits it.

What’s been interesting to me in the resultant conversations is the occasional male commenter (and perhaps there have been females as well) who doesn’t view this as discrimination or misogyny.  People who I would have expected to say, “your religious beliefs stop at my right to sit where I am” argue instead that this is simply a matter of courtesy and respect, that changing seats is the polite thing to do.

The Washington Post‘s Amanda Bennett noticed the same pushback, and wrote a column that appeared in the April 19th edition, Why is it okay to discriminate against women for religious reasons?   In addition to the plane incidents, she begins her article with an anecdote about running into an Orthodox man at a social function:

Not very long ago I met a young man at a business function. “Hello, I’m Amanda,” I said, sticking out my hand in greeting. He kept his arms glued to his side. “I don’t touch women,” he said.

That exchange–which I thought was a particularly pointed description of these slap-in-the-face moments–received as much or more attention in the WaPo comment section as did the plane behavior.  Those who disagreed with Bennett sensibly stressed (and stressed and stressed and stressed) that no one should ever feel required to shake hands, raising all the legitimate reasons one might not want to: germ-avoidance, arthritis, mere dislike of shaking, etc.

Unable to shake (heh) my conviction that Bennett had been rudely dissed, I reread her short description until I decided it was the brusque delivery of the message that made it discriminatory. New worry: does this make me a Tone Troll?  Surely, if you know your customs clash with Western 21st century standards, you could at least use humor, self-deprecation, or any of the other ways society’s developed to disarm verbal conflicts. Perhaps, say, a smile accompanied by an “I’m sorry, my religion forbids me from shaking your hand.”  Hmmm; that still doesn’t sit well.  But I do think that’s the way to avoid shaking for all the other reasons; just bringing out the charming, contrite smile, and a simple, “Sorry, I don’t shake hands,” would do.

Nevertheless, the theme of WaPo comments such as the following disturbed me, although the last thing I want to appear as is a pomo-feminist SJW:

Mutual respect, “live and let live”, isn’t good enough for the politically correct crowd, they demand not just tolerance but endorsement. This is tyranny and not conducive to a peaceful society.

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The liberal Outrage Lobby strikes again. So now, sincere religious belief is trumped by Amanda Bennett’s desire to shake hands. Amanda, the next time someone refuses to shake your hand, you might consider it’s actually because you are an anti-religious bigot.

***

The really important question is why the woman writer feels humiliated because another person does not shake her hand for religious reasons? The lefties love creating social turmoil and this is a favored strategy, being “offended” by the practices of others that the lefties can pretend are motivated by an intent to cause them “anguish.”

***

This whole discussion amazes me. A shomer negiаh sees his or her practice as respectful and chaste. This is a cultural divide which Ms. Bennett disrespects perhaps because she feels every thing is about her.

Does this mean I’m a narcissist and a traitor to my politics? Someone even saw Bennett’s reactions as anti-Semitic:

This article may be about discriminating women [sic] but it only shows the discrimination that Religious Jews face. How anti-Semitic is it to not take into consideration that Orthodox men feel uncomfortable with any physical contact with woman.

There were the expected (and in this case, unintentionally self-refuting) remarks from those who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid:

No, the Bible actually has no contradictions in it (apart from typos and translation errors). The creation story is given as an overview in Genesis One, then the particulars of the creation of man is given in Genesis Two.

Moreover, “rib” is a poor translation of  “Neged” (whence “negative” is derived). Adam was the compilation of both male and female (I am not speaking physically) until the female attributes were removed into a separate individual.

The woman has never, biblically, been considered inferior to the man; just at a different rank. It is the same as saying that a colonel is no more or less valuable as a person than a major; he simply has greater authority.

And from a woman for whom I feel very sad:

My husband and I have had myriad social experiences professionally with rich, powerful, educated persons etc. My skirt is below my knees, my dress has sleeves or a jacket, no plunging neckline, shoes without cutouts, no bare legs, and I walk just behind my husband so if someone throws something-it hits him first. Provacative [sic] attire/behavior is for entertainers or people who don’t mind being attacked.

For those of you who think this subject has already been talked into the ground here–I’m not helping!  But I know someone else has also sent Bennett’s article to Jerry, so perhaps I’m not the only one interested in continuing this discussion.  Finally, I heartily recommend a book, written before the Great Online-Atheist Schism, which is a cogent, exceptionally readable, egregious-example-filled treatment of the overarching topic here:  Does God Hate Women?, by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom. Please consider reading this volume no matter what you think of one of the authors in light of subsequent events.

Pinker on the Kosher Switch

April 16, 2015 • 10:00 am

The Kosher Switch post I put up yesterday, showing how some clever Orthodox Jews can circumvent the regulations not to turn on lights during the Sabbath, got 169 comments—three times more than the much harder-to-write post on the evolution of human altruism. Professor Ceiling Cat wept. Are kosher switches that much more interesting than why humans have behaviors that seem hard to explain by evolution? Well, readers have spoken!

But, like Maru, I do my best.  In the “Kosher Switch” post, I expressed doubt about whether the device was real. After all, is it really eliminating “causation” to turn on a light switch that simply removes an impediment to a randomly-activated beam of light? Wasn’t the whole thing just an enormous and clever joke?

I emailed the link to Steve Pinker, for, as fellow secular Jews, we exchange Jewish jokes as well as bizarre issues of Judaica. Steve responded, and I reproduce what he said, with permission:

It is absolutely not a joke – there is a significant industry in using technology to work around the laws on what you can do on Shabbos (many Israeli hotels have an elevator that stops on every floor on the Sabbath so no one has to press a button and complete an electrical circuit, which is tantamount to lighting a fire, which is work). But Rebecca has told me that most Orthodox Jews would not sign on to such deliberate and complex evasion – there is a sense of obeying the spirit and not just the letter of these laws.

In The Stuff of Thought I go through the philosophy, linguistics, and psychology of causation, and this would have been an excellent case. In common sense and the ordinary language of causation, interpolating a link in a causal chain that is seen as having some degree of autonomy (a human agent, the weather, a device that goes on unpredictably) is seen as severing the causation between the first and last link. So Mike can “break a window” by chucking a rock through it but not by startling a carpenter who’s installing it. You can “open a door” by grabbing the knob but not by opening a window and letting the breeze do it. You can “dim the lights” by sliding a switch but not by turning on the toaster. The law has a similar notion of causation, though as you can guess, this allows for considerable leeway for how many links of what kind are considered to nullify causation and hence mitigate responsibility. Many episodes of Law and Order play these debates out. In one real-life case that I describe in Stuff, a chef at Benihana tried to fling a sizzling shrimp into the mouth of a customer, but it was badly aimed and the customer ducked, sprained his neck, needed an operation, and died of a surgical complication. His survivors sued Benihana but the jury decided there were too many links in the causal chain. In another, President James Garfield was shot by an assassin, but the bullets missed his vital organs and arteries, and he died months later because his doctors applied crackpot 19th-century medical techniques that led him to die of starvation and infection. The assassin argued at his trial, “The doctors killed him. I just shot him.” The jurors were unconvinced and he was hanged.

I’m always impressed that Steve can apparently remember everything he ever wrote (I’m sure he didn’t look this up, because I’ve seen the same kind of performance in person). I can’t even remember some scientific papers I wrote earlier in my career. Further, he has the amazing ability to instantly come up with examples for any point he’s trying to make, as in our latest discussion about whether it would be good for society to pretend that people had libertarian free will, even though we know they don’t. Steve simply rattled off several examples of situations when it’s not necessarily good to know the truth. But I’ll leave that issue for another day.

The Kosher Switch: is it for real?

April 15, 2015 • 1:45 pm

As you may know, it’s forbidden for many Orthodox Jews to turn light switches on and off during the Sabbath, as that constitutes work equivalent to lighting a fire. Some resort to “shabbos goys“: non-Jews whom you can hire to do the dirty work for you.

Now, however, there’s an IndieGoGo project called KosherSwitch that purports to do away with all that, and yet also avoid using pre-set timing devices to turn lights on and off.  After all, you can’t always predict when you want the lights on.

The question is this: is this for real? Well, a lot of people seem to think so, for as of noon today the project has been funded to the tune of $35,421.  I myself found it dubious; but look at this video, which makes it impossible to decide if it’s a joke or for real. First, a bit of jargon that reader “freethinkingjew”, who sent the link, helpfully enclosed:

If you’re watching the video,

Shabbos/Shabbat = the Sabbath (I know you know that, but some of your readers may not)

chilul Shabbos = violation of the rules of the Sabbath

grama = indirectly causing “work” to be done on the Sabbath

Well, how does it work? How can you turn a light on without performing an action on the Sabbath? The details on the IndieGogo page are, well, a bit hazy. . .

Like many inventions, KosherSwitch® technology employs simple concepts to provide indispensable benefits. Our technology is employs complete electro-mechanical isolation, and adds several layers of Halachic uncertainty, randomness, and delays, such that according to Jewish law, a user’s action is not considered to have caused a given reaction.  Many Poskim & Orthodox rabbis have ruled that the KosherSwitch® is not even considered grama (indirect causation), involves nomelakha (forbidden/creative act), and is therefore permitted for consumer use.When “flicking” a  KosherSwitch®, all we’re doing is moving a single, isolated, piece of plastic!  More details are available on our website.

But you check the website, it appears that switching on the light moves a piece of plastic, but that doesn’t turn the light on directly, for there’s some probability that it won’t work. It’s all very deep and philosophical, which is expected when a bunch of wily but crazy Jews are trying to wiggle out of G*d’s strictures:

When you slide the on/off button, you’re moving an isolated piece of plastic.  It is purely mechanical, and is not attached to anything electrical (eletro-mechanically isolated). This is done at a time when you see a green Status Light, which provides 100% assurance that the relevant components within the switch are inactive.  Subsequently, after a random interval, the device will activate and determine the position of the plastic by flashing an internal light pulse. The attached light fixture will be triggered only after the switch overcomes two failure probability processes – one prior to this light pulse and one after it.  Halachically, your action is simply the movement of an isolated piece of plastic with no implications of causation.

20150402001202-KS_isolated_animated_4

I’m sure there’s at least one reader who will work though the complicated explanation (much longer than the excerpt given above) and let me know if there’s anything to it. I’m particularly curious about how “causation” is avoided when, after all, moving the plastic is what turns the lights on, even if there’s some inherent probability it won’t.

Get on it, dear readers; look at the explanation and post below! If this is a Poe, it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Is it philosophically and theologically sound?

Sexist ultra-Orthodox Jews continue to make trouble on planes

April 9, 2015 • 3:25 pm

Well, the New York Times has finally caught up to the prescient reporting of Professor Ceiling Cat, who has reported several times about the bad behavior of ultra-Orthodox Jews on airplanes (see here, for instance).  In their new piece, “Aboard flights, conflicts over seat assignments and religion,” the Times recounts what readers here have long known: in the past few months, those Orthodox religionists have delayed flights by refusing to sit next to women, which they claim is against their faith (they may, G*d forbid, actually touch a woman!). Flights have been delayed, passengers peeved at what is a sexist request, and there’s even been the spectacle of these Jews offering money to passengers to switch seats.

Several flights from New York to Israel over the last year have been delayed or disrupted over the issue, and with social media spreading outrage and debate, the disputes have spawned a protest initiative, an online petition and a spoof safety video from a Jewish magazine suggesting a full-body safety vest (“Yes, it’s kosher!”) to protect ultra-Orthodox men from women seated next to them on airplanes.

(Note: I’m looking forward to seeing that video!)

As the piece notes, it’s getting worse:

“The ultra-Orthodox have increasingly seen gender separation as a kind of litmus test of Orthodoxy — it wasn’t always that way, but it has become that way,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College. “There is an ongoing culture war between these people and the rest of the modern world, and because the modern world has increasingly sought to become gender neutral, that has added to the desire to say, ‘We’re not like that.’”

Apparently in some cases the fear is not just “pollution” by accidentally touching a woman, but fear of temptation, the same fear that drives many Muslims to insist that women be covered.

Rabbi Shafran noted that despite religious laws that prohibit physical contact between Jewish men and women who are not their wives, many ultra-Orthodox men follow the guidance of an eminent Orthodox scholar, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who counseled that it was acceptable for a Jewish man to sit next to a woman on a subway or bus so long as there was no intention to seek sexual pleasure from any incidental contact.

. . . Mr. Roffe [a writer from Los Angeles] described his experience on a United Airlines flight to Chicago. When they started to board, he said, an ultra-Orthodox man stood in the aisle, refusing to move and delaying the departure for 15 to 20 minutes until another passenger volunteered to switch seats.

“My buddy who is Orthodox was saying this is a traditional thing — he doesn’t want to be tempted when his wife wasn’t there. And I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ This was just some woman flying to work or home and minding her own business.”

While many passengers refuse this requests—and I especially applaud the women who stand their ground—some people feel that they should move as a nice gesture to accommodate people’s faith:

Some passengers are sympathetic. Hamilton Morris, a 27-year-old journalist from Brooklyn, said he agreed to give up his seat on a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Newark via Chicago because it seemed like the considerate thing to do.

“There was a Hasidic Jew sitting across the aisle, between two women, and a stewardess approached me and quietly asked if I would be willing to exchange seats because the Hasidic Jew was uncomfortable sitting between two women,” he said. “I was fine with that. Everyone was trying to be accommodating because on airplanes everyone is anxious about offending anyone for religious reasons.”

My own opinion is that it’s odious to go out of your way to afford respect to any beliefs that are sexist or misogynist, as these are. But others may feel differently. So here’s the question to readers: You’re on a plane, and an ultra-Orthodox Jew asks you to move so he doesn’t have to sit next to a women. (This could be asked to either men or women.)  Would you do it?

h/t: Greg Mayer

Crazy Sabbath restrictions for Jews leads to death of 7 children

March 23, 2015 • 1:30 pm

A reader with the pseudonym “Freethinking Jew” sent me the link below, adding this:

“When we think of the deaths caused by religion, we probably usually think of terrorism.  But in this case, people who may have otherwise been fine people and good parents, for all we know, may have caused the death of 7 of their children by strictly obeying their religion, even though they weren’t trying to hurt anyone.”

And of course the link he sent was to the New York Times article on the death of 7 children in a single Jewish family last Friday. Because of Sabbath regulations, Orthodox Jews are not allowed to turn their oven on or off from Friday sundown to Saturday evening, for that constitutes work, and you can’t work on the Sabbath. The mother was apparently keeping food warm on a hotplate (turned on before Friday sundown), and the hotplate malfunctioned, causing a fire that killed everyone but the father, who was away, as well as the mother and one daughter, who jumped out their second-floor window. Seven other kids died (see below; Orthodox families are large!), apparently of smoke inhalation. The mother and surviving child are in critical condition. From the Times report:

Just after midnight, flames began to fly off the large hot plate on a first-floor kitchen counter, near the back of the home in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood with many large Orthodox families. On a day of rest, it would have been one of the few electrical appliances in the neighborhood that were flipped on.

In upstairs bedrooms connected to the kitchen by an open stairwell, the Sassoon family slept: their mother, Gayle Sassoon, 45; four girls: Eliane, 16; Siporah, 15; Rivkah, 11; and Sara, 6; and four boys: David, 12; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; and Yaakob, 5. Their father was at a religious conference, and given the Sabbath prohibition on electronic communication, he did not learn what had happened until several hours after the fire, when the Police Department reached him at a synagogue.

. . . Gayle Sassoon was separated from her children by the flames, Mr. Nigro said. After leaping from the second floor, she stumbled through the smoke to the steps of her cousin Gary Jemal’s house across the street. There, a neighbor and friend of Ms. Sassoon, Victor Sedaka, found her “black, charred,” he said. “You couldn’t even tell who she was.”

With a voice so hoarse it was barely audible, Mr. Sedaka heard her try to scream: “Save my children, save my children.”

I doubt that she or her daughter will survive. And think of the father who has lost his entire family because of a hot plate, and a crazy religious stricture. What terrible grief! (Of course, he probably won’t think twice about the ludicrous nature of the rule that killed his family.)

As the “Freethinking Jew” noted, these regulations may seem ridiculous, or even humorous, to non-Jews, but they can also be dangerous. These children almost certainly wouldn’t have died if their parents were nonreligious, or even non-Jewish. How many lives is it worth to keep such a rule in place?

While my plea to get rid of these ridiculous restrictions will of course go unheeded, do take a look at some of the crazy rules. Have a gander, for instance, at the Wikipedia article about to what extent Orthodox Jews can actually ride in a motor vehicle on the Sabbath.  Further, Orthodox adherents can’t tear toilet paper on the Sabbath—it must be pre-torn. No flippping of light switches, either: for that you can have automatic lights or hire a “Shabbos goy“—a non-Jew who will turn the lights on at your request. (That’s always seemed like cheating to me.)

It’s not as if fulfilling these rules of behaviors—performing mitzvahs—will help you go to heaven, either. Jews don’t believe in an afterlife; it’s their one nod to reality. The many Sabbath restrictions, as well as others (ritual purification in a special bath for women after menstruation, for instance) are construed as divine rules of conduct that, for some Jews, will hasten the return of the true Messiah.

Curiously, just before this tragedy happened, reader Robin sent me a copy of the instructions she’d received with her new General Electric range. It turned out that her oven has a “Sabbath mode“, which you can program beforehand to turn it on and off on Sabbath. Furthermore— and I didn’t know this—the beeper and oven light are disabled in Sabbath mode, for beeping and lights going on apparently constitute “work.” The same goes for Orthodox refrigerators: you can’t have the light go on when you open them on a Sabbath. How crazy is that?

Here’s a copy of the relevant part of the instructions. In this oven there’s no lights or beeping, though on some models you have to unscrew the bulb before Friday sundown:

Screen Shot 2015-03-19 at 11.58.38 AM

 

If science doesn’t make a case for God, what does?

March 11, 2015 • 12:11 pm

Over at PuffHo Religion, we see a smart rabbi go wrong. The rabbi is Geoffey A. Mitelman, founder of an organization called “Sinai and Synapses,” whose motto is this:

Screen Shot 2015-03-11 at 11.47.44 AM

To my chagrin, that organization offers programs like “Scientifically grounded Judaism,” which makes sense only if they purge Judaism of everything that’s not scientific. And if you did that, you’d be left with a form of secular humanism absent any supernatural beliefs, which is what most liberal Jews espouse anyway.

Mitelman’s piece has a heartening title as well: “Sorry, science doesn’t make a case for God. But that’s OK.” The good news is that he’s on the mark here, even rejecting the “fine-tuning” argument so beloved by apologists as a powerful argument for God.  He also says this: “But science is a search for an accurate understanding of our world, which means that it can change. And if we’re basing our view of God on the latest scientific research, we’re going to have a very fragile theology.” But that would seem to make hash of the “Scientifically grounded Judaism” program in his own Sinai and Synapses foundation (I have to chuckle when I write that name).

The bad news is that Mitelman, even though realizing that science doesn’t make the case for God, apparently still thinks that something makes the case for God. But what is that something? He doesn’t say, but instead spews out Gould’s discredited hypothesis of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA):

Using science to prove God’s existence confuses two very different ways of thinking. Science progresses as new hypotheses get tested, questioned, refuted, expanded upon, discarded, and revised.

Religion, on the other hand, is a way to make sense of the world. It is an appreciation of awe and mystery, justice and compassion.

In other words, science is a search for truth, while religion is a search for meaning.

. . . In other words, religion doesn’t need science to prove God’s existence, because the question of God is not a scientific one.

Science is the best method we have for understanding how we got here. But religion isn’t science. It is not (or at least should not) be about provable or disprovable claims, because that’s not its purpose. Instead, it should be designed to help us improve ourselves and our world, here and now.

For me, as I look out at the universe, I am in awe of the fact that we are living here on this Earth. But that awe wouldn’t change for me if the parameters for life are actually one in a hundred rather than one in a septillion.

Instead, I am guided by the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

NOMA has been rejected by philosophers and secularists for two reasons: religion isn’t the sole bailiwick of morality, philosophy and meaning: we have a long tradition of secular morality and philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks. Second, as we all know, religions don’t limit themselves to questions of meaning alone. Creationism in America is the most obvious example, but so are any religious assertions about reality, such as those about the existence of God and Jesus, the nature of God, the existence of an afterlife, and so on. Religion, except for the most Sophisticated™ and apophatic sort, is resolutely wedded to claims about what is true. Mitelman either doesn’t see this or simply rejects what most religious people see as the nature of their faith.

And that is why NOMA has been largely rejected by theologians and believers, as I noted in my discussion of Gregg Caruso’s edited volume: Science and Religion: 5 Questions. In that book, one of the questions posed to the scientists, philosophers, and theologians was this:

Some theorists maintain that science and religion occupy non-overlapping magisteria—i.e., that science and religion each have legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority, and these two domains do not overlap. Do you agree?

The almost universal answer among the 33 people asked was “no.” And the theologians’ answers were largely based on existence claims made by their religion. Mitelman’s “yes” answer is a rare exception.

So what makes Mitelman believe in God? The article, and the excerpt above, don’t say. Perhaps it’s the “feeling of awe” he gets by looking at the universe. Or perhaps he buys into Rabbi Heschel’s notion that living itself is holy, which is simply an assertion without proof, and wouldn’t convince anybody not already in the asylum that there was a God.

I’d like to ask the good rabbi whether he thinks that there’s any literal truth in the Old Testament, and, if so, what that truth is. Does he really think the Exodus happened, when archaeology shows that it didn’t? Where does he get the idea of God, and what kind of God does he believe in? Why does he reject the idea of Jesus as the son of God, belief in which is necessary to be saved? And if God is just the universe, then he’s a pantheist, not a true believing Jew.

I appreciate Rabbi Mitelman’s candor about the inability of science to give evidence for God. But if he really believes that, then he’s left with no credible evidence for God, and should become a humanist.  In other words, “Sinai and Synapses” is just one neuron shy of pure atheism.