THE RADICALISED RABBI is a blog on Judaism and its very useful ideas and the blogger a Secular Koranist and a revolutionary. You don't have to be Jewish to find Jewish ideas very useful in tidying up your thinking and turbo-charging your powers of reasoning to the extent that you can even predict most events and disasters. The West is heading for disaster with its insane policy of Transnational Progressivism, turning our global village into Sodom and Gomorrah attracting the same punishment.
I am surprised the Chinese are being so stupid. They should have said:
"Oh dear. We seem to have a bit of a flu bug here. Some people may die, especially the ill and elderly, but they have had their innings, and these things happen from time to time, don't they? Keep calm and carry on, as the British used to say."
On the whole, I think the Jewish idea of Emunah and Bitachon would have been more useful to the atheist Chinese. All this nonsense trying to stop the spread of what will prove to be no more than the flu just makes my blood boil. All these families separated and symptomless people quarantined on islands and military bases. KUH RAY ZEE.
It is probably something to do with their one child families and atheism.
Emunah - belief in God
Bitachon - trust in God that He will do the right thing for you and everyone else, in the end
The difference between Emunah and Bitachon:
When Job's wife said "Curse God and die," she was displaying emunah but not bitachon.
All ideas have a purpose in mind, whether they are effective or not.
If God was an invention of Man, then this invention was intended assist Man in his government and politics, so must think the atheist.
A lie is by definition a false statement, but all lies are told for a purpose ie to obscure and deceive.
For the atheist, the idea of trusting in Fate, Fortune, Providence etc is perfectly possible, by use of the probability theory which professional gamblers use.
Bitachon is not of course a gambling strategy, because an excess of trust is simply recklessness, and gambling is simply thrill-seeking recklessness.
Bitachon for the atheist is the belief that things will turn out for the best even if there is just a 50/50 chance that something might work. Even if the chance is 1 in 13,983,816 or approximately 1 in 14 million of winning in the UK National Lottery, many happily buy it, because it gives them the pleasure of being hopeful and of imagining themselves trading up on their sex partners, spouses, homes, holidays etc though they don't really expect a lottery win or plan their future on that basis.
So here is an atheist in a foxhole praying for God's help. We all do it. I am currently an agnostic, but I know that in my atheist days that was what I did.
This is how bitachon would work for atheists:
1. Just supposing the Abrahamic God exists.
2. If He exists, He would be omnipotent and perfectly moral and be capable of helping us.
3. He would obviously be more likely to help us if we believed in Him and obeyed His laws.
4. But if we didn't believe in Him and didn't obey His laws, He would still be more likely to help us if we obeyed His laws even if we didn't believe in Him.
5. And so we resolve to obey His laws. In our more contemplative or desperate moments we wonder if He really exists, and the more rational of us will know that the best way to understand God is to understand the evils His laws are meant to discourage and prevent.
6. When we understand how the institution of marriage operates and how it works to preserve our nation and civilisation, we marvel at their wisdom and our bitachon increases.
Because we obey His laws, we would be happier and more confident people enjoying the rewards moral men and women enjoy: spirituality and moral superiority. We become confident in the success and worthiness of our undertakings and are consequently more prepared to take on risky but righteous projects, such as overthrowing our matriarchy or at least challenging it even if we are faced with a certain prospect of loss of dignity, family, friends, liberty, status or income and employment. That, in a nutshell, is the real purpose of bitachon. It is for the purposes of tikkun olam.
