In today's news we read the outrageous claim by Turkey's Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that it was Muslims who in fact discovered America, prior to Columbus. This Islamo- centrism is an ugly feature of fundamentalism, and the rejection of fact or reason. Another example is the Palestinian claim that there was never an Israelite Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, where the current occupier happens to be a mosque.
However, this post is not intended to take on Islam or even the Palestinians. It is only using them as an example to compare with the Talmudist rabbis. The problem being, that the rabbis have a very similar pathology, and it is Talmudo-centrism. Any contradiction between facts and the Talmud, and the talmud must be right. Any contradiction between the Torah /Neviim and the Talmud, and of course their position is with the Talmud. Thus, just like the Palestinian Islamists are unable to grasp the fact that a Temple pre-existed their religion and mosque, so the rabbis cannot grasp the fact that Hebrew was a spoken language before the invention of the niqqud vowels, or that the Kohanim knew how to slaughter animals before the invention of the Oral Law.
An awareness of this kind of bias, before engaging the rabbis in debate, will be very useful, and effecive.
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