Essay on Jewish Philosophers on Reason and Revelation

1 Id-According to the Old Testament, what massacre took place shortly after Moses received the 10 Commandments and why did it take place? Briefly list the main events in Moses’ life according to the Old Testament. Do any Egyptian sources confirm the events narrated in the Old Testament?

Between the two schools of epistemology, rationalism and empiricism, I am inclined towards the philosophies of rationalism. I am persuaded towards philosophical approaches which are superior at attaining truth. Empiricism relies on observation using the five senses in reasoning to achieve truth. However, in Plato’s Thaetetus, Socrates gives strong arguments for the limitations of human perception. The Canadian legal system, also, recognizes flaws in human observation, which increases my skepticism of empiricism. Conversely, rationalism relies solely on the use of logic and deduction in reasoning. Both, Plato and Socrates stressed the value of rationalism through the ability to know and express combinations of elements through mathematics. Large

In developing your answers to Part III, be sure to keep these general definitions in mind:

|Please answer each question thoroughly and completely. If you have treated this assignment lightly, you will |

Part 1:  Please respond to each question briefly and concisely, but as completely as you can.

Hello, Sean, I was reading through your post and I had a few question about the following:

David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion provide conflicting arguments about the nature of the universe, what humans can know about it, and how their knowledge can affect their religious beliefs. The most compelling situation relates to philosophical skepticism and religion; the empiricist character, Cleanthes, strongly defends his position that skepticism is beneficial to religious belief. Under fire from an agnostic skeptic and a rationalist, the empiricist view on skepticism and religion is strongest in it’s defense. This debate is a fundamental part of the study of philosophy: readers must choose their basic understanding of the universe and it’s creator, upon which all other assumptions about the universe will be made.

Jesus is the fulfillment of Judaic prophecies; he is the new Moses imparting the new Law of Love.

1. Page 355 in the text: Questions for Thought and Discussion: Questions 5, 9, and 11

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the

Levine’s book titled The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus proves to be a highly informative resource when trying to understand the intricate relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Levine’s primary objective seems to be a desire to address the idea that there is a vast, irreconcilable disparity between the beliefs and practices of Christians and Jews. Levine’s central argument focuses upon a common misperception of this dissimilarity: it is the result of Jesus being in direct opposition to Judaism. Furthermore, she contends that only a decided openness and interfaith dialogue between Christianity and Judaism can truly provide the most complete and compelling portrait of Jesus’s life and work. To me, the most edifying facet of Levine’s argument was her call to anchor Jesus within the historical and cultural context in which he was teaching in order to best understand his work and his message. Levine not only provides support for this idea throughout The Misunderstood Jew, but near the end of the novel also offers up ways in which both Christians and Jews can reconcile these two ostensibly conflicting perceptions of Jesus. Therefore, in this essay, I will analyze Levine’s arguments regarding the importance of historical/cultural context in Chapter One and Chapter Four while synthesizing it with her solutions presented in Chapter Seven.

Besides BonJour's argument of illustrative examples, moderate rationalism is defended by two intimately related dialectical arguments. The argument is that the denial of a priori justification will lead to a severe skepticism, in which only the most direct experience could be justified. Stemming from this severe skepticism, comes the stronger argument that argumentation itself becomes impossible. This essay will describe the distinct segments of the argument and will demonstrate the relationship between the two arguments.

I learned a lot of facts about Judaism that I had previously been ignorant to. I had no idea that we (Christians & Jews) maintained the same bible (The Old Testament) but that we interpreted certain events differently, such as Adam and Eve. “In Judaism, each and every human being is free to choose good or evil because each person stands before God in the same relationship that Adam and Eve did” (Esposito 77). I was unaware that Judaism did not believe in “original sin.” I had no knowledge of the fact that Jews did not believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead. I found it interesting how Jews have split into separate groups – Reform Jews, who believe that Judaism is a cultural inheritance and that neither the laws nor beliefs are

The Jewish religion has also undergone many transformations over the years. It started off in its earliest years as being animistic, with Hebrews worshipping forces of nature. As a result this religion had a number of practices that concerned magic and animal sacrifices. The Hebrew religion also became polytheistic which involves several gods. Hebrew religion eventually became anthropomorphic, in which God or gods became human individuals and had human characteristics. Eventually most Hebrews concentrated on one main God who they referred to as Yahweh. Yahweh is a mysterious term used in Hebrew that reads YHWY (in biblical Hebrew there were no vowels), and that still to this day its pronunciation

John H. Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible is broken up into fourteen chapters. Those fourteen chapters are each part of one of five sections. This book also contains over twenty historical images. Before the introduction, the author gives readers a full appendix of all images used in this published work. The author then gives his acknowledgements followed by a list of abbreviations.