Shalom. This video simply asked the question, why do we need God? After all there is a bestseller book in the New York Times it says that, religion is the cause of most evil in the world and God does not exist, so, why should we have God? And then, there was the death a couple of weeks ago of Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who founded secular Jewish Humanism, instead of saying, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” they prayed, they revered that as the best in mankind.
So, why do we need God? Well, there are a lot of reasons. One is that, most people believed in God, human beings seem to be hardwired for God. Albert Einstein believed in God. But, I will give you a couple of reasons just from the stories this past week. One, there was a big psychological study release that said, try to explain the reason why human being seemingly can be petty one minute and noble the next minute? And the answer was that the subconscious plays a lot more reactive role during the day than we previously thought. It kind of takes control of us. It can be triggered by all kinds of minor things that we are not even aware of. Even if we think we are being noble sometimes we are being petty, and there is really no antidote to that. It is not the devil. Jews do not believe in the devil. It is our own inner resources, our own inner subconscious that takes over. And, you have to fight against that all the time with noble ideas and the only antidote to that is the study of Torah.
Now, I will give you a few other examples from the animal kingdom. Rats, well, we use to, and sometimes we still say, “O that is a dirty rat”, meaning the person is mean. But you know that they did a study that was release a few weeks ago, they have founded rats are actually nice to each other, unlike human beings all the time. As you cannot say, he is a dirty rat anymore. Human beings, you got to understand, and asked why human beings are not nice all the time to one another. But take chimpanzees, they did a comparison between the animal that is most closely related to human beings, about 98% of the same basic biological structure. And they found that, like human beings, chimps can be ventral for good purposes of protecting the kingdom, and of the attacked of the chimps, and of punishing bad behavior.
But, unlike human beings, chimps are not vindictive. They can be ventral, but they are not in any way unnecessarily vindictive, they are not unnecessarily mean to people for no good reason, unlike human beings. Then take to ox, when dogs fight in the natural world, they do so for some important dog reason. But, they do not arbitrarily starved dogs to that and trained dogs just to kill one another, just for sport, like human beings do. You do not find mass murderers. Unless animals are really hungry then they killed one or two, unlike human beings have mass murder people. And so, all of these reason show that even in the animal kingdom, they are much more “human” than human beings can be. And the only – so how can you say we should revere that which is best in human kind when our subconscious controls us often and makes us petty, when we have all of these examples of how we are actually worst than the animal kingdom in so many ways.
Yes, we can be noble, yes we can be altruistic, but the answer is you need a source greater than we, the power greater than we, to say “This is the law, no murder, no steal”, it constantly educate yourself to that, because if you say simply human being says it, well it is easy to figure out some way to rationalized it.
Now, you could come back and say, “Well, in the name of God, and all kinds of bad things take place”, which they do. You have the crusade. You have all kinds of utility. You have Muslim fanatics, killing people in the name of God. That is true but on balanced, think about the huge mass murders in the 20th century, with 50 million died with Hitler and including six million Jews and 50 million by Stalin in the Communist purges, and 50 million by Mao Zedong. Those three movements of communism in the China, and communism in Russia, and the Nazism, all were based on, no God but do you find the person? And when you make a human being God that is when you get into the greatest trouble. And so, it is God alone, the power greater than any force in the universe, who laid down the law to Moses, which is still the eternal law, and that is the reason, one of the reasons why we need God.
Now, there is a wonderful and important psychologist who was, not exactly antithesis of Freud but had a very different understanding of human nature that Freud named Albert Ellis, who passed away a couple of weeks ago. One of the things he says, that human beings have a great capacity for sabotaging their own happiness. Therefore, we need an objective, an objective system to balance ourselves of to constantly educate ourselves through Torah study as to what God wants from us, in order to deal with our very powerful subconscious.
To deal with our urges which are not to makes us rats and much more vindictive than chimps. And I am willing to have support where animal is more and kill each other, so we could be entertained, that is why we need God, to realize that, yes we have a touch of God in us. Yes, we are a little lower than the angels but we need God constantly to reinforce those values by Torah study and by prayer and by us doing deeds of loving-kindness has been commanded to do that that is why we need God.
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