Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

younger participants in public rituals see that elders and wise people are accorded honor, and understand implicitly whom they should take as role models. In this way, they learn to value experience and knowledge, and they understand that if they wish to obtain similar prestige, they should seek to acquire such experience and knowledge.

When communities exceed a certain size and inter-personal relationships within the community become overly thin, the urge to seek grounds for splitting becomes irresistible.

the process of formulating clear principles helps us overcome systemic bias.

Such codes resemble statutory law in the sense that they are expressed as general principles of law rather than as rulings regarding specific cases. But they differ from typical statutory law in two crucial ways: they are not produced by a legislature but rather by an individual without recognized institutional authority, and, unlike legislation, t

people can’t live coherent lives without certain unfounded beliefs.

community is defined by the social norms shared by its members, while a state’s jurisdiction falls on all those who live in its territory.

Rawls and Heidi simply assume that there is some “unencumbered self,” as political philosopher Michael Sandel puts it,2 independent of and prior to the affiliations that constitute my identity, and that we can somehow imagine the preferences of these unencumbered selves as they organize themselves politically. But, in fact, we only have preferences

different groups, each in its own way, wish to bring salvation now by choosing either particularism or universalism to the exclusion of the other.

if and only if Seller has a high discount rate, it might be worth it for him to cheat.