Yes or No: Professor Jacob and I play a game of "When is your bar mitzvah?" to see who can guess the answer correctly. Will Professor Jacob win? Or will he be the one to be fired?
00:31:54.960So my interpretation of that would mean, okay, well, then that means that God, because God can't contradict himself, this is like the first principle of, you know, it's Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction, from which we have to reason.
00:32:08.480That would mean that God cannot be contradicting himself, so he's not telling us literally we can't have any images of things in heaven.
00:32:15.540He's saying, don't create any idols, because idols are very wrong, but images are just the way that our experience of the world is mediated.
00:32:24.620And this is one evidence of this is that immediately after God says, don't do this thing that you think he's saying, he immediately tells you to do that exact thing.
00:32:34.420And God would not do that, because we're not Muslims, and we don't believe that Allah is pure will, unbounded by reason.
00:32:39.540Producer Davies is probably going to have to stop us, because this might go for a while.
00:32:54.380Once every two years, NASCAR comes and they do an event on this street, they shut it down, I'm sure you've seen it, they shut it down in Nashville.
00:33:38.320But my question now to you is, what you're essentially saying is because the police gave permission to the NASCAR to go fast down the street for one specific instance, the law that existed before to not speed on that street, after NASCAR is over, I can go ahead and speed down the street as many times as I want.
00:33:54.420That would be an interesting rebuttal if God told us in the book of Exodus, do not make any images of anything on earth, except for this one time when I'm telling you to.
00:34:04.200But he doesn't say except for this one time when I'm telling you to.
00:34:05.900That part, you're just adding that in, like some people add words to the Bible.
00:34:37.540So it would seem to me, especially just reasoning from the fact that we always have images, we're always arguing for, we're always arguing for, we're always arguing for,
00:34:44.740we're always mediating our ideas and our discourse through images, that there's no problem with images.
00:34:54.220And so, so even for instance, even with the exception, would you say that the cherubim, that the ancient Israelites were ordered to carve for the ark, would you, would you say that those are idols?
00:35:18.300But to create an image used in liturgy, the liturgy of going through the desert, the Exodus, which is the figure of all history, would that not, isn't your objection to that, that that would be idolatrous?
00:35:31.620Isn't your objection as a Jew to the images and the statues in the Catholic churches that they're idolatrous?
00:36:18.460So are the images in the Catholic church necessarily idolatrous?
00:36:22.300Or does it depend on how the Catholics view the images?
00:36:24.080But just because something's not classified as an idol doesn't mean that it's an exception from the rule in the Ten Commandments not to make any graven images.