Max_S’s summary clearly says, “G-d directly tells the rabbis that Eliezer is correct”. So yes, you must have missed that part when you described it as only one of them hearing the voice in his head.
As Keeve has already answered, the point in that story is that all human authority to interpret Torah law depends on the proper following of the procedures for deriving the law from the Torah of Moses, and those procedures do not allow for subsequent divine voices to weigh in - “It is not in heaven” is itself from the Torah, Deuteronomy 30:12.
When Rabbis come to disagreeing conclusions following the proper Mosaic procedures, the Talmudic attitude toward such arguments is, “These and these are words of the living G-d.” Obviously only one can be right, and obviously only one can become the practical law, but the other was not heresy. However, the attempt to bring proofs from miracles and heavenly voices was outside of the Mosaic parameters. Ruling according to Rabbi Eliezer based on these would have undermined the entire system of Torah-legal jurisprudence.
I wrote claim but not in the sense of an unfounded claim. More like to take possession or to achieve it. They demonstrated that the Torah is for man to interpret. Poor word choice in hindsight, sorry.
Just to play devil’s (or, I suppose, angel’s) advocate… Isn’t this situation you describe kind of common in all fields of human endeavour? Debate and disagreement is what people do - even in matters that seem finite and should, one thinks, be quite cut and dried.
I am not aware of any country other than India which is constitutionally democratic and secular; and yet allows a separate Sharia law system for their Muslim citizens.
Israel still uses a modified version of the Ottoman “millet” system, where state-sanctioned religious courts are responsible for so-called “personal” matters, mainly marriage and divorce. The Jewish courts use Halacha; the Muslim courts use Sharia.
It’s a pernicious piece of legislation that many Israelis have been trying to get rid of for decades, with limited success.
The above, which was part of the OP, was a reaction to this observation:
So, if dozens of posters gave answers which all differed from each other, your conclusion is that all the answers were simply made up and have no true existence anywhere outside people’s heads. But can’t that be said of almost every thread on SD?
If you go to a physics thread you don’t get dozens of answers, because there is an outside authority that conveys rightness. With religion all you can get is whatever an individual’s interpretation of rightness. What non-members of that sect object to is that they then try to insist on the absolute rightness of that interpretation and want to force others to live by it.
Please give it up. You cannot rationalize religion. There is no “rightness” to religion that is any more meaningful than any other philosophy or non-philosophy. Religion only gains “rightness” from power. And the point of this thread, which you keep ignoring, is the number of people who have grown so tired of that evil that they are moving away from religion. As the OP, I ask that you discuss the point of the thread rather than trying to justify the unjustifiable.
I think that I do understand the bad reputation that religion gets from so many different religions all claiming to be correct. What I don’t understand is how that leads to the conclusion that none are correct. Can’t it be possible that some subset actually is correct (even if it’s not provable which subset that might be)?
Well, yeah, but I mean it even happens all the time with verifiable facts - that was the point - actually it was your point - that our observation of disagreement should lead us to conclude that the answers are merely made up and have no true existence outside peoples’ heads.
I’m simply suggesting that’s not how you decide if something is false, or else you will need to conclude that nearly everything that anyone ever speaks about is false, because there is almost nothing anyone speaks about, that someone else won’t contradict or argue about.
The answer is that religion had become less and less about metaphysics and more about socializing with the other members of the congregation and moral teaching. Physics and biology have removed the need to turn to religion for The Big Questions, but religion doesn’t limit itself to just The Big Questions.
Sorry, but that’s a horrible example. All the versions of quantum mechanics give exactly the same answers. It’s been mathematically proven that they are the same thing in different forms. The ways they approach the answers differ and those are called interpretations. But physicists know they can rely on getting the correct answers that agree with every other physicist every single time no matter the approach.
Step outside of your bubble and try to see how pathetically pleading such a statement appears to non-believers. “Please, please, please. Somebody must be right, mustn’t they? We can’t all be wrong. I need hope, however slim.”
No, a god is such an incredibly powerful thing that to think that a million versions of religions can all be wrong is the same as saying that a million and one must be wrong, and a million and two, and three, and four, and so on. Wrongness must not be imposed on others on the chance - chance! - that one variation must be right although no one will ever know what that is. What a horrifying evil way to think.
Exactly, so that’s the method by which you decide if things are right, not by just concluding that nobody is right, on the grounds that everyone is arguing.
Exactly - and if eight billion people all parrotted the party line, because they all converted to one religion - that wouldn’t make it any more true (though it would probably make it really easy for them to fabricate evidence)
What shape is the Earth? Do vaccines cause Autism? Is the Earth’s climate changing? Does smoking cause disease? Does water have memory? Did humans visit the moon? Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself?
These are all topics about which you can (or could) find lots of people disagreeing with each other, and yet, you would not conclude, on account of that disagreement, that the answers are merely made up and have no true existence outside peoples’ heads.
That’s the point. The method of discernment of truth proposed by OP at the start of the thread is not the method the OP actually uses.
It’s nothing to do with people disagreeing with one another - it’s whether they disagree with observable evidence.