I only watched the first 4 minutes just to hear his first point against Christianity and how well he makes his case. I decided to let his statement about the Christian concept of a “blood thirsty God” pass for the moment, and hear his next criticism. At 3:02, concerning Christians, he states, “Their so-called New Testament claims that God has done away with his instructions for morality.” One could argue that he is committing a Straw Man Fallacy, but not necessarily. The NT aspect that he seems to be addressing is that, according to St. Paul, Christians are not justified by observances of the Law of Moses, but rather faith in Christ and acceptance of his gift of salvation. As is taught in Christianity (Catholic & otherwise), we are still bound my such OT teachings as the 10 Commandments, but we do not have to observe such things as the Jewish dietary restrictions. A Jew could make the argument that obedience to the Law equates with morality, and therefore rejection of any of the 600+ laws within the Torah is an immoral action.
With this in mind, he says, “One could only imagine how that statement (about God doing away with his instructions for morality) would have been understood by the Jews of old. They would have fallen to the ground and would have yelled, with all their might, ‘God forbid!’”
Here’s the problem with his line of reasoning. Earlier in the video he claimed that he was doing this as a tool to facilitate conversion to Judaism. Then he claims (in so many words) that Christianity is in error because it rejects the idea of obedience to the Law of Moses. The problem is that Jews have heavily debated amongst themselves for over three thousands years what proper obedience to the Law actually means, and how it is done. Today there are different branches of Judaism, each having different notions as to which OT laws are to be obeyed, and how they are to be obeyed. The same “Jews of old” mentioned by the man in this video may see the observances of modern Jews and say, “God forbid!”
I have Jewish friends, and I interact with Jewish people, but I do not know of a single Jew who follows every single OT law. If someone would like to read an account of a Jew who attempted to do this for an entire read, I recommend A.J. Jacob’s
The Year of Living Biblically. It is both insightful and humorous (in terms of the latter, it is very funny to read how he had to figure out how to obey the law concerning stoning an adulterer without actually hurting someone).
At this point I stopped watching the video, mostly because of time constraints. But my basic point is as follows: Both Christians and Jews believe that some of the OT laws are still binding, while others aren’t. So his initial criticism of Christianity is
also applicable to Judaism, and yet he says that one of the purposes of his video is to covert Christians to Judaism. So whereas he may not have started off with a Straw Man Fallacy (depending on how one defines morality) he has committed the Fallacy of Inconsistency, because what he ascribes as a failure in Christianity is not considered a failure in Judaism.
