The click drop ratio is a HUGE deal.  This goes more into site design as well… don’t think you will achieve virality, raise funds or get email sign ups if it take more than a click/screen or two to get to the end result.  

Thanks for sharing!

With regards to the actual point of this article (which has been very well written, I might add):
Anytime a websites requires more than 2 clicks to convert on a call-to-action, I’m done. For every click required, conversion rate falls 20%. Making someone jump through too many hoops and you’ll lose the vital users.

Great article!

Just to clarify, what I got out of your argument here is that since moral instructions have changed in different situations, that strict Jewish morality is meta-ethically relative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism You have made no indication that you are arguing about the other forms of moral relativism, so I won’t address those.

You have not successfully argued moral relativism . It’s not that god is unbounded by the morality that humans are guided by, and therefore morality is relative. Nor does it make sense to say that since god gives different instructions in a specific instance than god has given in the general case, that morality has itself shifted. Under strict Judaism, moral living is living in accordance with hashem, period. Hashem exists in accordance with Hashem, so Hashem is moral. If I perform mitzvot, then I exist in accordance with Hashem, and I am moral. If I ignore (or break) mitzvot, then I am not living in accordance with Hashem, and I am not acting morally. You have begun with the presumption that the Torah is truth, but under that system, moral relativism is a literal impossiblity.

Once you understand that definition, much of the rest falls into place.

To say that your first example (Adam and Eve) is of moral relativism is to say that we should be bounded by the same laws as Adam and Eve, even though they had not eaten from the tree of Wisdom. We are fundamentally different from Adam and Eve because we have gained insight. We are not bound by the same moral code as salamanders because we have an increased capacity to recognize right from wrong.

To say that your Egeyptian example implies that God must be bounded by the same strictures as we are. Using the definition of morality in literal Judaism, your stance that God’s slaying of the first-born is morally relative is literally saying that “Hashem told *us* not to kill in order to live in accordance with Hashem’s will. When Hashem kills the first-born, Hashem is therefore not in accordance with Hashem’s will.” Hashem is, by definition, in accordance with Hashem.

To wit: under a literal system of Torah, literal directives are always moral, even if they appear contradictory, silly, or unreasonable.

Your last example is more complex, because there is certainly an appearance that not killing, in general, is in contradiction with being told to kill in a specific instance. But in assuming a contradiction, you have either made the flaw of presuming knowable properties of the law beyond what was stated (in this case, constancy), or misunderstanding the profound implications of God’s word itself. Let’s take the first case, first.

There is a teaching from strict torah judaism: you can not claim to know the reason for a mitzvah. Even if the torah says, “do this for such-and-such reason”, there is no way to know that the reason given is (a) the only reason, or even (b) the best one. We only know that that is the reason that has been shared with us. Without knowing the reasons behind the mitzvot, we are also not in a position to decide that if something is all right in one situation, but not in another, that this implies a moral relativism, only that we don’t were not given the rationale behind the shift.

By extension of this same idea, we also cannot “rank” mitzvot. It seems intuitive that not sleeping with my neighbor’s wife (and dog) is more important than not eating fish that don’t have scales, but we cannot actually know this. It could be that, on some spiritual and godly level, eating fish without scales seriously messes things up on a grand scale for thousands of years, while sleeping with my neighbor’s wife and dog only really make things messy in my immediate vicinity here on earth while I am alive.

If god said that on Tuesday, we must all wear green hats with spinners on them, then that directive, as silly as it might appear at first glance, would have exactly as much weight as the command not to kill, and it would be exactly as moral. It’s not relative because it is to a single standard, and if it is not entirely rationalizable, it’s because we have not been given (or perhaps cannot understand) the rationales.

The only knowable properties of a command from God are exactly what God has said, no more, and no less. God did not say that the commands were necessarily for all time. God could come back and change this at any point. This is not a contradiction, either. This brings us to the second way that the direction could be misunderstood: not taking the profundity of God’s word into account.

God’s word is, quite literally, both the source and the reason behind the universe. No form of morality is more constant than the universe itself. If, tomorrow, the universe shifted, flipped itself metaphorically inside-out, and the consequences of actions changed, morality would not have to shift in order for moral actions to change. If the result of stabbing my neighbor in the head, instead of pain and death, caused that same neighbor to be freed of cancer and to get a handful of candy, then the moral action would involve stabbing him in the head! (Before you nitpick at my example here, feel free to change it however you wish so that you don’t miss my point.) This is because morals are not separate from consequences. Morality is, in fact, intricately tied in to consequences, and tied into the physical and spiritual nature of the universe. Do not forget that we cannot claim to understand these consequences!

Here’s the final bit: when god utters words, the universe itself shifts. Spiritual stuff whirls around, the physical and spiritual planes are forever altered, and consequences change. The moral system is still tied in to consequences, but just as we were unaware of the consequences of actions before the change, we are unaware of the consequences of actions after it as well. The directives God grants us preserve the moral system (Hashem’s will) in the face of a shifted universe.

In the end, if you assume a strict Torah given by an all-knowing, all-powerful creator-god, there cannot be moral relativism. There can be moral misunderstanding among people, but not relativism, because any way you slice it would imply impossible things.