Gemara Logic

I've been wondering if learning copious amounts of Gemara affects your reasoning skills.

Now learning Gemara is fine AS LONG AS you know from whence it comes. It comes from people who were just stumbling upon the concepts of logic and logical thinking and had not yet matured intellectually enough to develop things we take for granted such as modern literary analysis and modern critical thinking.

The problem with yeshivot (and Orthodox Jews in general) is they have way too much reverence for the Gemara. Just like Chareidim are wrong in blindly accepting Chazal's faulty science, so too we must not be wrong by blindly accepting Chazal's logic and methodology. But Yeshivish and Orthodox Gemara learning does not take any of this into account. They treat the Gemara's logic as something profound and relevant when in reality the Gemara's reasoning is much more primitive (excusable, of course, due to the time period) than our own.

Now you spend all day or most of your day sitting learning this profound and meaningful Gemara logic and eventually you're going to start thinking the obvious - hey! This is a normal way of thinking! When the Gemara does such and such that's just how one is logically supposed to treat such and such a dilemma. Then you might take the Gemara's methodology and start trying to apply it in places where it doesn't belong. . . .

I wonder this because the Orthodox seem rather unworried by explicit contradictions in the Pentateuch. (I'll finish that list some day....)

Could it be, perhaps, and this is just some random guessing, that one of the reasons the Orthodox believer happily accepts Chazals resolutions to these explicit contradictions is because they've gotten used to Talmudic thinking. The Gemara absolutely loves taking two explicit contradictory statements and then using some ingenious explanation to show how there really is no contradiction at all. Now you start learning things like this in 5th grade or something and continue to pound it into your brain for years. Every year you watch the Gemara say things like "This Baraita says that strawberries grow on bushes and this Baraita says that strawberries grow in fields לא קשיא. One is talking about strawberries in Israel while the other is talking about strawberries outside of Israel" And since this is the most logical training you're gonna get it middle school or high school, you start to think that this is a completely normal way of thinking. That it's completely run of the mill to take two complete opposites and try smashing them against each other until you get a resolution.

So now our Gemara saturated fellow cracks open a book about Bible criticism and starts reading about how scholars separate bits of the Torah that just don't shtim (flow). And our Talmudic scholar is not scared or confused but just annoyed at the stupidity of this so called scholar. Doesn't he know that when two things contradict each other you're supposed to uproot mountains to reconcile them! Silly Bible critic! You don't assume there is an argument you assume there is an ingenious and complex resolution. If only Elliot Friedmann had learned a little more Gemara! Then he would know how you're REALLY supposed to think.

Maybe.

Or maybe most people are just brainwashed well enough to NEVER ask questions.

More probable.