Oh, sorry, I thought that was obvious. Illusion of transparency, I guess. God says we should be monogamous or celibate. Of course, I doubt it’d be useful to go around trying to police people’s morals.
Sorry, where does God say this? You are a Christian right? I’m not aware of any verse in either the OT or NT that calls for monogamy. Jacob has four wives, Abraham has two, David has quite a few and Solomon has hundreds. The only verses that seem to say anything negative in this regard are some which imply that Solomon just has way too many. The text strongly implies that polyandry is not ok but polygyny is fine. The closest claim is Jesus’s point about how divorcing one woman and then marrying another is adultery, but that’s a much more limited claim (it could be that the other woman was unwilling to be a second wife for example). 1 Timothy chapter 3 lists qualifications for being a church leader which include having only one wife. That would seem to imply that having more than one wife is at worst suboptimal.
That is a really good point. (Actually, Jesus made a stronger point than that: even lusting after someone you’re not married to is adultery.)
You know, you could actually be right. I’ll have to look more carefully. Maybe my understanding has been biased by the culture in which I live. Upvoted for knowledgeable rebuttal of a claim that might not be correct.
Is that something like “Plan to take steps to have sex with the person”, or like “Experience a change in your pants”? (Analogous question for the “no coveting” commandment, too.) Because if you think some thoughts are evil, you really shouldn’t build humans with a brain that automatically thinks them. At least have a little “Free will alert: Experience lust? (Y/n)” box pop up.
I don’t really know if I should say this—whether this is the place, or if the argument’s moved well beyond this point for everyone involved, but: where and when did God say that, and if, as I suspect, it’s the Bible, doesn’t s/he also say we shouldn’t wear clothing of two different kinds of fibre at the same time?
Yes. That applies to the Jews but not to everyone else. You’re allowed to ignore Leviticus and Exodus if you’re not Jewish. EY probably knows this, since it’s actually Jewish theology (note that others have looked at the same facts and come to the conclusion that the rules don’t apply to anyone anymore and stopped applying when Jesus died, so take into account that someone (I don’t think it’s me) has done something wrong here, as per Aumann’s agreement theorem).
Well, I suppose what I should do is comb the Bible for some absurd commandment that does apply to non-Jews, but frankly I’m impressed by the loophole-exploiting nature of your reply, and am inclined to concede the point (also, y’know—researching the Bible… bleh).
EDIT: And by concede the point, I of course mean concede that you’re not locally inconsistent around this point, not that what you said about monogamy is true.
The last time I entered into an earnest discussion of spirituality with a theist friend of mine, what I wanted to bend my brain around was how he could claim to derive his faith from studying the Bible, when (from the few passages I’ve read myself) it’s a text that absolutely does not stand literal interpretation. (For instance, I wanted to know how he reconciled an interest in science, in particular the science of evolution, with a Bible that literally argues for a “young Earth” incompatible with the known duration implied by the fossil and geological records.)
Basically I wanted to know precisely what his belief system consisted of, which was very hard given the many different conceptions of Christianity I bump into. I’ve read “Mere Christianity” on his advice, but I found it far from sufficient—at once way too specific on some points (e.g. a husband should be in charge in a household), and way too slippery on the fundamentals (e.g. what is prayer really about).
I’ve formed my beliefs from a combination of the Bible, asking other Christians, a cursory study of the secular history of the Roman Empire, internet discussions, articles and gut feelings.
That said, if you have specific questions about anything, feel free to ask me.
I’m curious what you think of evidence that early Christianity adopted the date of Christmas and other rituals from pre-existing pagan religions?
ETA: I’m not saying that this would detract from the central Christian message (i.e. Jesus sacrificing himself to redeem our sins). But that sort of memetic infection seems like a strange thing to happen to an objective truth.
I think it indicates that Christians have done stupid things and one must be discerning about traditions rather than blindly accepting everything taught in church as 100% true, and certainly not everything commonly believed by laypersons!
It’s not surprising (unless this is hindsight bias—it might actually BE surprising, considering how unwilling Christians should have been to make compromises like that, but a lot of time passed between Jesus’s death and Christianity taking over Europe, didn’t it?) that humans would be humans. I can see where I might have even considered the same in that situation—everyone likes holidays, everyone should be Christian, pagans get a fun solstice holiday, Christians don’t, this is making people want to be Christian less. Let’s fix it by having our own holiday. At least then we can make it about Jesus, right?
The worship and deification of Mary is similar, which is why I don’t pray to her.
So, suppose I find a church I choose (for whatever reason) to associate with. We seem to agree that I shouldn’t believe everything taught in that church, and I shouldn’t believe everything believed by members of that church… I should compare those teachings and beliefs to my own expectations about and experiences of the world to decide what I believe and what I don’t, just as you have used your own expectations about and experiences of human nature to decide whether to believe various claims about when Jesus was born, what properties Mary had, etc.
So, my own experience of having compared the teachings and beliefs of a couple of churches I was for various reasons associated with to my own expectations about and experiences of the world was that, after doing so, I didn’t believe that Jesus was exceptionally divine or that the New Testament was a particularly reliable source of either moral truths or information about the physical world.
Would you say that I made an error in my evaluations?
Possibly. Or you may be lacking information; if your assumptions were wrong at the beginning and you used good reasoning, you’d come to the wrong conclusion.
Ehh… even when you don’t mean it literally, you probably shouldn’t say such things as “first day as a rationalist”. It’s kind of hard to increase one’s capability for rational thinking without keeping in mind at all times how it’s a many-sided gradient with more than one dimension.
Here’s one:
Let’s say that the world is a simulation AND that strongly godlike AI is possible.
To all intents and purposes, even though the bible in the simulation is provably inconsistent, the existence of a being indistinguishable from the God in such a bible would not be ruled out because though the inhabitants of the world are constrained by the rules of physics in their own state machines or objects or whatever, the universe containing the simulation is subject to it’s own set of physics and logic and therefore may vary even inside the simulation but not be detectable to you or I.
Yes of course this is possible. So is the Tipler scenario. However, the simulation argument just as easily supports any of a vast number of god-theories, of which Christianity is just one of many. That being said, it does support judeo-xian type systems more than say Hindiusm or Vodun.
There may even be economical reasons to create universes like ours, but that’s a very unpopular position on LW.
To me it seems straightforward. Instead of spelling out in detail what rules you should follow in a new situation—say, if the authorities who Paul just got done telling you to obey order you to do something ‘wrong’—this passage gives the general principle that supposedly underlies the rules. That way you can apply it to your particular situation and it’ll tell you all you need to do as a Christian. Paul does seem to think that in his time and place, love requires following a lot of odd rules. But by my reading this only matters if you plan to travel back in time (or if you personally plan to judge the dead).
But I gather that a lot of Christians disagree with me. I don’t know if I understand the objection—possibly they’d argue that we lack the ability to see how the rules follow from loving one’s neighbor, and thus we should expect God to personally spell out every rule-change. (So why tell us that this principle underlies them all?)
Using exegesis (meaning I’m not asking what it says in Greek or how else it might be translated, and I don’t think I need to worry much about cultural norms at the time). But that doesn’t tell you much.
To me it seems straightforward. Instead of spelling out in detail what rules you should follow in a new situation—say, if the authorities who Paul just got done telling you to obey order you to do something ‘wrong’—this passage gives the general principle that supposedly underlies the rules. That way you can apply it to your particular situation and it’ll tell you all you need to do as a Christian.
Yes, I agree. Also, if you didn’t know what love said to do in your situation, the rules would be helpful in figuring it out.
Paul does seem to think that in his time and place, love requires following a lot of odd rules.
That gets into a broader way of understanding the Bible. I don’t know enough about the time and place to talk much about this.
But I gather that a lot of Christians disagree with me. I don’t know if I understand the objection—possibly they’d argue that we lack the ability to see how the rules follow from loving one’s neighbor, and thus we should expect God to personally spell out every rule-change. (So why tell us that this principle underlies them all?)
The objection I can think of is that people might want to argue in favor of being able to do whatever they want, even if it doesn’t follow from God’s commands, and not listen even to God’s explicit prohibitions. Hence, as a general principle, it’s better to obey the rules because more people who object to them (since the New Testament already massively reduces legalism anyway) will be trying to get away with violating the spirit of the rules than will be actually correct in believing that the spirit of the rules is best obeyed by violating the letter of them. Another point would be that if an omniscient being gives you a heuristic, and you are not omniscient, you’d probably do better to follow it than to disregard it.
Given that the context has changed, seems to me omniscience should only matter if God wants to prevent people other than the original audience from misusing or misapplying the rules. (Obviously we’d also need to assume God supplied the rules in the first place!)
Now this does seem like a fairly reasonable assumption, but doesn’t it create a lot of problems for you? If we go that route then it no longer suffices to show or assume that each rule made sense in historical context. Now you need to believe that no possible change would produce better results when we take all time periods into account.
Note that the Noahide laws are the Jewish, not Christian interpretation of this distinction. And there are no sources mentioning them that go back prior to the Jewish/Christian split. (The relevant sections of Talmud are written no earlier than 300 CE.) There’s also some confusion over how those laws work. So for example, one of the seven Noahide prohibitions is the prohibition on illicit relations. But it isn’t clear which prohibited relations are included. There’s an opinion that this includes only adultery and incest and not any of the other Biblical sexual prohibitions (e.g. gay sex, marrying two sisters). There’s a decent halachic argument for something of this form since Jacob marries two sisters. (This actually raises a host of other halachic/theoloical problems for Orthodox Jews because many of them believe that the patriarchs kept all 613 commandments. But this is a further digression...)
And Jesus added the commandment not to lust after anyone you’re not married to and not to divorce.
And I would never have dreamed of the stupidity until someone did it, but someone actually interpreted metaphors from Proverbs literally and concluded that “her husband is praised at the city gates” actually means “women should go to the city limits and hold up signs saying that their husbands are awesome” (which just makes no sense at all). But that doesn’t count because it’s a person being stupid. For one thing, that’s descriptive, not prescriptive, and for another, it’s an illustration of the good things being righteous gets you.
And I would never have dreamed of the stupidity until someone did it, but someone actually interpreted metaphors from Proverbs literally and concluded that “her husband is praised at the city gates” actually means “women should go to the city limits and hold up signs saying that their husbands are awesome”
As a semi-militant atheist, I feel compelled to point out that, from my perspective, all interpretations of Proverbs as a practical guide to modern life look about equally silly...
Upvoted for being the only non-Jew I’ve ever met to know that.
Really? Nearly everyone I grew up with was told that and I assume I wasn’t the only one to remember. I infer that either you don’t know many Christians, the subject hasn’t come up while you were talking to said Christians or Christian culture in your area is far more ignorant of their religious theory and tradition than they are here.
I’ve heard that some rules are specifically supposed to only apply to Jews,¹ and I think most Christians have heard that at some point in their lives, but I don’t think most of them remember having heard that, and very few to know that not wearing clothing of two different kinds of fibre at the same time is one such rules.
I remember Feynman’s WTF reaction in Surely You’re Joking to learning that Jews are not allowed to operate electric switches on Saturdays but they are allowed to pay someone else to do that.
There are different Jewish doctrinal positions on whether shabbos goyim—that is, non-Jews hired to perform tasks on Saturdays that Jews are not permitted to perform—are permissible.
Do I get an upvote, too? I also know about what I should do if I want food I cook to be kosher (though I’m still a bit confused about food containing wheat).
I kew it too,. I thought it was common knowledge among those with any non-trival knowledge of non-folk Christian theology. Which admittedly isn’t a huge subset of the population, but isn’t that small in the west.
Do I get an upvote, too? I also know about what I should do if I want food I cook to be kosher (though I’m still a bit confused about food containing wheat).
I want an upvote too for knowing that if I touch a woman who has her period then I am ‘unclean’. I don’t recall exactly what ‘unclean’ means. I think it’s like ‘cooties’.
Well, I’d lived in Israel for three years, and I did not know about these rules in this much detail, so I feel like I deserve some sort of a downvote :-(
On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour: And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance, And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven.
If you read the rest of the chapter it’s made clear that the dream is a metaphor for God’s willingness to accept Gentiles as Christians, rather than a specific message about acceptable foods, but abandoning kashrut presumably follows logically from not requiring new Christians to count as Jews first, so.
(Upon rereading this, my first impression is how much creepier slaughtering land animals seems as a metaphor for proselytism than the earlier “fishers of men” stuff; maybe it’s the “go, kill and eat” line or an easier time empathizing with mammals, Idunno. Presumably the way people mentally coded these things in first-century Palestine would differ from today.)
Thanks, I appreciate it. I am still interested in hearing why you don’t agree, but I understand that this can be a sensitive topic...
Oh, sorry, I thought that was obvious. Illusion of transparency, I guess. God says we should be monogamous or celibate. Of course, I doubt it’d be useful to go around trying to police people’s morals.
Sorry, where does God say this? You are a Christian right? I’m not aware of any verse in either the OT or NT that calls for monogamy. Jacob has four wives, Abraham has two, David has quite a few and Solomon has hundreds. The only verses that seem to say anything negative in this regard are some which imply that Solomon just has way too many. The text strongly implies that polyandry is not ok but polygyny is fine. The closest claim is Jesus’s point about how divorcing one woman and then marrying another is adultery, but that’s a much more limited claim (it could be that the other woman was unwilling to be a second wife for example). 1 Timothy chapter 3 lists qualifications for being a church leader which include having only one wife. That would seem to imply that having more than one wife is at worst suboptimal.
That is a really good point. (Actually, Jesus made a stronger point than that: even lusting after someone you’re not married to is adultery.)
You know, you could actually be right. I’ll have to look more carefully. Maybe my understanding has been biased by the culture in which I live. Upvoted for knowledgeable rebuttal of a claim that might not be correct.
Is that something like “Plan to take steps to have sex with the person”, or like “Experience a change in your pants”? (Analogous question for the “no coveting” commandment, too.) Because if you think some thoughts are evil, you really shouldn’t build humans with a brain that automatically thinks them. At least have a little “Free will alert: Experience lust? (Y/n)” box pop up.
In addition to what APMason said, I think that many Christians would disagree with your second statement:
Some of them are campaigning right now on the promise that they will “police people’s morals”…
I don’t really know if I should say this—whether this is the place, or if the argument’s moved well beyond this point for everyone involved, but: where and when did God say that, and if, as I suspect, it’s the Bible, doesn’t s/he also say we shouldn’t wear clothing of two different kinds of fibre at the same time?
Yes. That applies to the Jews but not to everyone else. You’re allowed to ignore Leviticus and Exodus if you’re not Jewish. EY probably knows this, since it’s actually Jewish theology (note that others have looked at the same facts and come to the conclusion that the rules don’t apply to anyone anymore and stopped applying when Jesus died, so take into account that someone (I don’t think it’s me) has done something wrong here, as per Aumann’s agreement theorem).
Well, I suppose what I should do is comb the Bible for some absurd commandment that does apply to non-Jews, but frankly I’m impressed by the loophole-exploiting nature of your reply, and am inclined to concede the point (also, y’know—researching the Bible… bleh).
EDIT: And by concede the point, I of course mean concede that you’re not locally inconsistent around this point, not that what you said about monogamy is true.
If you want Bible verses to use to dis Christianity, I suggest 1 Corinthians 14:33-35 and Luke 22:19, 20.
I’d be interested in your ideas of what books you’d recommend a non-Christian read.
The last time I entered into an earnest discussion of spirituality with a theist friend of mine, what I wanted to bend my brain around was how he could claim to derive his faith from studying the Bible, when (from the few passages I’ve read myself) it’s a text that absolutely does not stand literal interpretation. (For instance, I wanted to know how he reconciled an interest in science, in particular the science of evolution, with a Bible that literally argues for a “young Earth” incompatible with the known duration implied by the fossil and geological records.)
Basically I wanted to know precisely what his belief system consisted of, which was very hard given the many different conceptions of Christianity I bump into. I’ve read “Mere Christianity” on his advice, but I found it far from sufficient—at once way too specific on some points (e.g. a husband should be in charge in a household), and way too slippery on the fundamentals (e.g. what is prayer really about).
I’ve formed my beliefs from a combination of the Bible, asking other Christians, a cursory study of the secular history of the Roman Empire, internet discussions, articles and gut feelings.
That said, if you have specific questions about anything, feel free to ask me.
I’m curious what you think of evidence that early Christianity adopted the date of Christmas and other rituals from pre-existing pagan religions?
ETA: I’m not saying that this would detract from the central Christian message (i.e. Jesus sacrificing himself to redeem our sins). But that sort of memetic infection seems like a strange thing to happen to an objective truth.
I think it indicates that Christians have done stupid things and one must be discerning about traditions rather than blindly accepting everything taught in church as 100% true, and certainly not everything commonly believed by laypersons!
It’s not surprising (unless this is hindsight bias—it might actually BE surprising, considering how unwilling Christians should have been to make compromises like that, but a lot of time passed between Jesus’s death and Christianity taking over Europe, didn’t it?) that humans would be humans. I can see where I might have even considered the same in that situation—everyone likes holidays, everyone should be Christian, pagans get a fun solstice holiday, Christians don’t, this is making people want to be Christian less. Let’s fix it by having our own holiday. At least then we can make it about Jesus, right?
The worship and deification of Mary is similar, which is why I don’t pray to her.
That’s interesting.
So, suppose I find a church I choose (for whatever reason) to associate with. We seem to agree that I shouldn’t believe everything taught in that church, and I shouldn’t believe everything believed by members of that church… I should compare those teachings and beliefs to my own expectations about and experiences of the world to decide what I believe and what I don’t, just as you have used your own expectations about and experiences of human nature to decide whether to believe various claims about when Jesus was born, what properties Mary had, etc.
Yes? Or have I misunderstood you?
Yes. Upvoted for both understanding me and trying to avoid the illusion of transparency.
OK, cool.
So, my own experience of having compared the teachings and beliefs of a couple of churches I was for various reasons associated with to my own expectations about and experiences of the world was that, after doing so, I didn’t believe that Jesus was exceptionally divine or that the New Testament was a particularly reliable source of either moral truths or information about the physical world.
Would you say that I made an error in my evaluations?
Possibly. Or you may be lacking information; if your assumptions were wrong at the beginning and you used good reasoning, you’d come to the wrong conclusion.
Do you have particular assumptions in mind here? Or is this a more general statement about the nature of reasoning?
It’s a statement so general you probably learned it on your first day as a rationalist.
In other words, “Garbage in, garbage out?”
Yes.
Ehh… even when you don’t mean it literally, you probably shouldn’t say such things as “first day as a rationalist”. It’s kind of hard to increase one’s capability for rational thinking without keeping in mind at all times how it’s a many-sided gradient with more than one dimension.
Here’s one: Let’s say that the world is a simulation AND that strongly godlike AI is possible. To all intents and purposes, even though the bible in the simulation is provably inconsistent, the existence of a being indistinguishable from the God in such a bible would not be ruled out because though the inhabitants of the world are constrained by the rules of physics in their own state machines or objects or whatever, the universe containing the simulation is subject to it’s own set of physics and logic and therefore may vary even inside the simulation but not be detectable to you or I.
Yes of course this is possible. So is the Tipler scenario. However, the simulation argument just as easily supports any of a vast number of god-theories, of which Christianity is just one of many. That being said, it does support judeo-xian type systems more than say Hindiusm or Vodun.
There may even be economical reasons to create universes like ours, but that’s a very unpopular position on LW.
Come on. Don’t vote me down without responding.
How do you interpret Romans 13:8-10?
To me it seems straightforward. Instead of spelling out in detail what rules you should follow in a new situation—say, if the authorities who Paul just got done telling you to obey order you to do something ‘wrong’—this passage gives the general principle that supposedly underlies the rules. That way you can apply it to your particular situation and it’ll tell you all you need to do as a Christian. Paul does seem to think that in his time and place, love requires following a lot of odd rules. But by my reading this only matters if you plan to travel back in time (or if you personally plan to judge the dead).
But I gather that a lot of Christians disagree with me. I don’t know if I understand the objection—possibly they’d argue that we lack the ability to see how the rules follow from loving one’s neighbor, and thus we should expect God to personally spell out every rule-change. (So why tell us that this principle underlies them all?)
Using exegesis (meaning I’m not asking what it says in Greek or how else it might be translated, and I don’t think I need to worry much about cultural norms at the time). But that doesn’t tell you much.
Yes, I agree. Also, if you didn’t know what love said to do in your situation, the rules would be helpful in figuring it out.
That gets into a broader way of understanding the Bible. I don’t know enough about the time and place to talk much about this.
The objection I can think of is that people might want to argue in favor of being able to do whatever they want, even if it doesn’t follow from God’s commands, and not listen even to God’s explicit prohibitions. Hence, as a general principle, it’s better to obey the rules because more people who object to them (since the New Testament already massively reduces legalism anyway) will be trying to get away with violating the spirit of the rules than will be actually correct in believing that the spirit of the rules is best obeyed by violating the letter of them. Another point would be that if an omniscient being gives you a heuristic, and you are not omniscient, you’d probably do better to follow it than to disregard it.
Given that the context has changed, seems to me omniscience should only matter if God wants to prevent people other than the original audience from misusing or misapplying the rules. (Obviously we’d also need to assume God supplied the rules in the first place!)
Now this does seem like a fairly reasonable assumption, but doesn’t it create a lot of problems for you? If we go that route then it no longer suffices to show or assume that each rule made sense in historical context. Now you need to believe that no possible change would produce better results when we take all time periods into account.
Well, yeah, the first one’s kind of appalling, but the second one’s just kind of kinky.
I can save you some time here. Just look up “seven laws of Noah” or “Noahide laws”. That’s pretty much it for commandments that apply to non-Jews.
Note that the Noahide laws are the Jewish, not Christian interpretation of this distinction. And there are no sources mentioning them that go back prior to the Jewish/Christian split. (The relevant sections of Talmud are written no earlier than 300 CE.) There’s also some confusion over how those laws work. So for example, one of the seven Noahide prohibitions is the prohibition on illicit relations. But it isn’t clear which prohibited relations are included. There’s an opinion that this includes only adultery and incest and not any of the other Biblical sexual prohibitions (e.g. gay sex, marrying two sisters). There’s a decent halachic argument for something of this form since Jacob marries two sisters. (This actually raises a host of other halachic/theoloical problems for Orthodox Jews because many of them believe that the patriarchs kept all 613 commandments. But this is a further digression...)
And Jesus added the commandment not to lust after anyone you’re not married to and not to divorce.
And I would never have dreamed of the stupidity until someone did it, but someone actually interpreted metaphors from Proverbs literally and concluded that “her husband is praised at the city gates” actually means “women should go to the city limits and hold up signs saying that their husbands are awesome” (which just makes no sense at all). But that doesn’t count because it’s a person being stupid. For one thing, that’s descriptive, not prescriptive, and for another, it’s an illustration of the good things being righteous gets you.
As a semi-militant atheist, I feel compelled to point out that, from my perspective, all interpretations of Proverbs as a practical guide to modern life look about equally silly...
Upvoted for being the only non-Jew I’ve ever met to know that.
Really? Nearly everyone I grew up with was told that and I assume I wasn’t the only one to remember. I infer that either you don’t know many Christians, the subject hasn’t come up while you were talking to said Christians or Christian culture in your area is far more ignorant of their religious theory and tradition than they are here.
I’ve heard that some rules are specifically supposed to only apply to Jews,¹ and I think most Christians have heard that at some point in their lives, but I don’t think most of them remember having heard that, and very few to know that not wearing clothing of two different kinds of fibre at the same time is one such rules.
I remember Feynman’s WTF reaction in Surely You’re Joking to learning that Jews are not allowed to operate electric switches on Saturdays but they are allowed to pay someone else to do that.
There are different Jewish doctrinal positions on whether shabbos goyim—that is, non-Jews hired to perform tasks on Saturdays that Jews are not permitted to perform—are permissible.
And paying them on Saturday is always bad.
Pretty much a combination of all three. I live in a tiny bubble; occasionally I forget that and make stupid comments.
Do I get an upvote, too? I also know about what I should do if I want food I cook to be kosher (though I’m still a bit confused about food containing wheat).
I kew it too,. I thought it was common knowledge among those with any non-trival knowledge of non-folk Christian theology. Which admittedly isn’t a huge subset of the population, but isn’t that small in the west.
I want an upvote too for knowing that if I touch a woman who has her period then I am ‘unclean’. I don’t recall exactly what ‘unclean’ means. I think it’s like ‘cooties’.
Is this a sarcastic attempt to tell me that was a stupid reason to upvote someone? If so, I’ll retract it.
Not really, just playing along with MixedNuts talking about ridiculous Judeo-Christian rules. Vote up people for whatever you want.
Well, I’d lived in Israel for three years, and I did not know about these rules in this much detail, so I feel like I deserve some sort of a downvote :-(
The Catholic explanation for this one is that the pope had a dream about a goat piñata.
If that’s real, I want the whole story and references. If you made that up, I’m starting my own heresy around it.
Acts 10:9-16:
On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour:
And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance,
And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth:
Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.
And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.
But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.
And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.
This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven.
If you read the rest of the chapter it’s made clear that the dream is a metaphor for God’s willingness to accept Gentiles as Christians, rather than a specific message about acceptable foods, but abandoning kashrut presumably follows logically from not requiring new Christians to count as Jews first, so.
(Upon rereading this, my first impression is how much creepier slaughtering land animals seems as a metaphor for proselytism than the earlier “fishers of men” stuff; maybe it’s the “go, kill and eat” line or an easier time empathizing with mammals, Idunno. Presumably the way people mentally coded these things in first-century Palestine would differ from today.)
...a live goat piñata? Whoa.
Yes, sadly this isn’t the origin story for the Mexican piñata.
I’m glad Oligopsony provided the biblical reference; I learned about that one in Catechism class but couldn’t find the reference.