Big Abraham
Junior Chimp
Posts: 6,052
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« on: October 22, 2021, 02:28:23 PM » |
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Chomsky used to have a funny anecdote about his Jewish upbringing. According to Talmudic law there's no difference between the holidays and the Sabbath, except with regard to eating or cooking dinner. So when a young Chomsky was visiting his Orthodox family in Baltimore during Passover, he noticed his grandfather smoking and asked him how he could be smoking on the holy day. And his grandfather responded that "smoking was a form of eating."
It seems to me that the entire assumption for this is that God is an idiot. Religions devise all of their legalistic rules and proscriptions which really no one can live up to, and then devise ways into fooling God that they have not been broken. You see this with Jews in the above example, you see this with Moslems in this thread ("well, Allah's intoxicants ban technically only literally translates to wine..."), and you see this with Christians who seem to be fans of all kinds of loopholes to get out of their religions' prohibitions on premarital sex, etc., going to confession, or finding ways to interpret Scripture to imply the opposite of what they actually mean so as to appear more palatable to prospective converts.
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