Given that I wrote the post in question, I’d like you to know I take great offence at the suggestion you are less cranky than me.
Coffee spit! PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!
You are falling for the oldest religious trick in the book. All cult leaders say they are just channelling their deity.
If you want to quibble about what is and is not within the definition of “cult”, or “cult like behaviour” I’ll leave you to it.
My point is simply that IMHO groups of people who bring up children so they cannot cope outside the group, and ostracise those who leave, suck. Whether they fall within your definition of cult or not.
It depends on where the power lies. The typical minister is an employee also, but we’ve seen it takes a great and public scandal to get some of them fired.
Depends what you mean by “the average talmud.” The standardized Talmudic text (this being the Babylonian Talmud) is the “Vilna edition,” and the text of the actual Talmud is surrounded on-page by commentaries no later than the mid-13th century. But many volumes have been published since then commenting on the Talmud, they’re just printed as separate volumes. That has never stopped, and is what continues in modern-day Yeshivas.
But the point of learning Talmud is not necessarily to discover anything new, but to connect to G-d by learning his revealed word in detail. Most dedicated Rabbinic-track students will not be writing volumes of Talmudic commentary, but will be guiding/inspiring congregations or teaching students with their knowledge of the Torah and Talmud and the commentaries that the sages over the centuries have already authored.
If you read one page of the Talmud every day, it takes 7.5 years to complete. This is called Daf Yomi (“a page a day”) and people all around the world do it, in sync, now with assistance from the Internet.
The latest cycle began on Jan. 5, 2020, and to mark the occasion My Jewish Learning launched a groundbreaking effort to make this global project of Jewish learning available to a wide audience. Each day, subscribers to A Daily Dose of Talmud receive an email with an accessible, easy-to-understand insight from that day’s page of Talmud.
Here is a commentary on a recent daf, on a subject that may be of interest to some people here: marital relations. (FYI, the Talmud was the first religious text to mention the female orgasm, and unlike other sex-unfriendly religions, Judaism teaches that it is a man’s duty to give his wife sexual pleasure.) But it also speaks about the passion for study of the Torah.
On this page, the bold text is quoted from the Talmud. A mishnah is a passage from the oldest, original Talmudic commentary on the Bible.
Unless you’re defining “religious text” or “mention” in a specifically restricted way, there’s ample evidence that many pre-Talmud religious texts alluded to female orgasms.
I was repeating a claim I had heard, and may have left out some important qualifier. Were the hymns written or only oral? Could the Talmud be the first written religious text?
I’ll see if I can check with my source for further clarification.
Written, definitely; the only way we know about any Sumerian/Akkadian religious compositions is via their preservation in written form on (mostly) cuneiform clay tablets.
(Technically, however, a historical “text” can be considered any verbal composition in a standardized form, whether it was transmitted via writing or oral repetition and memorization.)
I doubt that you (even inadvertently) misrepresented your source’s claim about the Talmud, I suspect that the source simply didn’t know about and wasn’t thinking about the textual corpora of ancient non-Abrahamic religions when they made that claim.
And just to prolong the nitpickery, the Talmud may not be the earliest religious text to refer to a female orgasm even within Judaism, according to this article about the Dead Sea scrolls:
New York State officials have determined that a private Hasidic Jewish boys’ school in Brooklyn is violating the law by failing to provide a basic education, a ruling that could signal profound challenges for scores of Hasidic religious schools that have long resisted government oversight.
The ruling marks the first time that the state has taken action against such a school, one of scores of private Hasidic yeshivas across New York that provide robust religious instruction in Yiddish but few lessons in English and math and virtually none in science, history or social studies.