Cool. It’s like a daisy.
I believe it. I believe it not. I believe it. I believe it not…
Hey, I just thought I’d remind you of the parts of the post you hadn’t attempted to rebut yet. 
Something to thing about: If we don’t participate in governmental charity, we lose our freedom. If we don’t participate in God’s charity, we lose our souls. Which one is worse? Which one is more coercive?
Alright, alright. I’ll get off my high horse. Or, was that my low horse? Well,anyway, I’ll get off the horse altogether. I’ll walk. Wait, that might be too humble. Hmmmmm. Ok, I’ll take a cab. But anyway, I won’t apologize about it any more. And I’ll really work on the arrogance thing, too. Ok? Is that alright with everyone?
Oh. Uh, nevermind.
<P ALIGN=“CENTER”> Tris </P><HR>
<FONT FACE=“Webdings” SIZE=5 COLOR="#ff2400"> ** Y ** </FONT> </P>
Happy Valentines Day.
For Tris, a short midrash, which I’d heard before but I believe I’m indebted to Chaim Keller for reminding me of, a couple of months ago:
"A rich banker, a rabbi, and a poor rag-seller went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur. As appropriate for the Day of Atonement, the rich banker threw himself before the Torah and cried out, “Oh my God, have mercy on me for I am nothing in your sight.” He rose and returned to his seat Then the rabbi did likewise. Lastly, the poor rag-seller did the same. The banker turned to the rabbi and said, “Look who thinks he’s nothing!”
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A short thought for you all on the subject of God’s putative laws and philosophies:
“If we are still slaves to the law, then Christ has died in vain. But by his death and rising, we are dead to the law and brought back to a life of freedom…But though all things are legal to me, not all things are efficacious for me.” (St. Paul, as usual complexifying things)
Nine of the Ten Recommendations are not binding on Christians in the last analysis, though rarely will one of them not be the proper way to love God and fellow man. (I fail to see how, even on the wildest hypothesis, the First Commandment could ever be contrary to the Two Great Imperatives of Jesus.) For Chaim as a practicing Jew, they are indeed God’s commandments. For the Christian, they are at most strong recommendations on how best to carry out what Jesus defined abstractly in actual practice. It is my judgment, for example, how I may best “remember the Sabbath day” – and it is not left to me to decide how somebody else ought to do this.
Poly - I’d agree that the Commandments (Big Ten or any of the others) are no longer binding on Christians - except for the First Commandment, which is pretty hard to enforce.
Still, they were compulsory at the time, and the commandments that I’ve mentioned did restrict private property rights.
I think it goes without saying that I wouldn’t want to import the Torah whole-hog into the present. Even with the assumption that the Torah is exactly the law that God wanted the Hebrews to have at that point in their history, many of those laws make absolutely no sense outside of their context. (E.g. Deuteronomy 22, vv.28-29.)
But God expects us to govern ourselves, and it’s possible, IMO, to make reasoned arguments (not firm and absolute conclusions, but reasoned arguments) about the implications of the Torah regarding what sort of self-government God might hope we would adopt.
A person making such a case, I think, has to do so with the attitude that people of good will are going to disagree with him; despite his best efforts to comprehend the mind and heart of the Lord, there’s no guarantee that he’s done so correctly.
For instance, I might argue for the extrapolation of the Sabbath law of the Torah to some more flexible restriction on the work week in American law today, such as a universal forty-hour week with higher pay rates for overtime. I think that would be a Good Thing, and IMO, if God were just getting around to creating the Law at this late stage of history, He might well include a law like that.
But I have to admit from the start that I don’t know for sure, that people who accept the authority of the same canon I accept might reach vastly different conclusions from mine, and I have no right to judge them to be morally insufficient if they do. After all, the answer to “Who knows the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counsellor?” isn’t “RTFirefly of the SDMB”. And won’t be, either, in this lifetime.
But, given those limitations, there’s nothing wrong, IMHO, with my making my case, and trying to persuade others of the moral logic of my view of how God’s actions at one point in history should translate into our actions in the present.