So, you’re saying that Reform Judaism (Liberal Judaism in some countries) considers the eating of pork to be a sin?
And I’m not sure I accept your assertions in the last paragraph. No, I’m not talking about the existence of an afterlife.
I love pork chops. No way could I be a Muslim or a Jew. Simply. Not. Possible.
Hey Monty, are you American/European? It lists your location as Beijing China… but you sound Americanized to me. I was in China for a month when I was a kid in the middle 1980’s. My dad took me with him on a business trip.
This is what Reform Judaism says about the dietary laws:
However, in its earlier days, Reform JUdaism was more radical:
One of the cool things about Judaism is our long tradition of debate. Illogical BS tends to get sifted out pretty quickly. Reform Judaism justified its rejection of many old practices by saying:
Once you’ve rejected the idea of the Word coming directly from God, then all moral values are just a matter of personal belief. But Reform Judaism wasn’t trying to have it both ways. The Torah isn’t the direct, infallible Word of God, to be interpreted by fallible humans(even when those interpretations make no sense whatsoever). The Torah instead is divinely inspired, but written by humans, and reflects the moral norms of the time. I think it’s an overly convenient explanation, but it is an explanation.
YOu don’t have to. There’s no way to statistically prove the assertion. Just an observation that I noticed reading about the history of totalitarian governments. It’s always the fundies who are taking the risks while the moderates just sort of go along to get along or even embrace the new teachings. that’s why I agree with the OP. What’s common to most “moderate” religious people is that the secular world influences their religious belief more than their religious belief influences their secular life. Whatever secular values are, their religious beliefs conform to that, even if secular values change suddenly, as in the case of totalitarian governments quickly coming to power and remaking society in a damn hurry. That’s partly why society changes so quickly in those situations, because you’ve already got a population that is only nominally religious, so for the majority it doesn’t take much to scare them or persuade them to accept the new dogma.
1- I’m the OP 
2- If I were to become religious it would have to be a Christian, not a Muslim or a Jew. Because I really really — really — like Pork Chops.
Me too, although not for the pork thing. I think that Christianity gets human nature better than any other faith. In the end, all these debates on what you can and can’t do doesn’t even really matter. Once you’re saved, you’re saved, as long as you strive in your heart to do God’s will. If you’ve talked yourself into believing that divorce is okay, you might be wrong on the logic, but you’re still saved because humans are fallible and our fleshly desires lead us to do evil(and then rationalize it to ourselves and others).
All religions accept human fallibility in some way and make provisions for it(for Jews it means a lot of fasting), but no one ever came up with as elegant a solution as Christianity: “You’re all screwed up but God loves you anyway!”
Buddhism makes a lot more sense to me than any of the Western religions
Robert163: I’m American. I’m working in Beijing now.
adaher: Isn’t the “oral law” a rather convenient fiction? I don’t mean that its existence and the interpretation of same down the years being fictional, but rather that God gave Moses the written law and then said a whole bunch of other stuff for him to pass down without putting it into the books of the Law. Well, that’s what a lot of it all is for the so-called “moderates”: legal fictions. They’re not the folks I have a hard time respecting; on the contrary, I respect them a lot. It’s the fanatics I don’t respect.
Isn’t Buddhism more of a philosophy than a religion?
On what basis do you disrespect the fanatics? Sure, they often reject science and reason and commit atrocities in the name of their God. That’s a good reason to disrespect them. But their own internal logic is quite respectable. God exists and he told us to behave like this, so we do it.
IMO, the journey from religious believer to non-believer should be a fairly simple, linear process. You believe a bunch of stuff, then after some time you realize that a lot of it makes no sense at all so you reject it. I’m not sure how people detour to “I don’t believe in most of this stuff but I still believe in God and I think God endorses 21st century secular morality”. But that’s not much better than thinking God endorses 7th century secular morality. To the perspective of someone in the 22nd century you’re still a backwards savage. If we accept a perfect God, then He knows the perfect morality. And today’s is very unlikely to be it, just as we didn’t have it right in the 20th, 19th, 18th, or 17th centuries. If religion has any meaning, it has to be opposed in some ways to the current secular worldview. Some things we deem good would have to be regarded as evil, and some things we regard as evil would have to be deemed good. The moderate has to be willing to take moral stands that can make him or her very unpopular, maybe even outcast. Unless we are to assume that we’ve reached the perfect utopia of an enlightened society. History says otherwise. There will be things we think today which are considered so wrong as to be equivalent to racism, and those changes will come in our lifetimes. Will the moderately religious just change with society and say God endorses the new view? Why didn’t He tell you about it earlier?
I disrespect the fanatics when they have negative effects on the rest of the population. I couldn’t care less, other than as an academic exercise, what they think about their religion otherwise.
There are some religions that do not postulate the existence of deity, BTW. For those which do, there are, as mentioned above, the traditions of changing interpretation.
Interpretation isn’t the same as amending though. What is sometimes done is effectively amendment of Scripture. Scripture says divorce is a sin, so we insert a “not” in there without actually writing it down. But in effect, that’s what it is. You can’t reinterpret something to mean the exact opposite of what it says.
Of course you can. It’s quite simple. It’s called abrogation. Even the example you’re using is an amendment of earlier scripture.
I love these religious debates. One person debating with another person about some pretty abstract concepts with a clearmindedness that each is fairly certain that they know what they are talking about. I mean, let’s face it: religion is at best a hunch and at worst a recipe for how to divide the human population into pieces that can be devoured by other people who see things differently. I am always reminded of the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant when it comes to religious differences; each of us has a piece of the Great Truth, but we all miss the point unless we can bring our truths together and find what we have in common.
Biffster: Nobody’s witnessing. AFAICT, this is more of a sociological discussion.
You keep on saying things like this - thing which can hardly be disputed. That religions change interpretations is the very point of this discussion. The question is the justification for changing interpretations.
Did God get it wrong? Did the people who wrote it down get it wrong?
Did God not reinspire them then? Why are the later interpretations more correct than the earlier ones?
The model of God as a morally perfect entity dictating the law doesn’t seem to support evolving moral codes. The model of some people writing down stuff they made up, with morals based on the morals of the day (perhaps slightly advanced) looks to be a lot closer to our reality. In that model later writers refine the morals to match the moral advances of culture.
Really, if holy book says to wear red, and its current proponents wear blue, if we ask why they don’t get to attack us for challenging their interpretation of red as meaning blue.
No offense intended, and I realize that you are expounding on your quoted source and not necessarily advocating the above, but I think it’s bullshit. The laws in the Torah are not prefaced with, “IMO this is the gist of what God wants,” they are prefaced with, “The Lord spoke unto Moses saying…”, and then direct quotes from Yahweh follow.
I will never understand religious people, EXCEPT for fundamentalists. If people, for whatever reason, believe that some book is divinely inspired, then it makes perfect sense to follow its commandments, and that’s what fundamentalists do. I think they are idiots for believing what they do, but at least I can understand them, given that belief.
But people who say they believe a book is divinely inspired, and then feel free to pick and choose which commandments they follow, or to say that chapters that explicitly say they contain direct quotes from God are just some barbarians’ attempt to understand the world, IMO foreit any claim to intellectual integrity. I don’t understand why they honor the book at all, if they can dismiss whatever parts of it they don’t want to follow.
Even the rationalization that the dietary laws were God’s way of preventing disease before refrigeration, or whatever, make no sense. God could have prevented untold millions of deaths by simply giving a commandment to wash your hands before cooking, eating, or treating the sick or pregnant, and he didn’t.
And to top it off, after an extra-Biblical tradition of washing your hands before eating bread had developed among the Jews, Jesus went out of his way to disparage even that.
And thus, it was not until the 19th century that someone discovered that “childbed fever,” which killed millions of women every year after delivery, could be dramatically reduced by simply having doctors wash their hands before delivering the baby.
I wish all religious people were moderates. I would much rather have them as neighbors, let alone political leaders, than fundamentalists. But I agree with the OP, it is very hard for me to respect their intellectual integrity.
Each religious group that changes their interpretation of what they view as scripture has their own reason or reasons for doing so.
FWIU, the usual issue isn’t stated as “God got it wrong” or “Those guys long ago got it wrong”, but rather “Those instructions were necessary for those guys long ago and this is what applies now.” I suppose you could put it “That was then, this is now”.
Not all religions postulate a deity and not all of those that do postulate a “morally perfect one”.
For those groups that do “evolve” their religious codes, they have a mechanism for it, and not all groups use the same mechanism.
I just saw that episode last week. The hat’s supposed to be green.
On a serious note, where are they attacking you for asking? Every group I’ve encountered in person that has modified their scriptures or their stance on said scriptures is more than happy to explain their mechanism for doing so. Even the literalist Christian fundamentalists have such a mechanism. For your example about changing the meaning of “red” to mean “blue”, I don’t agree that’s what the various groups are doing. What they’re doing instead is saying “Back then it was supposed to be red; but today, due to various reasons, we are to wear blue.” The “various reasons” vary by group, of course.
Speaking of literalism, The Year of Living Biblically, by A. J. Jacobs, is a great read. He writes about his year attempting to follow the Bible literally (1/2 the year following the Old Testament, the next 1/2 year following the New Testament). He shows how it’s impossible to do so. IMHO, it’s never been possible to follow the Old Testament literally.
So do lots of Muslims and Jews.
Most Jews don’t follow kosher dietary laws and most Muslims either ignore Halal laws or have different interpretations than the traditionalists.
It varies. Some forms specify demons and spirits and other supernatural stuff. Tibetan Buddhism incorporated a lot of that sort of thing in, and at least gives a nod. Tibetan temples will have shrines to lots of spirits and gods or god-like entities.
Other forms are much more austere, and don’t get involved with much supernatural stuff. Some don’t even deal with the reincarnation of the soul, and those varieties are almost totally secular. It’s a really broad spectrum.
On red and blue: here in Canada, the Conservatives have adopted the color blue, while the Liberals are red. It is exactly the reverse in the US and A, where the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue. Same colors (or colours), but reversed meanings.