I have not the faintest clue why you think a pun is required for this to work. It’s not the verb “to fish” that’s relevant. It’s the idea that food coming from the water is acceptable to eat during lent.
Huh? WTF? I mean, I’m honestly not understanding these arguments against the one line that’s really getting such undue attention.
The book is called “The God Delusion”. It’s about a persistent false belief held in the face of contradictory evidence. So these kind of mental gymnastics are the point. Perhaps Reynolds assertion is incorrect in terms of the rumor, but it’s certainly not particularly different from lots of other examples. Even the problem of evil is an example of tortured rationalization, as is the idea that you can do anything you want to on Saturday night and can confess it away on Sunday.
What you haven’t done is demonstrate that the assertion that people tied strings to meat to retrieve it from water was false.
Well, it’s what Dawkins used or at least Kimstu in the post “the loophole allowed for some occasions when meat could be served on a fast day as long as it was lowered into a well first and “fished” up out of it, to make it ceremonially equivalent to fish. “They must think God is awfully easily fooled”, hee-hawed Dawkins.”
The point is, it doesn’t take any “fooling God” to claim that “whale is Fish” when in those days, whatever came out of the sea was “fish”. It wasn’t “mental gymnastics” or fooling anyone. That was their definition. Just because it isn’t now doesn’t make them wrong then. Thus, a belief that ocean or water going mammal is a “fish” was NOT a persistent false belief held in the face of contradictory evidence. Then, it was correct. There was no evidence to contradict them. Whales WERE fish. Thus, they would be Ok to eat during Lent. I mean today we consider fish to be meat. They did not, St. Gregory used the term “flesh meat” to differ from fish. In fact there were quite a few dispensations, and working families could eat meat if they didn’t have other foods. So there was no need for legalistic wranglings.
The point is- I don’t have to prove it. There’s nothing in the Catholic Encylopedia about this, and there no other cite other than a cookbook author citing what she admits was a “rumor”. There was no need for such rationalizations in any case.
In Dawkins’ actual quote, it wasn’t “whale” but lamb.
Yes, you’re right, to any reasonable medieval, whale is “fish.” Heck, Herman Melville spent page after page of “Moby Dick” arguing that whales are fish.
But lamb? To argue that lamb is fish? And, if it actually happened, to argue that lamb is fish because it was drawn up from the water? Oy vey! If only every law were so easy to circumvent!
Now you’re just avoiding the question. People do all sorts of things (and tell others what they should and should not do) because it is, as they say, what God wants. That is the ‘point’ behind the rules. Taking an outside view on a religious practice (ie; the real religious object of X activity is not the activity itself, but is Y) renders any religious practice completely arbitrary.
Which, frankly, I don’t have a problem with. Believe, don’t believe, dip your meat in a well, drink the blood of your savior, whatever. We’re all doing what works for us.
But, in a world where divine edict is used to beat others into a Christian mold (and an arbitrarily specific one at that), I refuse to accept a wishy-washy reasoning about why I should, for example, not use contraception. It’s either because God said so and we need to do what he says, in which case let’s start living to the letter of the Bible, or it’s because people decided that’s what they think is best, and are using God as a bludgeon, or a yoke, to get others to follow along.
Reading back on your posts you say, “I specifically said it was silly. I merely disagreed with Dawkins on where that silliness lies, and pointed out that his choice of “silliness point” is absolutely worthless if his goal is convincing them of that silliness.”
I get your point, but you’re wrong; there is indeed silliness where he points it out, if the practitioners claimed they were eating only seafood because it was what God wanted. The minute a father answers the question, “Dad, why can’t I have bacon today,” with, “because to show our devotion to God we must eat only that which comes from the sea,” then accepting a change to that rule later means that either the father was lying, or mistaken. If he’s not a cruel man it’s probably not the former, and if it was the latter then how the heck do you know that you were mistaken, and that what you’re doing now is also not mistaken?
The scales need to fall from the eyes of those who cannot see that their religious practices are man-made and ultimately self-serving constructions (which doesn’t make them wrong, or bad, btw), and I don’t think that there’s any way to gently nudge people towards that view while being coy about what the problems are in asserting religious truths and divine will.
Others have mentioned mammals living in water (such as the capybara) as other weird exceptions. Whales are a good example as dudes also go on about the tale of Jonah and how it must have been a whale, not a “great fish”.
In any case, yes, many marine and aquatic animals were then classified as “fish” even tho today that would be incorrect.
I think what Cheshire was saying was that religious types generally wouldn’t say that God “wants” us to eat seafood; it’s just something they do out of tradition because it helps them act more like Jesus, in turn bringing them closer to God. The tradition itself isn’t necessary delineated in the Bible as a demand from God but more of a guideline from the church.
This is why I think Dawkins could have chosen his words more carefully in this case (I’ve since changed my mind on the issue). It would depend on if they understood that Lent is a manmade personal tool and how many think God actually wants things like food sacrifice, etc.
Of course, it’s always hard to tell what people think about religious practices because by its very nature, religion is amorphous. Some people think X Y and Z are tradition, while others think they are required for winning God’s favors/opinion/rewards/whatever.
But obviously this lamb/fish thing is a flimsy point – the real meat is that the Bible is full of demands. Sleep with mankind as you do a woman? Commit adultery? Pick up wood on a Saturday, talk smack about God, be a fortune-teller, disobey your parents and refuse to heed discipline, fail to be a virgin on wedding night, etc? Killed, killed, killed.
Such things are explicitly laid out in the Bible as demands from God and yet we don’t see people obeying these commands today. People pick and choose what to follow from the Bible at their convenience. “Oh, we don’t believe in that anymore.” Well, why the fuck not? Your Bible tells you to do it.
Ultimately it becomes apparent that people do not get their morality from the Bible and that the word of God is malleable. Either a LOT of people are disobeying God or trying to fool him… or they’re all just full of poopie doodoos.
“I’ll explain and I’ll use small words so that you’ll be sure to understand, you warthog faced buffoon”
Yes, the Bible tells us so. But then the Bible, later, gives new rules.
I’m still missing the relevant point. In terms of evaluating the God hypothesis, ppresumably at the core, people choose to follow “man-made” religious rules only to the degree that they ultimately relate to God, right?
If you’re argument is that they are followimg rules that are indepedent from what they believe about God, then yeah, that wouldn’t be relevant. "Tom said I should have a Bjg Mac today, so that’s why I’m at McDonald’s.
But if the motivation is Tom said I should, and he’s my religious leader, then the distinction between man made and not man made is irrelevant. That is behavior driven by a belief in god, or a belief in a personal god who cares what i do in terms of evaluating my worth.
So, if not eating meat were written in the bible, or if it were simply what Reverend Jones said to do, there’s no difference, because the behavior is driven by the same delusional thought process.
It is behavior driven by a belief in God, but it’s not a behavior necessarily aimed at directly trying to please God. That’s why it may not make sense to say “You’re dipping lamb in water and calling it fish? Are you trying to pull a fast one on God?” God may not give two shits about whether or not you eat lamb on a Friday during Lent. You can choose what to give up as long as you’re acknowledging the underlying purpose of Lent, which is to be more like Jesus/get closer to God/recenter your priorities/drop superfluous attachments to worldly things/soul-search/whatever.
If the French were trying to bypass Lent by acting like they were suffering when they really weren’t, then that’s a pretty wasteful way to treat Lent. It wouldn’t be trying to fool God per se; God might just think you were being dishonest with yourself and wasting your own time because you weren’t doing yourself any favors or gaining any insight.
However, Dawkins may have been taking the “love” angle. God does demand that people worship and love him, and that is a fairly open-ended command. People may view Lent as a way to show devotion and love and hence Dawkins might argue eating lamb in place of fish is “pulling a fast one” on God because it’s an insincere sacrifice – an insincere token of love. It’s like when Homer buys Marge a bowling ball. It’s really more of a self-serving gift but hey, at least you can say “you got her something.”
That is my own interpretation of his words, anyway, although I agree that the distinction needs to be made clearer.
I think he actually has a vinyard, not a date farm. Is date production a big thing in Greece? Anyway I thought that’s just what middle aged well off Californians do, it didn’t occur to me that he was actually trying to live as a smallholding hoplite. That’s pretty nutty.
Anyway the only reason I know this is because I read(listened) his book Mexifornia, and I thought his views on illegal immigration were actually pretty reasonable and not at all like his awful opinions on everything else.
I’m surprised no one has recited the old joke (unless someone did and I missed it…)
The guy goes into a restaurant and asks for a whale sandwich. The manager says, “We haven’t got that!” The man says, “Well, the good Lord knows I asked for fish. I’ll have a steak, then.”
The joke invokes the same hyperlegalistic trope: by pretending to try to obey the law, the guy really only shows his hypocrisy in his cleverness at avoiding it.