That’s true enough. The immediate cause for these deaths was unsafe use of an electrical appliance. The proximate cause was adherence to backwards religious beliefs.
Religion was harmful bunk before this tragedy and remains so after. I don’t think it is dangerous in the sense of risking physical harm from fire.
Exactly. Which is why people are criticizing the association of the ‘religion is bunk’ argument with this tragedy. It is imposing a causation on the story that does not exist, for purposes of witnessing.
It’s the equivalent of the typical religious glurge in the form of “Committed Christians survive terrible plane crash because they stopped to pray, and so missed their flight”. Sure, the “poximate cause” of them not flying was “adherence to their religious beliefs”, but that is basically a meaningless statement: it would be exactly the same outcome had they stopped for a round of Bingo.
Edit: more exactly parallel to the thread title, “Praying Leads to Survival of Seven Christians”.
Not really. The causation is there. It’s sad and ironic that rules from a magic book passed down from a benevolent (?) all-knowing god indirectly caused the tragedy.
I see people criticizing, as you say, as a reflexive justification for their own idiosyncrasies.
Agreed that that is also idiotic.
They are both examples of ‘causation’, where the alleged causation is meaningless. Or rather, lacks the meaning that is cleary being implied. It is the implication of a false causation that people react against (following Jewish ritual risks getting you killed; praying may save you from being killed). This sort of logical manipulation is obnoxious in witnessing, no matter by whom.
If I get killed in a car accident because I went out to buy Cheerios, my desire for Cheerios “caused” the tragedy in exactly the same “indirect” sense.
That’s exactly what observant Jews (of whatever stripe and degree of orthodoxy) are trying to do – they’re trying to comply with God’s law. And part of that is an effort to understand what the law is, and what it means, and how one is to follow it in day-to-day life.
It’s not " trying to cheat him on cutesy technicalities." To say that reveals total ignorance of what the law means to observant Jews. And also an unwillingness to try to understand what you’re criticizing.
Look, every religion is fair game for criticism, including mine. But you can’t just propose that a religious rule or rite or anything is something other than what it is, and then criticize that.
Shutting down your critical thinking skills has consequences. It seems entirely consistent to me to think god would not allow an accident to happen for following his rules.
But meh. I agree that the fire hazard is unlikely to be statistically relevant. It’s just a reminder that these beliefs are about 2000 years behind modern civilized society.
Decoration, ritual, shrine, altar - whatever. I’m saying that while I do think building simple religious shrines is obviously silly, since you might as well be placing a collander on your mantlepiece in honor of the flying speghetti monster - they strike me as less arbitrary, inconvenient, absurd, and less-contradictory than some more elaborate practices to do the same thing.
As another example, prayer is silly. You’re not talking to anyone. However, I don’t think someone going to their holy building and silently speaking in their head to God is particularly absurd beyond that. On the other hand, if one religion mandated that in order to talk to God, you had to ascend a mountain by hand, without food or drink (to remain ritually pure, why not), and then carve a hollow tube out of a tree like a bullhorn so that you could raise it into the sky and yell your requests to god so that he could hear you, that’s more absurd to me than simply going to your holy building and praying.
In the latter example, you’re putting yourself through inconvenience, strife, and danger - all under the premise that you need to speak a certain way so that god can hear you, despite you believing that god is omnipresent and omniscient.
Can you see why I think that practice is more absurd than simply praying quietly in a church/temple/mosque?
You yourself certain judge certain religious practices as being more bizarre, extreme, or absurd than others, don’t you? Is the Christian practice of exorcism not more absurd to you than their practice of singing songs in church to praise god?
So then, if someone in this hypothetical religious practice decides to climb that mountain to talk to god and they die along the way, is it unreasonable for me to think that their death is even more tragic and senseless than someone who’s performing a more grounded, and less absurd practice? Is a guy who starves to death on his way to make a wooden bullhorn on a mountain so god can hear him more absurdly tragic than someone who dies in a car crash on their way to a routine church/temple/mosque visit? Yes. Even though both actions are both based on silly premises (ie they’re going to talk to god), one is worse than the other.
You seem to be under the impression that I started this thread to “witness” the deaths of these 7 children. In fact, I did not. While dead kids due to religious stupidity does upset me, it’s not the sort of thing that I routinely bother to participate in anymore. I didn’t start this thread, nor would I have participated in it if all that was being discussed was the senseless tragedy of this incident.
You will note, if you go back to the beginning of this thread, that what got me to participate in it wasn’t simply my desire to jump into this thread and say “see, religious stupidity leads to more deaths!”, but rather because people were making the effort to say “oh, this has nothing to do with religion at all, why would you think it did?!” - in fact, at the time of my posting, that was the predominant tone of this thread. That’s what I could not abide and felt the need to participate.
I was not, and am still not, using this tragedy as a way to gloat over the religious about how stupid they are. I was participating in this thread to fight the idea that religious thinking is blameless in this tragedy and it had nothing to do with religion. I do not like when religions are excused from the behaviors of their followers that stem from their adherence to that religion. I also don’t like when people try to dismiss Christian hate groups in a similar way, nor when people try to pretend that Islamist violence has nothing to do with Islam.
Imagine we were on a board that had a lot of discussion and support around nonsense alt med treatments. One of their members got a very treatable, but potentially fatal, form of cancer. But the had read all sorts of alt med books, and been in the alt med community, and believed that scientific medicine was all a sham. So they took the accepted accepted type of treatment amongst people who shared their beliefs - that sticking pomegranates up your ass was the best way to treat this cancer. Their solution would’ve been common and accepted among that culture.
And then, of course, that person died. And someone else made a thread to say “this is so tragic, if that idiot hadn’t believed all this alt med nonsense, they would probably be alive today”, and then others chimed in saying “What? Cancer killed them! Not alt med! This had nothing to do with their belief in alt med! Cancer was the cause of death. What does alt med have to do with this?!”
If you identified with the alt-med tribe, instead of the Jewish tribe, you’d be in here telling me how I was hateful, and not carrying on the intellectual tradition of advocacy for scientific medicine (and how people like me gave scientific medicine a bad name), and that I was merely witnessing and gloating in this person’s death because I hate alt med, and that I’m scum, and that I’m ignorant of the specifics of alt-med practices because I’m not intellectually curious.
Cheerios are an idiotic tradition.
This post makes me think you are, basically, dumb rather than hateful.
Everyone else, apparently, is capable of understanding that the particular ritual in the OP was not fundamentally risky. Certainly not as fundamentally risky as (say) driving a car somewhere. It is not analogous to using snake oil to attempt to cure cancer, or climbing a mountain without food, or whatever. It is not as risky as many ordinary activities (such as car-driving) , and certainly not extraordinarily risky (like using snake oil to cure a possibly fatal disease).
It was only “risky” in this case because the family, through ignorance, poverty, or both, used an improper utensil to heat their food, and neglected to have fire alarms.
In this case there is an equal chance that the later plane they catch will crash, so their action is not increasing their risk in any way.
To be analogous, the hot plate turned off and unplugged overnight should be as dangerous as the hotplate plugged in and turned on overnight.
Not so. The risk of taking an ordinary plane, or heating food overnight is, under normal and non-negligent circumstances, near zero. Only, in the OP’s case the heating method was quite clearly unsafe (faulty hotplate rather than proper crock pot, no fire alarms).
The analogy would be improved by mentioning that the plane the Christians missed by stopping to pray happened to be obviously unsafe in some manner.
The good thing is that such a stupid tradition is Darwinism in action. Though it should have been the mom who died and not the kids.
Only if they could know it. Crock pots are made to be left on unsupervised. Hot plates not so much. I cooked dinner for two years in college using hot plates in my dorm room, so I consider myself an expert.
Too bad that there is nothing about this in the Talmud.
Nasty.
Yes, exactly. Maybe an obviously-drunk pilot and a plane with no seats … I’ve actually had that, once. 
Oh but there is. “Whenever there is a possible danger to life, the laws of Sabbath are superceded”.
According to this doctrine, it would be forbidden under Talmudic law to use an unsafe hot-plate to keep Sabbath, even if that was the only way to keep Sabbath and otherwise they could not.
You’re a one man case study in Dunning-Kruger effect. How could you see the argument about cause and effect in this thread and then just go “Hurrr the Sabbath makes people use their hotplates unsafely! What a dumb tradition!”? It’s not like it says somewhere in the Talmud “Thou must turn on thine hotplate before the Sabbath! Also, no smoke alarms!”
The ‘workarounds’ you’re referring to are applying ancient rules to modern life. They didn’t have electricity thousands of years ago, they didn’t have fixed houses with (the need for) locks thousands of years ago. I’m thinking their pretty creative to follow ancient rules in a modern world. That being said, if the hot plate worked last week, & the week before that, & the week before that, etc. what makes one think it’s going to cause a deadly fire this week? Yes, it’s potentially unsafe, but I’ve safely driven my car hundreds (thousands?) of times; I don’t expect it to catch fire the next time I drive it.
The reports I read stated that there was only one smoke detector, in the basement, where it probably couldn’t have been heard by people sleeping upstairs. I don’t know about NYC specifically but lots of cities/fire depts give out free smoke detectors. 1) Assuming NYC didn’t, & 2) assuming that they couldn’t afford them they could go to their synagogue, & 3) if they were too embarrassed to let their community know of their situation, they could have gone to a church, or mosque, or buddhist temple & I’m sure they would have been provided these relatively inexpensive life-saving devices.
Why is your outrage directed at how these people were observing their religion rather than the fact that they didn’t have smoke detectors in the house? They screwed up & paid a horrible, awful price for it but it’s not because of their religious practices.
Of course it is. If she wasn’t trying to obey the psychotic omnipotent monster that Jewish people worship, she would have hit the off switch.
It’s not that she used a hotplate. People use hotplates.
She didn’t want to touch the switch, because her religion said so. So she left it on.
The religion also says protect life before anything else. She would have hit the off switch had she known it would’ve cost lives. So either she misunderstood the religion or didn’t know it wasn’t safe. There is nothing in the religion that asks her to do a dangerous thing.
It is highly unlikely to cost lives. It’s not like they were playing Russian Roulette. I don’t doubt they did it before, and hundreds or thousands of other families do the same thing. Realistically, today, stuff usually works. You can probably keep a hot plate on for a hundred weekends, and nothing bad will happen.
But sometimes you roll the dice and the unlikely result shows.
I contend that this doesn’t rise to the level of, “If death is on the line, eat pork!” I’d say that this is, “Well, I’d like to keep to the law, and this isn’t that dangerous as long as we’re careful.”