Electrical cords can deteriorate over time. I had a cord to a space heater burn itself through not long ago. It was scary.
No, what they did was unsafe by any reasonable standard - leaving an improper utensil (a hot plate) unattended, and worse, failing to have smoke alarms.
I stress again that doing so in order to fulfill the Sabbath is directly contrary to the religion, which is quite specific on this exact issue. The rule " “Whenever there is a possible danger to life, the laws of Sabbath are superceded” - is found in the Talmud. Not ‘if death is on the line’, but a ‘posible danger to life’. Which, it has been noted repeatedly, using an unattended hot plate, and failing to have smoke alarms, clearly is to any reasonable person.
In short, if through poverty or whatever reason the only choice was to do as they did, or fail to keep the Sabbath - the religion itself commands: don’t keep the Sabbath.
Which is yet another reason why this whole argument is such a damn misfire for anyone who knows anything about Judaism. There are lots of real reasons to critique Judaism from an atheist perspective, particularly Judaism of the Orthodox variety: this just isn’t one of them.
You guys are doing what I thought would be impossible: making the Orthodox seem like models of sweet reason by comparison. :eek:
it doesn’t matter what a thinking philosopher or intellectual adherent to that religion might do, given the issue some thought. what matters is what the general population of adherents are likely to do.
And the majority of those don’t leave unattended hotplates running in smoke-detector free homes.
The general adherents in this case (Orthodox Jews) are sometimes considered fanatics by other Jews exactly because they spend so damn much of their time studying the Torah and Talmud and arguing over every bit of it - sometimes to the exclusion of other activities.
That’s what makes Orthodox Judaism different from most other religions. Its adherents are, famously, literate and knowledgeable about the content of their religion. Too much so. It is very different from (say) pre-Vatican II Catholicism, where there is a priesthood who knows the liturgical language mostly unknown to non-priests (Latin) and the arcana of the religion, and the mass of followers in some cases just do the rituals.
It is simply nonsense to assert that Orthodox Jews would be ignorant of this very basic premise found in the Talmud. No-one who actually knew any Orthodox Jews would believe that. This sort of thing is bread and butter to them. Arguing about this stuff is what they do.
If any religious person leaves a hot plate on overnight you could say that their religion made them stupid. In this case, as has been repeated many times already, this is not adherence to a religious practice, it’s actually a failure to understand the religion.
And let me be very clear, you are a fucking moron if you leave any open heating device on overnight.
I would be surprised if any hot plate is sold without a warning not to leave it on unattended at all. And heating device is more subject to failure than other electrical device specifically because the heat it produces degrades it’s components. I don’t know what model of hotplate this is but some of them are very cheaply made and readily burn out after a long period of use because they have no heat regulation. Sometime this is preceded by rapid heating. Occasionally the failure of the heating element can cause a fire, but we don’t know for sure that the hot plate failure was the actual cause of this fire, it could have set off nearby flammable materials and the evidence of hotplate failure was actually something that occurred after external flames overheated it.
Malthus do you think they had any appreciation that it was significantly unsafe?
Do you think that any “possible” danger to life is ever interpreted literally? Heck eating steak is a “possible danger” … it is possible to choke on it. Walking down the icy path can possibly kill you. A crockpot cord can become frayed and be a danger … it’s “possible.”
I do think that many otherwise “reasonable” people in many poor communities would not appreciate that a hot plate unattended is an unreasonable risk, one out of ten homes below the poverty line do not have smoke alarms, and many who have them either never or only rarely test them.
People of all socioeconomic levels sometimes don’t know better than to do stupid things and both poverty and living in an isolated community (be it geographically or due to self-imposed factors) is associated with a greater lack of having even been exposed to the information. They don’t install smoke alarms and don’t test them if they do, they have upper floor windows with screens that kids can push out, medicines improperly stored, cords hanging down that kids can wrap around their necks or pull things down on top of themselves, don’t insist on bike helmets, as mentioned old heavy tvs on dressers and shelves … people do things that are risky either because they think the risk is small enough that it isn’t worth the bother or because they don’t know better all the time.
Neither believers or atheists are immune from lack of adequate knowledge about risks and our general tendency as humans to be pretty poor at risk assessment and management.
This was not because they ignored a religious law any more than it because they followed one. IF they had thought using a hot plate in that manner was an unreasonable risk then they would have followed the law to not put life in danger as the superceding principle; they didn’t. Being very knowledgable about Halakhah correlates little with other knowledge possession.
I assume it’s based on some sort of standard of reasonableness. Obviously, de minimis risks would not qualify. Doing something a reasonable person would regard as dangerously risky to life would.
Failure to use fire alarms, and use of unattended hot plates, are unreasonably dangerous.
While I agree poverty and bad risk management was probably at the root of it, I disagree that a reasonable person would not even know of the danger. For one, this wasn’t even the first time a malfunctioning hot plate had started a fire among the Orthodox community in Brooklyn. The same thng happened in 2010. It’s a reasonably tight-knit community, so they would likely have heard of that.
Hell, when I was a poor student, I did lots of stupid and dangerous things. It isn;t that I didn’t even know they were dangerous - I was just too dumb to care, and too poor to rate doing things safely as a priority.
I agree, which is why I also said she was not aware of the risk or was assuming it will be ok, again this time. People run their ovens for heat and cause fires or CO poisoning even though they know better. People text and speed because up until the fatal crash nothing bad happened.
No one is denying that she made an error in judgement in her observance of the religious ritual. There is nothing inherent about the ritual that causes it to be dangerous. Compare to snake handling, where the goal is to handle poisonous snakes- the risk is embedded in the ritual. There is no risk embedded in this ritual.
In these communities it’s what the rabbi tells them to do. Which is why I think it’s incumbent on the rabbis not only to instruct their congregants on the danger of hot plates, but to set up funds to purchase crockpots or other safer heating devices for those who can’t afford it, something which would fulfill at least 3 mitzvot.
If you want to blame their rabbi I’m all for it.
I’m pretty sure their rabbi would have told them to get a crock pot and install smoke detectors. Sometimes people to ill-informed things with disastrous consequences, this is one such case.
That could be. But if he didn’t he should get his ass reamed.
No argument from me.
Surely there is some small amount of risk built into the ritual, or at least the common response to it. In order to be able to function on those days, you need to find workarounds to normal operations for routine tasks like selecting clothes to wear, cooking food, opening doors, operating devices passive, etc. Whatever workarounds you come up with are going to be sub-optimal compared to if you could just do them in a normal, unrestricted way. In some cases those sub-optimal methods are also going to include sub-optimal safety. Even if the decrease in safety is tiny, that decrease in safety is due to religious ritual.
New analogy time, I know you guys love these. Some holy book says “Your god commands your attention daily, and so you shall not walk towards anywhere in the hour after dawn” - in response to this, adherents to that religion only walk backwards places. Because, hey, it’s not “towards”, so it’s cool with god, right? Sure, whatever, he doesn’t want us walking, but let’s just focus on the “towards” thing instead, because there’s a technicality we can use to get around this rule. So walking backwards after dawn becomes tradition.
Now there’s nothing in that tradition that forces walking backward to be unsafe, and the vast majority of adherents walk backwards successfully every day without harm. But every once in a while someone gets hurt because they trip because of the awkwardness of walking backwards or because they can’t see everything in their way. In a rare once in a while, an accident that would’ve never happened while walking forward causes someone to make a fatal mistake during backwards walking and they die.
That death is so much more tragic and pointless because it only happened because someone was doing a silly ritual based on silly beliefs. Not only are the original beliefs silly, but it’s made even sillier (sillier squared, in fact) by the fact that their method was a workaround to comply with a silly rule on a technicality anyway.
Most of this thread is people saying “People walk backwards all the time without dying” and "no, of course walking backwards doesn’t violate the spirit of the rule, the law only says you can’t walk towards things, that’s not a violation of the spirit of the laws and “of course his local holy teacher would’ve told him not to trip and fall into traffic, the holy book doesn’t condone that!”
I do suspect that if someone died during the process of an exorcism, this board would rightfully be outraged at how silly and tragic it was, not rushing to the defense saying “The Church doesn’t say you should kill people during exorcism” or “the vast majority of exorcisms don’t result in anyone’s death”
Question: in your analogy, how do you know the “he doesn’t want us walking” part?
I should’ve made it more clear, but I meant to convey that the prohibition on walking is meant so that you can sit there and think about God for an hour. So if you end up walking backwards - not only is that walking, but walking that actually requires more effort because it’s so unusual, leaving you less able to think about God. So you have this technical workaround, because the book says it prohibits “walking towards” things in a poetic flourish, so even though you violate the spirit of the law (not walking to have time to meditate and appreciate god), you have a technical way to comply with the law (walking backwards with your full attention actually leaving you less able to contemplate god than with normal walking)
The purpose of the Sabbath is to provide a day of rest, right? A day on which you don’t do work. And yet the preparations people make on the Sabbath to do ordinary tasks take a whole lot more effort and impede rest compared to being able to take these actions normally. So you’re not actually resting by complying with these laws. Furthermore, using a hotplate to cook things requires work and effort, and in fact that least worky thing about it is the pushing of the button. So if you’ve convinced yourself that you can do food prep and cooking but can’t a actually press the off button, that certainly sounds like a workaround to the rest provision.
I know this isn’t the case, but by way of analogy, imagine if people cut their grass with a bladed push mower because they decided that hitting the starter switch on their powered mower constitutes work, but mowing their grass with an old time push mower, despite being far more work, doesn’t.
I’m willing to concede that I obviously don’t know the subtleties of traditional Jewish interpretation on holy law. However, the responses given to me in this thread essentially indicate that it’s impossible to go against the spirit of the law by following the letter of the law, which either means there’s no greater purpose for the laws, no meaning behind them, no spirit to violate, or such posters, and perhaps Judaism as a whole, have decided that only adherence to the letter of the law is meaningful and the spirit of the law is ignored. Which seems rather ridiculous if you’re trying to comply with how God wants you to live, but you’re acting as though you’re trying to get by with the absolute minimum technical compliance with a job contract in a job you hate.
Is that explicitly specified in the writing or is that your interpretation of it? In your analogy, of course.
No. The purpose of Shabbat is to have a day that is different from others. For example, it is forbidden to do “melacha” on Shabbat. People who don’t know Judaism seem to be convinced that “melacha” translates as “work”. It doesn’t. So any argument that presumes that (like yours) is out of ignorance.
Again, you make ignorant assumptions about Judaism and what the Torah proscribes on Shabbat, and build an argument on those. It is wrong because the underlying assumptions are wrong.
And yet you seem to be judging things based on your ignorance.
It is presumptuous, to the extreme, to contravene the letter of the law because you think you know what God actually meant.
The problem here is that you don’t know shit about Judaism (and don’t want to learn). So you keep embarassing youself by insisting that Jewish rituals are absurd because they do not achieve the purpose you think they are for.
I know it is hopeless - but for others reading along, the purpose of Shabbat is not simply a “day of rest”. Anyone could easily discover this by a simple Wiki search.
Shabbat is “about” lots of things: prayer and ritual commemoration foremost. It is not merely “about” taking a rest.
For example - what the laws prohibit is not “work”, but better described as “creative activity”. Why? Not simply to give folks a relaxing rest - though it may well do just that - but to commemorate the fact that the Hebrew god ceased creation on the seventh day (a “microcosmos = macrocosmos” sort of thing).
Now, commemorating your creator god may be bizzare, or even nuts, but the point here is that you quite clearly do not know that’s what they are doing; so all of your criticisms sound dumb. Because they are based on ignorance. You have no idea what the “spirit of the law” is in this case, and so you just assume it is being violated.
Edit: I see Terr got in ahead of me …
Imagine for the purposes of analogy it said something “So that you start the light of the day with the contemplation that god has brought you this light, you shall not walk towards anywhere for the first hour after dawn” - I know “walk towards” is an awkward phrasing to make a point, but hey, holy books have all sorts of archaic and awkward phrasings, so it fits.
But it is intended to be a day of rest, right? Or is that something that’s not true at all? Creating a religious holy day so that people could, at most, be forced to work 6 days a week in antiquity makes sense as a societal policy to me. It’s one of those times that people invent a religious reason for something designed to make society run smoother. But making sure their rest day is full of silly little workarounds that actually make the day less restful serves no useful purpose.
I mean, it’s a ritual that inconveniences people that has no practical value which only goes to serve its religious purpose. It’s not as if you’re enlightening me that it’s some great thing, you’re only telling me that my specific assessment of how silly it is may be incomplete.
People in this thread have said that adherence to the technical details of the law IS observance of the spirit of the law in Judaism, or that the spirit of the law doesn’t exist. Logically, then, it would follow that it’s impossible to cheat a religious law in Judaism - you couldn’t possibly violate the spirit of the law, because only technical adherence to the letter of the law matters.
Can you imagine a scenario in which you could obey the letter of your religious law but violate the spirit? Is that even possible?
The spirit of the law informs the letter of the law. It’s not as if people can go the legislator and judge in this case to ask for clarification, as you could in real life. You have to make a good faith effort to figure out what he was trying to tell you to do, and why, if you are to comply with the spirit of the law. And presumably god isn’t like an adversarial court case - he will judge your intentions to follow his wishes rather than whether you got the minutia right.
If you can’t imagine a scenario in which you could follow the laws of your religion and violate the spirit, then you are far too focused on the minutia and not sufficiently focused on the overall intentions/god’s wishes.