I suggest all orthodox Jews hang a copy of the Tora above any possibly defective hot plates.
Let God and Murphy fight it out.
I’m not going to defend the way they get around the rules. There are even more ridiculous ones like pre-tearing toilet paper and elevators going up and down and opening their doors at every floor. Walking three blocks to shul isn’t work but driving there is.
Do you mock the Muslim faith? Hindus? Buddhists? Or is it just Christians and Jews that draw you ire?
In your previous post, you mentioned culture as well. Is it not childish to mock another’s culture?
Stupid, indeed. You only need to cut off one leg to get a handicap sticker, not two!
You didn’t ask me, but I do. All religion is stupid. Even yours. Especially yours. 
Cultures can be stupid. It’s a cultural practice to hack off clitorises. You think that can’t be mocked?
You might be able to get by with faking knee pain. No reason to get the saw out.
Okay, now who’s lawyering around the rules?
You seem to suspect he is some stereotype you have of american leftists. Beef is a conservative and he is unkind to islam as well…
it wasn’t done by accident. it was intentional.
god is not a benevolent judge according to some.
There’s a long tradition of obviously getting around the spirit of the law by exploiting the details of the law.
Examples:
You can’t carry items in your pockets outside of your home. Possibly only on the Sabbath, not sure about that. So Jewish communities will tie a string around every building in Jewish neighborhoods so that they can all claim it’s one continuous building, so the entire neighborhood is now your home. Apparently this tricks God. “Oh, are you carrying something outside your house?” “Nope! There’s a string! THERE’S A STRING! IT’S ALL MY HOME”
Related, people will buy belts that have home keys built into them so that they can carry around a house key without using their pockets.
You can’t shave your beard because god wants you to have a beard. Oh, but we can use electric razors, because those cut by moving two blades together, so they’re actually tiny little scissors instead of shaving. So that’s cool. Yep, god says you can’t have a shaved face, but hey, if you have tiny automated scissors take off your facial hair, that’s not shaving!
And generally all the Sabbath stuff where you use some sort of gimmick to get something to do the work for you. Sabbath ovens and such. Cooking a meal doesn’t become work unless you flip the switch to on, but if something else flips the switch, you can do everything else. There are dozens of things like that.
There’s all sorts of crazy shit like that that’s widely accepted and practiced among Orthodox Jews.
It seems sort of insane to me. If you think God laid out these rules, do you really think you’re going to outsmart him? That he’s going to say “oh, haha, a self starting oven. You totally got me. Well played” - that’s some crazy shit.
The best explanation I’ve heard is from a formerly orthodox jew turned secular - essentially that rules-lawyering is viewed as clever problem solving in their culture and looked well upon, and so they essentially think God is like them - he’ll appreciate the rules lawyering they did to get around his rules.
This is just one of those things where douchey liberals have a “haha yeah religion/Christianity is stupid” and “all cultures are sacred and you can’t criticize other cultures/religions!” conflict. It’s safe to mock Christianity because it’s the dominant religion where they live, whereas other religions can be conflated with ethnicities or even race in their minds, and so criticisms of other religion becomes xenophobic criticism of ethnic/race.
So you get the “[makes criticism of stupid Christian practice]” “Yeah, dude, that’s so dumb, religion is bunk” “[makes equivelant criticsm of stupid Jewish/Islam practice]” and you get “woah woah woah! I didn’t know I was talking to a racist!”
So following the religion at all is dumb enough on its own. But deciding to follow a rule that says “you can’t do any work on the Sabbath” and then saying “oh I can cook this meal as long as I leave a dangerous hot plate on 24/7 instead of pushing the button myself!” is doubling down on the stupid for inventing a stupid solution to try to trick god.
Fooling civic functionaries for a real-world benefit isn’t quite the same thing as trying to fool an omnipotent psychopath, for no actual benefit whatsoever.
That said, I wouldn’t do the former either. I feel bad using my mom’s disabled pass when I take her to the store. And she genuinely has mobility issues.
Yes, I absolutely mock Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. I also mock homeopaths, people who make ghost detecting kits, and all sorts of other supernatural nonsense that plague our society.
No. Why would you think it’s childish at all? The best way to attack entrenched institution in a way that gets past people’s mental blocks against it is through satire and mockery. If some culture has some negative aspect that’s hurting people but perseveres exactly because it’s thought that cultures are sacred and unmockable, then those who are failing to mock, and saying that something is above mockery, are complicit in that harm.
No subject should be sacred. Everything should be examined critically and spoken freely about.
To correct this, I’m definitely not a conservative. Conservatism, by definition, is a bias towards retaining the status quo. I have no marriage to the status quo, and many of my views are not in line with that at all. I consider myself to be a skeptical pragmatic utilitarian. And I’m not generally right on most issues. I’m actually one of the most rabid anti-Republican Party posters on this board, although I haven’t been posting much political stuff in the last few years. My actual views on various topics are what I hope to be open minded and carefully considered, and so I don’t line up well with any particular political party or set ideology. I don’t need a group identity to tell me what I think on issues.
I do go after what I consider to be liberal douchebags who are up their own ass with cognitive dissonance when they try to defend barbaric religious or cultural practices because they’re viewed as being from a different culture, and they’ve decided they’re apologists for other (non-modern-west) cultures and religions.
As an example, some of the people I think are the most detestable are 4th wave feminist activists who think that women in the west are horribly oppressed because we live in a society of trigger warnings and rape culture and patriachy over minor things, but who rush in to defend barbaric Middle Eastern cultures who actively repress women in a way that a thousand times worse than anything in the west because their “look for oppressions you can bask in” feminism conflicts with their “all cultures are beautiful and no one can criticize anyone else” nonsense. I wish they’d explode like when Kirk talked robots into evaluating their conflicting imperatives.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not anti-feminist. I’m absolutely committed to egalitarianism. I mean the special snowflakes who are butthurt that they lived in a place and an era where oppression is mild at best but who desperately seek to be oppressed as part of their identity, so they have to pull oppression out of their ass in absurd ways. It’s always amusing to me that someone who thinks a man getting slightly into your personal space on a bus is rape and oppression, but throwing acid on a woman’s face because she wanted to learn to read is okay because YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE THEIR CULTURE, RACIST.
A religious culture? Never. We’ve gotten so far beyond that crap.
Well, sure, if there weren’t that religious proscription in the first place, this family would not have been trying some less than fully thought out method to seek to stick to the letter of the proscription. But then again as has been pointed out, whole populations of strict-observant followers of that doctrine have complied without injuring people or destroying property. IIRC it is everywhere all over rabbinical literature that you need not observe the Sabbath so rigidly as to the point of endangering lives.
As mentioned, nothing in the Sabbatical rules mandates that you rig up a way to keep food hot for a day(). In this case, as has been pointed out before, it seems it’s a community of more limited means that may not have access to more sophisticated alternatives and just do the same thing they’ve seen neighbors and relatives do – this is where leadership from within the religion itself, a Rabbi who would advise that G_d does not want you to do things the dangerous way, would have a better effect than outsiders jeering “you’re stupid for believing a fairytale!!” (**) That among disadvantaged congregations you also often find clergy who are not willing to do this but rather double down on fanatical observance only makes things worse.
()Oh, and the issue with setting things up or programming timers a day before being acceptable? Some who explained the position to me told me that is that it’s *mental and physical effort by **people ***to set things into motion that has to happen outside of the Sabbath. When YHWH chilled on the seventh day, there was still a sunset and a sunrise, the heavens still revolved, the creatures that crawl kept crawling, the four rivers kept flowing etc. i.e. what was already set into motion in the Universe during the first 6 days simply continued and did not freeze in place for the day while Mr. Big took a break.
(** Because, it may be just me, but I’d care more about first preventing people from burning down the house with their family in it, than about getting them to abandon religion. The one is more imminently necessary)
That’s nice. Now what about your claim that the first fifteen or so posters to this thread do the exact same thing?
Hence the rule against Sex in the City on the Sabbath.
No, it’s childish to accept a culture as presented. It is adult to question the obviously delusional and what makes no logical sense.
Do I mock other faiths? Certainly. All of them. “Faith means not wanting to know what is true.” That’s a “god” worth mocking. Kicking in the arse, even.
Fully agreed.
I equate this one with the Schiable family in Pennsylvania who killed not one, but TWO kids, due to pneumonia and the rules of their strict Faith Healing church. There’s doctors, ERs, clinics, drug stores, but you think that’s cheating so no medical for you. The reason-- the only reason-- those kids did not receive medical attention was to please a phony storybook and its followers.
Same with this. God above family. We COULD serve something cold but that might offend, go out to eat, hell you can fast (bet Goddy would like that), but that would be cheating. The reason-- the only reason-- that hot plate was left on was to please a phony storybook and its followers.
I always have and always will look at the divinely inspired storybook and classify it as a guidebook on how NOT TO LIVE your life. The subtitle should be: “A Guide Against Common Sense and Rationality.”
Except he didn’t say “Don’t flip switches”. He said “Do not do creative work”. Flipping the switch before Shabbat and leaving it on fully complies with it.