Anything that works automatically, and not initiated by a Jew on Shabbat, is fully allowed. Including smoke detectors. Apart from the fact that smoke detectors fall under “pikuach nefesh” principle, under which almost everything is allowed.
He didn’t actually say anything at all. He is a daydream that some smelly desert dwellers with huge parasite loads and matted beards made up before switches to turn on fire was even fathomable.
That said, keeping the switch on, is obviously trying to get around the proscribed action. I agree that it keeps with the letter of the law, but it’s douchebaggy and an attempt to get around the rules of an omnipotent asshole. Regular assholes don’t like it when you try to get around their rules. I imagine, the monstrously evil and cruel God that is described in the Jewish faith would like it even less.
…so Jews can’t smoke on the Sabbath?
Only if they light the cigar before sundown.
Really? There’s a clause to all this shatbath? Then why didn’t this family know about it? Or my neighbors’ dad who had a heart condition, had Life Alert, but wouldn’t use it on the sabbath because he says it’s “against the rules”?
No, my neighbors don’t have smoke detectors either. AND they turn off ADT Home Security too, thinking, “No one will rob us. Hey, they know we’re home! It’s the sabbath!” :rolleyes: I hear this home rule weeks after the dad’s fatal heart attack which may have been stopped with Life Alert or a cell phone call, but you know, rules…
Hijack, because it’s cats:
Thanks! I was very lucky my canvas tote bag was big enough to stuff my largest cat Mina (a 13lb porker at the time) in, while her two not-quite-fully-grown kids were forced much more comfortably in a single pet carrier. That way I could sling the squirming tote bag over my shoulder while lugging the big carrier down the stairs.
Mina made her dissatisfaction with the arrangement known, however. The tote bag was, um, not usable afterwards. I’ve since purchased more flexible carriers.
Back on topic. As a nonobservant Jewish person I think the rules lawyering is stupid and mildly obnoxious, although I guess it’s easy for me to say since I don’t obey the laws in the first place. IMHO, either follow what you believe is the law as proscribed or don’t pretend you’re being observant. As I said, my grandmother did without cooked food for 24 hours and she survived.
BTW, the “no work on the Sabbath” wasn’t always just a Jewish thing, unless Laura Ingalls Wilder lied to me, and I know that couldn’t be true! As a five-year-old child she could play with paper dolls on Sundays but wasn’t allowed to cut paper clothes for them, because that was work. Meanwhile her grandfather got whipped for merely going sledding on the Sabbath, so things were even stricter then.
The Ingallses seem to have relaxed somewhat over the years, because Pa does hitch up his horses (which would be considered work) to take the family to church by the time they’re in Plum Creek (which is about three years after the paper doll incident). Ten years later, Almanzo even breaks the Sabbath to work on their house before they get married, and it ain’t considered no big thang. However, other families are still more observant: about a year earlier, Laura is boarding with a young wife and daughter on their homestead claim for a summer, and the husband–who spends the week in town to work but travels to the claim for weekends–is described as a nice guy but such a strict Presbyterian that they weren’t even allowed to smile on the Sabbath.
These trivial tidbits brought to you by the Society for Going Off-Topic and Distracting People.
Is it really law or is it a belief?
I have no idea why they didn’t know that but they seem to be pretty ignorant in general. Every one of those rules is overridden if you have to break it to save a life. If someone gets a weird disease and the only way to survive is to eat pork, the can eat bacon. You can certainly drive to a hospital on the sabbath if you are taking someone having a heart attack. It is a complete 100% bullshit lie that using Life Alert is against the rules for a heart attack victim.
NFPA estimates that U.S. fire departments responded to an average of 378,600 reported home structure fires per year during the four-year-period of 2003-2006. These fires caused an estimated average of 2,850 civilian deaths, 13,090 civilian injuries, and $6.1 billion in direct property damage per year. More than two-thirds (70%) of the reported home structure fires and 84% of the fatal home fire injuries occurred in one- or two-family dwellings, including manufactured homes. The remainder occurred in apartments or similar properties.
Cooking equipment is the leading cause of home structure fires and home fire injuries, while smoking materials are the leading causes of home fire deaths. Roughly half of all home fire deaths result from incidents reported between 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m.
This seems to be your recurring theme and I’m curious as to how you arrived at that conclusion. I can agree with most everything you’ve said in your posts to this thread, but this part, as a liberal (and a non-believer), puzzles me. The things people do to one another in the name of their gods is a constant source of frustration and disgust to me. I have no compunction about criticizing someone’s belief system if that system brings harm to their fellow humans. Orthodoxy is just the Jewish faith taken to obsessive extremes and I have zero patience with it, particularly when it results in the death of seven children who had no say in the matter.
I’ve been accused of being racist many times for completely race-neutral comments on Judaism and Islam. I’ve never been criticized in that way when I’ve gone after Christianity just as savagely. Have you really never seen liberals running in trying to be apologists for the cultural or religious practices of any sort of non-western source? It happens constantly.
I suspect how it developed was that a lot of the bile and hatred thrown at Judaism and Islam are indeed racially or ethnically motivated by a lot of bigots. People who are too dumb, for example, to even know that most Muslims aren’t Arab - so most of their “towel head” hatred is directed at “Muslims” rather than any particular race or ethnicity, even though the latter is probably the main motivator. So Liberals reflexively argue against them, as part of their anti-racism platform, and just generally their attempt to have an air of cultural relativity and non-judgement about cultural issues.
But then they take that reflexive apologism of any other culture or religion that people in their own culture might be xenophobic towards and then apply it where it doesn’t belong, like against people who attack all religions equally.
Which leads to the ultimate head up your ass position of social justice warriors thinking the US and the western worlds are horribly oppressive patriarchies, but places where they fucking stone women to death for being raped are unique and beautiful cultures above criticism, because hey, our culture has flaws too.
He’s not saying liberals are douchey and believe that, he’s saying that the douche subcategory of liberals believe this.
For an example, take Michel Foucault. Kept bitching about the West being oppressive, especially when it came to bodies and sexuality. He was enthusiastic about the 1979 Iranian revolution.
But you specifically accused a dozen or so of us in this very thread of that behavior and have yet to back that up. Of course there are lots of other people out there that do that.
The first two replies to the thread, for example, are an explanation as to why this is just a random accident/tragedy that had nothing to do with Judaism.
Yes, Judaism as a religion doesn’t force you to burn your house down. But it does make really restrictive rules about what you can do on the Sabbath. And Jewish people for hundreds or thousands of years have been creating various workarounds and cheats to be able to function despite these rules. These workarounds are sometimes less optimal in terms of safety than, you know, not being bound by these laws. The people saying “oh it can happen to anyone, cook-related fires are common” are ignoring the fact that the fucking hotplate wouldn’t have been turned on for 24 hours if she could’ve just fucking hit the off switch. It was Orthodox Jewish religion and culture that put her in a position where she had a stupid rule that needed a workaround, and plenty of precedents for created such a workaround. The fire wouldn’t have fucking happened if she could’ve just cooked like a normal human being or, even if she had to use a hotplate, turned it fucking off at night. If she wasn’t an Orthodox Jew, this doesn’t happen. So the people who are rushing in to say “Oh this isn’t related to Judaism, religious practices, or cultural practices - cooking fires happen all the time! This is just a random senseless tragedy that has nothing to do with any of that!”
If some Christian, scientologist, or Mormon did something so incredibly bizarre and stupid that resulted in the death of a bunch of kids, we’d be outraged. Those are all fair game, because they’re not looked at as the potential target of xenophobic hate. But if Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism gets the same results, then we have to rush in and talk about how it’s not about religion at all because we’re so fucking afraid of looking bigoted in some way we can’t even give cursory scrutiny to such things.
Oh, lord, the toilet paper thing - when my dad was a boy that was a weekly chore for him, pre-tearing toilet paper for use on the Sabbath.
My Jewish grandparents didn’t use a hotplate, they had a collection of chafing dishes and left lit sterno under them all Sabbath. It’s a wonder they all survived, I guess. Add in young kids and/or pets and a hot plate probably is safer in comparison… which doesn’t make it absolutely safe, just less bad.
I’ve been a shabbos goy on occasion. It’s sort of like the Amish taking rides with “English” people even though they aren’t supposed to be driving a car themselves.
As I have requested three or four times now, show me that those posters in this thread have shown this type outrage over an analogous Christian act which was a specific claim that you made.
Keep requesting it. What am I going to do, go through each poster’s individual history until I find that exact post that bashes something to do with Christian stupidity? That’s boring homework. I’m not accusing a specific user, but the general tone. Are you doubting that there are people who mock stupid Christian beliefs but come to the defense of similar Jewish or Islamic beliefs?
I said “If some obscure stupid Christian rule lead to people getting killed, we’d all be mocking it.” - do you disagree that there are threads on this board in which people mock stupid Christian beliefs? Or are you saying that the people who participate in this thread are an entirely separate group from them? When I say “we” in that statement, I mean the general population of this board.
Even if you were right, and the particular people in this thread that were excusing it as a non-religious practice didn’t bash Christianity, so what? The rest of my points about how that’s absurd would still stand, and my general points about people who are willing to bash Christian religious stupidity but not Judaism/Islam apply, there are certainly a lot of those people. You’re just trying to feed me busywork to prove something that’s obvious and not even a core premise to my point that this is religious stupidity.
Yes, it’s all a complete 100% bullshit lie. All religious rules are. But that didn’t help the religious person religiously decide what his religion expected of him regarding pushing a button for his needs. (According to another neighbor, he never wore it on Sabbath. Can’t confirm that, obviously.) This person was devout, so this news about life-saving acceptance to break a rule coming from you or me may not have been enough to convince him.
God appreciates that you take the Word (still the Word in Judaism, not made Flesh in Jesus) ‘seriously’ enough to invent ways of technical ‘compliance,’ while still living a relatively typical modern life… as opposed to saying fuck these stupid rules.
So you’re an equal opportunity jerk. Glad we got that straightened out. :rolleyes:
When you were in elementary or middle school, and your Social Studies teacher had a unit about the Yanomami, did you mock them?