Feb 29 is approaching which is a good day to celebrate those men (humans) who created their calendars by observation rather than by revelation. If you are a religious person who believes your God cares about the number of new moons that pass between some events, or about what day it is modulo 7, I have some questions for you.
You probably have no answer as to why God did not make the solar year evenly divisible by whole days. Maybe the solar calendar is of little interest to you. But Psalms 104:19 says the purpose of the Moon is to mark the seasons. Gen 1:14 says the same. Why isn’t a year evenly divisible by a month? Why didn’t God give people a little help with their planting and harvesting by telling them the period between Spring Equinoxes?
If you think every 7 settings of the Sun are extremely important to keep track of, what do you say to the fact that two travelers , one going East and one West around the earth will meet again with different opinions on what day it is? Kudos to the author of the Kuzari for figuring this out, or a least getting it into print, but the intellectual gyrations of dealing with Shabbat and the Date Line are comical. Couldn’t God have mentioned? Did he intend for people never to stray more than a few arc seconds of longitude away from Jerusalem ? That would keep everyone synchronized, but it would be kinda crowded.
(In 2012, several Islands in the Pacific switched sides of the international date line, creating confusion for the devout ).
(I apologize if Al-Muttaqin is not a good equivalent of Frum. I wanted my post to apply to all fundamentalists. It appears to me that Islam has a general exemption for travelers in performing Jumu’ah)
I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the main motivations to a lot of ancient mathematics and astronomy was calendar-making. If this had been easier (because of things coming out even), would that have set back the development of these disciplines?
Georg Christof Lichtenberg (1742-1799), one of my favorite physicists (an an inveterate punster) wrote an essay “Consolations for the Unfortunates Born on the 29th of February”, in which he answered the question of when Leap Year babies (born on Feb 29) should celebrate their birthdays in non-leap years.
His solution: Each person’s birth moment is marked by a particular point where the sun stands in the ecliptic. That is the day when such a person should celebrate their birth.
The calendar day thus chosen isn’t stable, even in non-leap years, but drifts through a set of 3 or four calendar days. It does this for everyone, even those not born in leap years. "A man born on some other day [than February 29] who celebrates it according to the calendar date is often mistaken, " remarked Lichtenberg, commenting on this drift. “But no one notices it.”
I’ve never gotten the impression that the monotheistic religions hold “making things easy for people” to be a divine priority. I’m not sure why the OP expects believers to be surprised or disappointed that He didn’t.
Especially in something as trivial as the calendar. I mean, if I accept for the sake of argument that God exists, and think about the ways in which God has made life difficult for humans, the asynchronous length of the day, month, and year are way, way down on the list.
It might have been a mistake to make a thread mixing Leap Day with Saturday. I have been thinking about posting about the later topic or some time, and then it seemed close enough to Feb. 29.
Let me try again. Say a religion declares that it is abomination to stand to the East of the High Priest of the Oogah-Boogah, or to be to the East of someone already to the West of the August One. One day a bright school kid realizes that for a large enough population, they would go all the way around the earth each person thinking he was to the West of the next, but the last person would end up to the East of the H.P.O.B.
Jews claim that Saturday should be universal, but in some sense Saturday is relative.
Trying to think of an example of a calendar system that was not created by observation. Not succeeding.
If what you mean is that certain aspects of certain calendars have been stated in certain religious texts to be religiously important, well, okay.
Not sure why February 29 is particularly appropriate for celebrating calendars based on observation, since it’s a classic example of a schematic kluge introduced for long-term administrative convenience rather than short-term observational accuracy.
If we were really trying to regulate the year in accordance with observation, we’d start every year 365 days and about 6 hours after the start of the previous one.
In Christianity at least, “making things easy” is most definitely NOT a priority. And calendars are human inventions. God doesn’t recon time the way we do.
Well that doesn’t have anything to do with the calendar. Can you give an example of a religion that has such a rule? I can’t think of a Jewish or Christian analogue to your hypothetical.
And I struggle with the concept that because lunar months don’t line up with the solar year neatly that – religion is wrong?
You’re missing the point of the OP which is that religious people are wrong who claim that God set up the phases of the moon etc. to be a calendar that people can use to track the course of the year. It’s absurd to suggest the God deliberately created an inaccurate clock that requires people to devise all manner of complex corrections.
I know the feeling. I was raised in a fundamentalist, Sabbath keeping family, and it was not until adulthood that I encountered the thought experiment / real experience of Magellan’s circumnavigation. A traveler moving constantly west who returns to , say, Jerusalem will disagree with someone who has remained there about how many sunsets there have been since they parted; what day it is.
Some threads you win, some you lose. I suppose if I had put a bit more time into this one it could be clearer, but is it that incoherent? I posted the link about rabbi Halevi and an early work of his that discusses the issue. Googling “Halevi date line” gets results.
(Where would Zeno of Elea have gotten if he had stopped the first time someone jeered him ? Onward I go.)
This is not argument against religion that will have wide appeal. It is a contrived, weird situation. “Saturday observance crossing the International Date Line? Whatever. Ask your Rabbi.” But if you are pious, it might grate on you. If you are religious, you are not ever going to accept some syllogisms that disprove… I don’t know, that God does not care about human suffering. But imagine if Paul had written that the square root of 2 was rational and that God had revealed the Numerator to him in a vision (but, regrettably, the margin of the epistle was too narrow to write it), would most Christians be bothered? Not in the slightest. Math has nothing to do with the main issues of Christianity. You would need to be a devoted believer in scriptural inerrancy to get worked up.