# Smart homes / devices and the Sabbath **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 28, 2016, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smart-homes-devices-and-the-sabbath/773299 "2016-11-28T17:58:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 24
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2016, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smart-homes-devices-and-the-sabbath/773299/24 "2016-11-30T17:34:36Z")
> [@Secret Queer Love and Poetry; Advice Needed](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/secret-queer-love-and-poetry-advice-needed/102541/12): > > Some of the _"solutions to fool god_" are mind boggling. > … > > And so on, and so on… An ancient, tendentious, querulous, and simply simple-minded _topos_. Any Jew (let alone anyone else) who thinks these exact examples you listed are “to fool God” is seriously wrong about _what laws are and how they get made and amended_. Ideally, to the religious, they are “allowed by God” (of course the whole point of a free society is to dispute this if you feel strongly, and God knows Jews dispute with God and man) because we all live in reality and human society, and\* all laws are made in a free society\* by willing participants who attempt to be good to each other given competing interests. Farmers should not be forced to commit economic suicide every seventh year (one such term would be enough); bakers should not be forced to destroy their entire inventory and commit economic suicide every Passover. Etc. and etc.: if the injunction is Biblical, God had a point, somewhere, somehow, to the religious, and still does. Translation into day-to-day laws, by a reasoned and impassioned process continued to this day, of course, tries to think of why and keep a part of it relevant–and in doing so, references aspects of previous debate on social and individual circumstances, debates which I would wager are fantastically more ethically philosophically and intellectually saturated than any poster here has the slightest knowledge of. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smart-homes-devices-and-the-sabbath/773299)._