Working on the Sabbath warrants a death sentence

We grew up, you fucking moron, and stopped basing all our ideals on some book that says "do this or else".

Is this what passes for "Intelligent conversation" around here now?

 

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Symbolically is the operative word.

What if you were working at helping a disabled person, or nursing sick people - would God rather you just leave them in a pile of their own shit and go home and pray?

 

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Clay birds

You know, there's this bit in the Old Testament—and this is how specific it is—that says if two men get in a fight, and a woman grabs one of them by the balls, you are to cut her hand off.

Where the fuck did that come from? And what, really, is the point?

There's another bit where if you are dissatisfied with your wife, you take her to the rabbi, who poisons her, and if it doesn't kill her or cause her anguish, she is acquitted of being an unsatisfactory wife.

That's right up there with the ducking stool: If we kill her, she's innocent. If she lives, she's guilty.

What the hell is the point of that?

It has to do with superstition, and by that I don't mean the condemning context I use in relation to our contemporary religious freaks. (Did you ever notice that, even though we've gotten to the point in the U.S. where we can say "ass" on television, it's still the "God" part that is bleeped or silenced out of "goddamn"? And, yet, any rational scholar of theology will tell you that this is certainly not what the third commandment means.) In this case, we have to remember that human civilizations were emerging throughout the ancient period. Science? Knowledge? Philosophy? These operated in fits and starts—Greece, India, China, &c.—but didn't really take off in Europe until the Renaissance. If you read through the early and middle Christian philosophers, they perform some incredibly complex maneuvers with childishly simple concepts. It's actually impressive in its own right.

But the Old Testament standard for murder can come down, literally, to the difference between night and day. Religious philosophies—especially the Abramic usurpations—tend to develop intricate theories based on incomplete knowledge of objects and concepts sparsely understood if at all.

If you look at religion through a lens of psychology—e.g., Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913) and Moses and Monotheism (1938), or even Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959)—religious philosophies are derived from the human psyche. While the religionist might suggest that we find certain things important because God made them important, the psychologist might counter that we invest those aspects in God because we find them important.

In that context, bizarre religious rules and customs reflect the state of mind of the people who devise and practice them. They are invested, originally, in the psyches of their inventors, and later transformed and re-invested in subsequent generations of faithful.

There was a time, for instance, when "ritual" seclusion after bodily functions, or prohibitions against tattoos made sense. Even sexual taboos. Really, when you're a suffering people wandering lost through the desert, hygenic septicism, extraneous infected wounds, and wasted seed and unintended pregnancies aren't the best things for the community. Try explaining that, though, in scientific and philosophical terms. Better yet, define intrafamily psychological matrices for ancient people according to contemporary perspectives, and you'll be seen as a spirit of evil.

And, yes, there is a point when ritual cleanliness and such are taken too far. Some American tribes virtually exiled their women during menstruation, but isn't there psychological value in that? Ew! It's bleeding! Sure, I might have come from one of those, but get that nasty thing out of here because I want to fuck it! Talk about neurosis.

But what you're looking at is a freeze-frame of history reinterpreted over and over by people who aren't so much unquestioning as they are inwardly focused. That is, they spend a lot of time figuring out how to please God without ever stopping to wonder if maybe, just maybe, God might have been fucking around with us on a few of those rules.

I was watching Star Blazers last night, including the episode where Wildstar and Conroy capture a Gamilon pilot. After a bunch of silly melodrama, including this great line about how boring outer space is, Captain Avatar finally releases the captive pilot. He's useless, has no real information to give. Avatar's rationale is simply that the Yamato has just enough food for its crew and journey, and cannot afford to sustain a prisoner. And then, in a classic turn, after Conroy leaves to escort the pilot back to his plane, Avatar tells Wildstar to make sure the guy has enough food to get wherever he's going.

The thing is that Avatar is correct factually. They do not have enough food to sustain a prisoner. Indeed, I think it's shortly after that, they stop at a strange planet looking for food.

So his choices are to either kill the prisoner or release him. And this is where the question arises.

In a former, earthbound day, a leader would have the prisoner executed. But Avatar is enlightened and civilized; he recognizes this mindless drone is not a cruel criminal, but nearly as much a victim of the Gamilon empire as the people of Earth.

Coming back to the real world, we're wrestling with some of those issues in our own time. Early in the Iraqi Bush Adventure, soldiers were filmed cheering as they killed a wounded, disarmed enemy lying in the street. Now, this is exactly the sort of savagery we attribute to our enemies. So what is this enlightened standard? How did the brutality of the Biblical era (e.g., the Amalekite genocide and God's repentance) become transformed into this strange institution we have today where compassion demands that we only kill people in certain ways? And how did we evolve to witness a broad, international push against killing people at all?

Then was then. Now is now. Some people alive now would rather have lived then, apparently.

The point of such strange customs is not one that makes sense to us in any visceral way. Intellectually, sure. I mean, I was eating at Chiang's in the U-District one night when I finally realized a legitimate purpose to eating lamb. If you're the Mongols breaking camp, do you take the lambs, who will slow down the journey, or leave them for potential enemies to find? Neither. You slaughter them and take what you can get. Sure as hell beats the modern custom of eating lamb because it's "sophisticated". I can understand either outlook on lamb intellectually, but I'm missing a visceral connection. I've never been a Mongol, or on the move like that. And I've never been part of those social strata that apparently need odd foods like lamb or veal or that stupid fish that poisons you to death if you don't cut and cook it right.

I would speculate, though, that the point of a death sentence had something to do with fear. Six of the ten commandments, under the Sanhedrin, carried the death penalty. And one that didn't? Well, the perp was supposed to have his hand cut off. These rules originated among a people steeped in superstition. They tied their fortune as a society, and as individuals, to adherence to what they believed God wanted. Psychologically, yes, it's a sublimation of primal bloodlust, and in that context, the point of it is whatever the people at the time thought the point was. Maybe they really believed God would harm them if they didn't kill someone for honoring the Sabbath. Or maybe they were just a bunch of bloodthirsty bastards. Given the fact that they were human, I'd say it's probably a mix of the two.

I forget who the original author is. I mean, it's traditional, but you know how that goes. Anyway, I picked it up years ago from Idries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1993):

One day Jesus, the son of Mary, while a child, was fashioning small birds out of clay. Some other youngsters who could not do so ran oto the elders and told them, with many complaints. The elders said, "This work cannot be allowed on the Sabbath," for it was a Saturday.

Accordingly they went to the pool where the Son of Mary was sitting and asked him where his birds were. For an answer he pointed to the birds which had been fashioned: and they flew away.

"Making birds which fly is impossible, therefore it cannot be a breaking of the Sabbath," said one elder.

"I would learn this art," said another.

"This is no art, it is but deception," said a third.

So the Sabbath was not broken, the art could not be taught. As for deception, the elders as well as the children had deceived themselves, because they did not know what the object of the fashioning of the birds was.

The reason for doing no work on Saturday had been forgotten. The knowledge of what is a deception and what is not was imperfect to those elders. The beginning of art and the end of action was unknown to them ....​

(Nine years. It's been nine years since I pulled that one out. Damn. I'm not sure whether I'm impressed or frightened.)

 

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Half a page, Tiassa?

 

Love is a beautiful thing

Now you drink whiskey like it was water.
And you slug down NyQuil like it was a glass of lemonade.
You drink that rot-gut whiskey like it was water.
And you still drink that NyQuil—wake up woman!—cough syrup like a glass of lemonade.

You know, I regret the day I wrapped my
Skinny legs around your fat butt,
Because that was about 375 pounds of the
Biggest stinkin' mistake I sure ever made.

And one more thing honey:

Roberta ... roll over.
Honey, I got somethin' down here I want you to see,
Roberta ... wake up.
C'mon, honey, roll over.
'Cause I got somethin' down here—
I got somethin' down here I want you to see.

Oh my God!

Your white go-go boots are scuffin' up the linin' on the waterbed again.
And you gotta get your big,
Freaky,
Furry,
Frantic,
Look-so-fine-walkin'-down-the-street-like-
Two-great-big-watermelons-hooked-up-in-time-
To-the-paint-shaker-of-destiny-playing-the-
Drum-beat-to-Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida-in-those-
Wet-look-hot-pants-incoming-large-unidentified-object-on-the-street
Legs—mmm-mmm!—
Off of me.

Love is a beautiful thing.

(Rev. Billy C. Wirtz)​

 

Fuck you. I'll deal with that when I'm sober.

 

Reminds me of Cummings. Aren't sure why....I'll work through that tomorrow.

 

Impressed or frightened. I wouldn't have been either. Might have held on to something that long, might not. And if I had, might not have bothered to reiterate. Certainly no mind to elucidate. This place is flatulence.

Right. Cummings. Had to say what he had to say. Short 'n sweet. Thinking the only thing which gets in the way of you is you.
Same as everyone else. Only a matter of degree, yes?

 

Myth and superstition, the same reasoning behind much of the Quran and every other scripture. Duh.

 

Theocracy. Any executions from this law in the past 2,000 years? How about in Israel?

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A "lesson" for their supposed turning away from faith. Which, of course, was bollocks.

 

Yes, but fear of what? Dying? But why would death cause fear? Because you would meet your maker and he would what? Kill you? Or worse, not kill you? I mean, you're already dead, what's worse? Suffering but not dying after dying? Seems like there is a lesson unlearned there.

 

Because most people live in secular countries in which the religious authorities do not have the right to take life.

 

Exactly.

 

You mean they ignore the Lords commands? Because He's what? Misled? Off the mark? Clueless? Anachronistic? Not worth the bother? Incompatible with civilised society? All of the above?

 

Or the humans that wrote it were wrong? Or that they weigh more heavily the humanitarian precepts of their religion?

 

I think religious people would like to follow "God's" words to the letter, but wiser and more reasonable minds have seemed to prevail (for now).

 

They only kill people for wise and reasonable reasons other than breaking the covenant with the Lord? Which changes what, exactly, besides the definition of wise and reasonable?

What is worse than breaking a covenant you made with the Lord?

 

I'm sure most Muslims would agree with that, which is why they like to stone rape victims to death.

 

Yeah they follow the non-Palestinian laws for some reason. The Quran does not prescribe stoning for anything.

 

It leaves it up to the perpetrator(s) to decide the means as well as the justification. How very efficient.