Timeline for Is stone age humanism possible?
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| Apr 12, 2021 at 20:35 | history | edited | user2352714 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
typo
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| Apr 12, 2021 at 13:31 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | @Joshua There's an oral component to the text which states that the threefold repetition means three different things. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 13:18 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 13:16 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | 3/3 thousands of people of this and a multitude of other detail, and also to convince them that it's been that way all along, how gullible, suggestible and unintelligent would those people have to be; and how manipulative, persuasive, and armed with suggestibility drugs would this theoretical council have to be? (And no, you can't use Fox News.) | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 13:16 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | 2/3 some council of elders got together and sold everyone on the thought that now everybody will make Kiddush on wine every Friday night, and they've been doing so all along or that the daily practice of "a sign tied on your hand and between your eyes" needs to be 1) black, 2) visibly square, 3) tied on the weaker arm 4) on the bicep, not on the hand 5) and over the hairline. Or indeed that the three textual repititions of "Don't seethe a kid in its mother's milk" refer to not 1) seething, 2) eating and 3) profiting from, a mixture of milk and meat. So again, in order to convince .. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 13:15 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | @ShadowRanger 1/3 RE: "contradictions" -- I offer an alternate hypothesis: multiple nuances are being provided, e.g. in the Ten Commandments in Exodus "Remember the Sabbath" refers to positive commemoration, while "Keep/guard the Sabbath" in Moses' retelling of the event refers to avoiding prohibited behaviors. But I think you're avoiding the main point: every single Jew today who accepts the authority of the written and oral components of the Torah agrees that this duality of Sabbath observance is -- and has always been -- the case. How did we get to this point? It beggars belief that .. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 20:04 | comment | added | user2352714 | @Ray People will always be inclined to propose mechanisms for natural phenomena, even if they don't have good evidence as to which one. For example, continental drift and its alternatives had nothing but circumstantial evidence for years until the mid-oceanic ridge was discovered. That didn't stop scientists (who are supposed to be the most objective among us) to support whatever zany mechanism they believed supported it. The difference between Oog and Ugh's hypothesis is a very big deal because it results in different behaviors being optimal for survival. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 20:02 | comment | added | user2352714 | @ZevSpitz Also the eating rules people make go back to what's relevant to the people making the observation at the time. Specific rules for healthy eating wasn't really a thing for most Abrahamic religions specifically because most people living at the time those rules were codified didn't have access to the high-fat diets and sedentary lifestyles seen in modern industrialized nations. People were more worried about starvation and famine than being overweight. And gluttony is still considered a sin in Judaism. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 20:01 | comment | added | user2352714 | @ZevSpitz The "too much detail" thing could easily be attributed to an overabundance of caution or incorrect hypotheses. I remember a book 11,000 Years Lost that featured a Stone Age tribe who had a taboo on eating fish because one of the tribe members choked on a fish bone and died, and they thought fish were cursed. While a work of fiction, the context in which it's told gives a good example of how a society can develop dietary taboos even if it's based on the wrong conclusions.... | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 18:11 | comment | added | Joshua | @Nosajimiki: You struck a bone. No cheeseburgers is a misread of the law. It says, you shall not seethe (or boil) a calf in its mother's milk. Even expanding this outwards to a ridiculous degree does not result in anything like no cheeseburgers. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 18:02 | comment | added | Ray | "There's no way to test either Oog's hypothesis that Vulcan did it or Ugh's hypothesis that it was due to natural processes deep below the Earth's crust". They do have the option of not believing either hypothesis until evidence presents itself, though. (The hypothesis of "You shouldn't live near that mountain. It catches on fire sometimes" could be believed in the meantime.) | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 17:31 | comment | added | ShadowRanger | @ZevSpitz: Yep. That's why, even edited, it contradicts itself in multiple places (e.g. the length of Noah's flood, the number of years in Egypt, the contents of the Ten Commandments, etc.). It's accumulating multiple versions of the narrative over time, and editing them back down imperfectly. There's also the issue of Judaism being much more centralized, and far less broadly known in detail among the adherents than the modern incarnation (when the Temple still existed, the average Jew was not expected to be literate, conscious of history beyond what the priesthood told them, etc.). | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 16:49 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | @ShadowRanger ... practice that nobody else remembers having done or mentioned previously. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 16:46 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | @ShadowRanger Off-topic, but could I sell you a story: your great-grandparents celebrated their honeymoon for two weeks in the Caribbean, and all their descendants (you included) have since commemorated the event with precisely the same daiquirí they drank there? Probably not. And if I claimed the narrative spanned 40 years, and happened to thousands of people; and the commemoration involves serious inconvenience and very specific requirements, and it's been done that way all along? Torah's development over hundreds of years entails getting everyone to agree on bits of narrative and ... | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 14:22 | comment | added | ShadowRanger | @ZevSpitz: "[P]art of Mosaic Law is that the relevant laws were delivered at a single point in time, not developed over an extended period." Just because that's what it says doesn't mean that actually happened. It's fairly clear the Torah was composed over the course of a few hundred years, by multiple authors, then edited down to the "revealed" text people use today. Also, the basis for "no cheeseburgers" is one of several laws that read more like admonitions against animal cruelty ("Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother's milk."), and got extended quite a bit. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 14:20 | comment | added | David R | @Nosajimiki Consider events like influenza hitting the pig farmers first. (Vector is birds transmitting to pigs which then transmits to humans.) Plagues have a far greater impact on religious beliefs than one family getting Trichinosis. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 14:10 | comment | added | workerjoe | A minor critique here on this point: "God stopping the sun in Joshua makes no sense in a universe that runs on heliocentricity." Doesn't that mean that modern people would be better able to recognize that miracle had a supernatural cause, compared to stone age people? For your stone age people, it might be easier to explain away as "just one of those things" like an eclipse which happens from time to time. For modern people, there's no way to rationalize the miracle away. | |
| Apr 11, 2021 at 11:52 | comment | added | Zev Spitz | @Nosajimiki Except that "kosher eating" includes far more detail than is necessary for health codes (no cheeseburgers, not even to sell to non-Jews?) and conversely provides very little relevant guidance to healthy eating ("kosher eating" doesn't include any mandate against heavy overeating, for example. In addition, part of Mosaic Law is that the relevant laws were delivered at a single point in time, not developed over an extended period. | |
| Apr 10, 2021 at 18:57 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | I've always said this about Mosaic Law. Kosher eating for example gets a surprising amount of modern health codes right even without understanding things like Trichinosis, Vibrio, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Kosher eating may be ascribed to the will of God, but deciding what things did and did not offend God to eat likely took a fair amount of scientific research. "God keeps blinding the children of the swineherders, clearly he does not want us eating pigs." | |
| Apr 10, 2021 at 18:26 | history | answered | user2352714 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |