There's nothing less rational than 'God said it so its true.' why on earth should marking your skin be forbidden?
You talk about intellectual basis, what basis is there for believing there is any merit whatsoever in a ruling that says homosexuals should be stoned to death?(even if you cop out and say no one should really follow it).
What intellectual basis is there to believe eating shellfish is wrong? They're certainly alot healthier to eat than red meat, and most have less capacity of pain/consciousness than cows do.
Even if there are good reasons for all those things, the fact god said it or not would only be ancillary to those good reasons. If god said owning slaves is okay does that make it right?
I'll concede that just because someone believes in god, doesn't make them stupid in every other area, but it is a stupid belief, so I was just using a shorthand by saying that believing stupid beliefs is stupid. Sorry for not being clearer.
Hindu's can't be right about there being millions of gods, and Jews being right about their only being one god at the same time. So one has to be wrong, and both could be wrong.
Even you would have to admit, if Jews are right, hindus must be wrong. So how can you prove theres Jehovah any more than Vishnu? If you can't it seems stupid to believe one over the other.
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G-d does care about those things, which is why they're mentioned in the Torah, and the Gemara, and in Halachic sources.
Weak willed individuals? what a silly assumption.
yeah, cause theres nothing stronger willed than blindly following rules that don't have any rational basis just because a magic super being told you to.
If you disagree please provide some rational for some of the rules in the Torah, especially leviticus, that doesn't involve "god said it/god cares about it so it matters". quick breakdown.
1. whats gods reason for forbidding eating shelfish?
2. whats gods reason for saying men who sleep with men should be stoned?
3. whats gods reason for forbidding tattoos?
If there aren't reasons, or you claim to not know the reason, then I'll happily stand by my claim that jews are being irrational for following those rules without good reason.
also I never said i was smarter than anyone, or that i know something they don't, i just called them stupid for believing things i think are stupid. I don't believe its a question of knowledge. I don't know anything any religious person doesn't already know, i just come to a different conclusion.
There are plenty of religious people who can kick my ass at math, or business, or playing the guitar, but its not really relevant because im just talking about how stupid belief in immoral supernatural beings are that you can't prove exist.
edit : as a matter of fact, the whole "newton/whoever believed in god, and they're smarter than you so they're right" argument is really piss poor. I can find plenty of smart atheists to throw into the argument, I can find stats showing the smarter people are the more likely they are to be atheist, but it doesnt fucking matter because its a weak fucking argument of authority that does nothing to address claims of fact..
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The real basis as to why we keep arguing over the same topic is because you don't understand that G-d created the world. Since you don't understand that, everything that follows is a continuation of that same argument in different forms.
Marking skin is forbidden because there's a passage in the Torah that forbids doing it, and mentions the idol worshipers as having a similar practice. Since we are forbidden to take on their ways, we cant do that.
There is an intellectual basis for belief. For instance, if someone were to ask" how did we get here"?
The question would have different answers in different eras. Up to about the fifties people would have said the universe was always here in its current form. Aristotle would have said that the universe exists in different forms in different stages, that the universe is in a stage now and had another one precede it, and will have others in the future.
The religious answer is that G-d created the world.
With the discovery of background radiation and red shifting, we now know the world started at some point, so the theory of the universe being immortal is wrong. Both theories remaining claim the world started at some central point in time and that the universe had a beginning. With the theory of multiple different forms of the world, you will not have an answer as to what made it start. Any answer I have heard on this topic has been a cop out, and believe you me I searched. A thermodynamic principle states that any reaction comes from a preceding action and nothing can start itself. So in my view the nonreligious answer is very lacking.
Why is shellfish not kosher? You asked....
It is not a health issue. If it was G-d would have commanded us to be healthy. Its a spiritual issue. I have not delved into this topic at length before but from the type of books that address this issue (Mussar books) they basically following these laws make us holier people, and G-d wants us to be holy. Eating certain foods or engaging in certain acts would introduce an element of debasement into our souls.
You have an issue with slave ownership too it seems, but you probably don't understand a bit of it. Can you name any laws pertaining to slave ownership? Ill give you a brief summary of the laws as I understand them.
Basically there were a few reasons people would be sold into slavery. Keep in mind that this isn't the type of slavery that occurred in the American South. One was if a family was destitute to the point at which they could not dower their daughter. What they would do is sell her to another family that was well off who had a son. When both were old enough and assuming they consented, they would get married with the inlaws of the destitute family paying for all the expenses. Now what type of "slavery" is this if the girl would become part of the family? Its essentially a form of kindness for G-d to have created this method of marriage. The laws that are in there regarding slavery? They're there to perserve the girls dignity because she doesn't have her biological parents looking after her.
Whats another reason to sell a person into slavery? If a person was a thief, and stole more then they could repay, they will work to repay their debt to the person they stole from. There isn't to my knowledge any form of jail in a Torah society. The work is supposed to reform the person in servitude. The laws in relation to slavery exist because a person who was just sold to work off their thievery would otherwise be subject to abuse, and the Torah is concerned with preventing abuse to a thief.
Why do you not know this? Its because you read the Bible, and took it at face value when its in fact very cryptic. The Gemara explains it all but you never read it so you would think "an eye for an eye" means we poke out eyes (we don't). You cannot understand the Torah without the Gemara.
Another thing that would cloud your judgment of things is how "we see the world for the way we are". A chassidishe Rebbe once said that, and although I don't take stock in aphorisms much I agree with the premise of this. It applies to all people and strata of society very well, and very consistently. You see this when a person who says that people are driven with greed and understand that that person himself is greedy. So, examine yourself.
You ask if G-d saying something makes it right. Let me rephrase your question. Is Torah good because G-d said so or.....I forgot the rest of the phrase. I understand what you are asking though, and here is my answer:
Since G-d is good, whatever he tells us to do is good. Good doesn't exist outside of that G-d says.
Stupid beliefs are stupid. You are right about that.What constitutes a stupid belief we are in conflict over. I might address this at another time, if you want to remind me.
You ask why monotheism is a more valid belief then polytheism. The shorthand explanation is from Yesodei HaTorah written by the Rambam. I will paraphrase heavily. A polytheistic belief system would require gods that are distinct from one another. Since they are distinct they would have to exist outside of one another and take up physical space. If they take up space then they have the limitations of all other forms of matter i.e. melting, and boiling points. If they have those limitations, then how could they be gods if anything thats a god is supposed to have unlimited power? They would be subservient to chemical processes more powerful then they!
Only G-d who is not physical could be unlimited.
yeah, cause theres nothing stronger willed than blindly following rules that don't have any rational basis just because a magic super being told you to.
Thats your quote.
I agree. Belief in G-d is silly. It makes much more sense to believe that the world started, created and formed itself billions of years ago and out of this development in a random corner of a universe created an area perfectly suited for biological functions. Those biological functions got better and better by themselves and turned from prions to DNA and began splitting themselves until they formed many different types.
The primordial soup got progressively more complex and out of nowhere there was the Cambrian explosion that took unicellular microbes and made them multicellular. Along the way, Cambrian explosion invented DNA splitting in the form of sexual reproduction. Good job Cambrian.
Then the increasingly complex creatures formed ways to walk on land and presto land animals invented themselves over a few billion years. Some of them thought it was a better idea to drop this limb regeneration thing, and get hair and milk instead so they turned into mammals.They got bigger and bigger until a meteor came out of nowhere and killed them. Only some of them because an asteroid traveling thousands of miles an hour the size of Manhattan can't bother to kill mammals. Only big lizards.
Because of the weather changes caused by this asteroid or fuck knows the theory sounds better this way the world became cold, and.........
???????
Then some of the puppies are all like, This sucks, were going back into the water. Peace out. They turned into dolphins, otters, and whales. How did they speciate like that? They punctuated equilibriumed themselves. That's how. Don't like punctuated equilibrium? Then you're an idiot. Punctuated equilibrium is when evolution doesn't work as a theory and evolution is when punctuated equilibrium doesn't work. This is also how tenure is preserved for totally making bullshit up as you go along.
So you have the father of all great apes running around. He is somehow also in Borneo. He decides that this prehensiled tail is cool and all, but wants to take it to the next level. He gets himself an opposible thumb by praying to Darwin, and begins working with simple tools.
But he is slow so it takes millions of years to LEARN TO USE A TOOL. This becomes important later on. One form of great ape is all like I wanna move outta here, so he runs out of the Great Ape family on two feet. So as he leaves the savannah, or the forest. It doesn't matter because both theories have enough knockout power on the other. Really, the facts don't matter so much because the story is so cool. Thats why conflicting evidence is "proof" of anything.
So, this new ape walks out into the world and settles it. He decides the birth of babies is not nearly painful enough for the womenfolk and gradually introduces it anyway. Now you might wonder how such a stupid and dangerous method of birthing would be an advantage over the previous method. The answer is shut the fuck up, its evolution.
One ape explodes into intelligence faster then all the others. In an impossibly short amount of time, it figures out how to talk and do all other sorts of things in 40,000 years, even though it took MILLIONS OF YEARS TO LEARN TO USE A TOOL (see above) and then it decides to go to Europe. The Neanderthals that live in Europe are bigger, stronger, smarter and learned to use tools earlier then the newcomers not to mention its more settled and don't have those pesky birth control canal problems. The newcomer says "survival of the fittest" then proceeds to take over Europe without intermating with the Neanderthals at all. They then decided to fling poo at logic itself.
They left Africa in one migration, or many migrations, or whatever, its all made up anyways and live alongside cromagnons in Israel, and Homo erectus in China because those guys didn't do the whole evolution thing.
Meanwhile, the other great apes think they're cool enough and see no reason to develop speech or awareness of the past or whatever. It somehow doesn't help them.
The new ape called himself homo-erectus-erectus and started inventing society, language, and farming with the brain that evolved in the impossibly short amount of time and had no reason to develop so quickly, or in such a complex manner that it would eventually invent calculus.
They then invented writing language and other stuff because thats what animals do when they're bored. Eventually, they began to wonder how it all began, which leads us to the present day.
Yeah, one of those theories is for stupid people alright.
Whats really weak-willed is believing in a bunch of bullshit because doing so absolves you of moral principles you don't want to follow.
I answered your shellfish, homosexuality, and tattoo answer above with the G-d wants us to be holy people answer and I will add that the reasons are out there, you just don't know them. You also don't know how your toaster works, but you still use it. You don't disbelieve your toaster because you don't know the mechanics behind it.
There are a lot of things a religious person knows that you don't. See above for a few examples.
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