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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

But literally all of those hacks feel like playing some stupid game with God. Like, if God is a truly omnipotent and all knowing, why would he/she care that you're tearing toilet paper on Shabbat or flipping a light switch. Equally, if you assume that this all powerful God really cares about this stuff, why would you assume they can be "tricked" by those hacks? Is the God all powerful and all knowing? Or literally so stupid that you can defeat the sacred logic with some simple hacks? Like the Eruv wire that wraps around Manhattan - do religious people honestly think that this "trick" works, in a spiritual sense? That they go to have their eternal judgement dispensed and God goes "yep, well done, you tricked me, I never specified the maximum diameter of the wire, and clearly you humans are too stupid to read context/intention in 'do no work' so yeah, it's all good, I have to let this one slide".

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There's no reason to follow the internal logic of a religion when trying to understand its workings. With Sabbath, observe how the rabbis decide on how to apply the rules. They know that their task is to keep the society functional, even if they use religious language to express it.

One basic reason a community will have some arbitrary rules: They make it expensive to be part of the community. They make it harder to fake adherence and profit from the group. All members of the community understand this intuitively even if they can't express it. So they welcome what looks like silly rules to the outsider.

I'm not religious anymore, but none of this strikes me as particularly compelling. I can take up the part of the theist here.

>Like, if God is a truly omnipotent and all knowing, why would he/she care that you're tearing toilet paper on Shabbat or flipping a light switch.

Because god prohibited these things.

>Equally, if you assume that this all powerful God really cares about this stuff, why would you assume they can be "tricked" by those hacks?

Because they permitted doing it that way.

>Is the God all powerful and all knowing? Or literally so stupid that you can defeat the sacred logic with some simple hacks?

God is all powerful and all knowing and the things they prohibited are prohibited and the things they didn't aren't.

>Like the Eruv wire that wraps around Manhattan - do religious people honestly think that this "trick" works, in a spiritual sense?

Loaded question, but short answer is yes. I think you should read this article (https://www.halachipedia.com/index.php?title=Introduction_to...). The eruv is to get around a rabbinic prohibition, not a divine one. It's also not accepted by everyone as a valid technicality; my rabbi would carry in nothing less than a walled city.

>That they go to have their eternal judgement dispensed and God goes "yep, well done, you tricked me, I never specified the maximum diameter of the wire, and clearly you humans are too stupid to read context/intention in 'do no work' so yeah, it's all good, I have to let this one slide".

No you go to your eternal judgement and god goes "good job you never violated any of my commandments".

Right, some good arguments here. If you don't mind, to continue the discussion a bit further:

>>Because god prohibited these things.

But God didn't, at least not explicitly. The specific instruction is to "do no work on Shabbat". The interpretation is human. I think(and of course Rabbis disagree) that interpreting "flipping the light switch" as work is NOT what God meant, it feels almost like an insult to intelligence to interpret it this way. There is an intention behind it, and I think the intention is more important than trying to be as literal as physically possible. After all doing literally anything is "work" in the sense that there is physical activity happening, you are burning oxygen just breathing, walking creates sound and talking moves the air about - it's all "work" in the physical sense. Why is flipping a switch special? I know the answer to this - because religious authorities have decided that's the case.

But that loops back to the original point - God didn't decide this. Rabbis did.

It's like Muslims are prohibited from consuming alcohol and if we accept that this is a divine restriction, we can still discuss what it actually means for us humans. Some interpretatioms say that Muslims shouldn't drink alcohol because the intention here is to prevent inebriation. But cooking with alcohol is fine because it doesn't lead to inebriation. Some other teachings say that all alcohol is bad. Those teachings conveniently ignore that alcohol is in everything(your average loaf of bread contains up to 2% alcohol by volume, purely due to yeast fermentation), but dogma is more important than reality.

So yes, I think I stand by what I said initially - all of this feels like a game, with some really crazy rules. Play according to the rules and you get eternal salvation. Don't question the rules.

>The specific instruction is to "do no work on Shabbat". The interpretation is human.

This is a good point, but I think orthodox judaism wouldn't say that the interpretation is human. In orthodox judaism, the interpretation of biblical commandments is usually assumed to be oral tradition from god. There are also rabbinic decrees, but these are generally treated with something approximating the force of a biblical command because there's also a biblical command to follow the rulings of the rabbis.

>I think(and of course Rabbis disagree) that interpreting "flipping the light switch" as work is NOT what God meant, it feels almost like an insult to intelligence to interpret it this way. There is an intention behind it, and I think the intention is more important than trying to be as literal as physically possible.

This is speaking like you're not obligated to fulfill the commandments. That's axiom one. Once we have that down, the obvious next question is "what are the commandments." Asking "what is the spirit of the commandments and when can I violate them" is wrong because the answer in orthodox judaism is that you can never violate them. You can make an orthodox argument that electricity should be allowed, the prohibition is definitely rather unbased in actual law imo. But that wouldn't be because it's ok in the spirit of the law, it would be because the law permits it.

>So yes, I think I stand by what I said initially - all of this feels like a game, with some really crazy rules. Play according to the rules and you get eternal salvation. Don't question the rules.

I think I can agree with this. Most of the rules do in fact feel like dumb contrived bullshit. If you actually look at the categories for work on the sabbath it's very clearly stuff that a worker in the BCEs would think is work; lighting fires, doing planting and harvesting, carrying stuff, weaving, making bread, it's all very strange and disjointed from modern reality. And this is supposedly divine decree too, so it's not even the work of ancient rabbis, supposedly.

> I think(and of course Rabbis disagree) that interpreting "flipping the light switch" as work is NOT what God meant

It's amazing that people can just come out and say "I know what the God meant, while people who lived this tradition for thousands of years, carried it over several continents and kept it alive through wars, plagues, genocides, raise and ruin of empires - they all don't know what they're talking about". It certainly is gutsy.

The thing is, there's only two ways to know things, in general. One is experience it yourself - in this case, you go to God, ask Him (or Her, or Them, whatever works for you) what is the meaning of that, get an answer and live the rest of your life according to it (or ignore it if you like, your choice, free will and stuff). Another is trust the relevant authorities - and in this case, those are the rabbis. If you are interested in Judaic tradition, then there's no Judaic tradition outside the rabbis. Of course, inside there's a lot of variety, but if you discard the rabbis, then you've got no Judaism. Whatever is left is not based on Judaic tradition anymore, and then one would have to ask - what exactly is it based on? Why would you believe anything in those texts at all or put any importance into it? Of course, you don't have to - but then the question of what's the right thing to do on Shabbat is moot - you do whatever you like (well, excluding the obvious things like murdering people etc.) and it's fine.

>>It's amazing that people can just come out and say "I know what the God meant, while people who lived this tradition for thousands of years, carried it over several continents and kept it alive through wars, plagues, genocides, raise and ruin of empires - they all don't know what they're talking about". It certainly is gutsy.

I'm just amazed that all of the thousands of years of experience, of wars famines struggle, of tradition of practice of worship of deep religious study was required to come up with a conclusion that somehow flipping a light switch is work. I'm not saying I know better, after all I'm not a follower of this religion, but this article was very specifically about a way to avoid pressing buttons because once again, all of those thousands of years of tradition decided that pressing buttons is work. Ok, cool, I'd like to point out that it doesn't make any sense to me. But then I forgot that religion doesn't have to make any sense to exist.

It's not "work" in the meaning you understand work. You're reading a fourth or fifth party translation of the actual tradition, with the terminology dumbed down to the level that makes it accessible to the layman. It's like reading quantum mechanics book and laughing about how stupid those physicists are thinking quarks have colors and flavors. I mean, do they really imagine they could taste a quark? Surely doesn't make any sense!

> I'd like to point out that it doesn't make any sense to me

It wouldn't. At least until you actually learn the framework and understand the terminology and the rules of it. And it's not supposed to make sense you you anyway - it's not made for you.

Fair enough.

> if you assume that this all powerful God really cares about this stuff

Nobody knows what God "cares" about, nor even if "caring" is something God does at all, in a sense that humans do it. It's like comparing human to CPU by clock frequency - these are different things, and clock frequency is a useable measure for a CPU (at least certain designs of CPUs) but quite useless if you want to talk about a human. You can't just bring terminology from one area onto another and expect it automatically to make sense.

> Is the God all powerful and all knowing?

Yes.

> Or literally so stupid that you can defeat the sacred logic

Why you think it's "defeating" anything? God is not a CTF contest. You framing it as "defeat" is just your framing, but it's not how Jews see it - they see it as "preserving", not "defeating".

> do religious people honestly think that this "trick" works, in a spiritual sense?

What you mean by "works"? It certainly works for them. It may not work for you, but if you are neither an observant Jew nor God, who cares if it works for you or not?

>>What you mean by "works"?

Works as in - they believe that they go for their eternal judgement and God says "I clearly said 'do no work' and you thought that by wrapping an entire city in a piece of wire you can safely ignore my commandment".

I know it's pointless to apply logic to religion, but how far could you stretch that? Could you wrap an entire country in wire and claim it still have the same effect? An entire continent? The entire planet?

>> who cares if it works for you or not?

I understand you're being flippant, but come on. I'm just asking if religious people think that such a simple "trick" is really going to be accepted by God as compliant with holy commandments. I can see the answer is clearly yes.

> Works as in - they believe that they go for their eternal judgement and God says "I clearly said 'do no work' and you thought that by wrapping an entire city in a piece of wire you can safely ignore my commandment".

No, that's not what they believe - they're not ignoring the commandment. They are fulfilling it in accordance with the rules given to them by God and passed down by tradition.

> Could you wrap an entire country in wire and claim it still have the same effect

I don't know, maybe - if an authority in the Jewish law declares it ok, then those who follow that authority would consider it OK. That's exactly how most Western law systems work too. If you want to know if something is lawful, you ask a lawyer. If lawyers disagree, they go to SCOTUS. If SCOTUS decides certain way, then the law is this way. Well, maybe a bit different since Jews have no SCOTUS (then called Sanhedrin) anymore, so if rabbis disagree, they just disagree and their followers do different things.

> I understand you're being flippant

No, really I am not. You try to apply your criteria to the environment and the culture of which you don't know the laws, the customs, the motivations and the history, and you complain it doesn't work for you and you don't understand it. It's like coming to somebody's house, trying on their shoes and complaining they don't fit. Well duh, it's not your shoes, why would you expect them to fit?! For people that accept this culture, it works, if you're not part of it - it doesn't, but that's fine. It's not some criticism of you, it's just not meant to work in way you think it is meant.

> I'm just asking if religious people think that such a simple "trick" is really going to be accepted by God

Religious people don't think it's a "trick". You think it's a "trick" but it's your definition, so asking what they think about it is pointless - they don't think in the terms you do.

Try to think of the Torah -- God's literal word, to Orthodox Jews -- as the Constitution, and rabbinical scholars throughout the generations as the Supreme Court.

The Torah prohibits work on Shabbat, but only points out a few instances in the broadest terms. One of those is to not carry items "between domains", directly referenced in Exodus and Jerimiah, but again only a single passage in each instance. This was expanded upon in Talmudic works, which include an explanation of what exactly constitutes a public domain.

The eruv is not a loophole to "fool God". The eruv is a means to adjust the technical (or legal) definition of a public domain.

When one ensures that a community has a functioning eruv, that itself is part of Shabbat observance.

You are re-visiting questions posed by a famous 2nd temple period rabbi from the Galilee which ultimately spawned a radical offshoot sect that exists to this very day. ;)

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