71–80 of 214 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The letter was, they believe, the word of God. If God hadn't meant the loophole to be there then he would have used different words. The loophole is divine .
If the loophole seems to go directly against intended meaning, can you say it’s there?
I found a "mode" in an elevator in India that I have not seen anywhere else: if a destination floor number is highlighted, and you press it twice, it gets cancelled. I have used this magic power just once, when an obnoxious man got on and insisted on having a loud conversation on his phone. Since he wasn't paying attention, I double-tapped his floor number and made him skip. I happened to get off at the floor before…
One of the ideas thrown around for achieving the objective was to somehow get ahold of an elevator key, stop it, and hide in there until the building closed.
I don't know if they actually did that, but it would've been hilarious to see them pop out like a scoobie doo villain and jack into an ethernet port while the janitor has no idea what's going on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, when people feel that the tax code doesn’t represent the spirit of the law, they change the wording, likely they will amend it and put the same tax on Sumo Citruses as on other citruses. So the tax code and the Talmud are quite different animals. Second, I am pretty sure the Talmud is not so precise to the point of specifically mentioning pressing pressing buttons on an elevator. So the analogy kind of doesn’t…
Imagine if the US Code suddenly became fixed and holy. Now imagine you are thousands of years in the future. Congress is long gone and if you're lucky you might have some notes and stories about how the laws were enforced in the past. Naturally, the world has changed a lot since the text of the law became immutable. But who is to say how new things fit into the old framework? What about old contradictions that were n…
my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.
In Orthodox Judaism, the letter of the law typically is the spirit of the law. Not a perfect analogy, but think of the talmud as similar to the tax code. There are things that are black, things that are white and things that are gray. If the tax code said there's a 5% sales tax on tangerines, clementines, navel oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, I'm probably not gonna volunteer to pay taxes on my Sumo Citruses, because…
I would like to understand the reasoning behind the belief that even legal rules of divine origin would include mention of things human culture would have had no concept of, and human language no word for, in the time the rule was made — such that the rules would be "complete for all future time" rather than "those relevant as of the time of covenant."
Wouldn't even a god think it more optimal to hold off on telling us rules about e.g. which synthetic meats are kosher, until we invent such things?
It seems awfully suspicious to the validity of that interpretation, that there are plenty of specific/concrete prohibitions given amongst divine rulings, but of those, none are about things that were entirely mysterious at the time, written down "as spoken" without understanding, only able to be made sense of centuries/millennia later.
In fact — the Hebrew god is an intercessor god, not an absent god; don't they already "amend" their own previous rules whenever they communicate specific orders / demands / requirements to particular people? Does that not, by itself, disrupt the interpretation of the initial set of laws given being a perfect closed set, never to be updated, applicable to all future circumstances? Would a perfect body of divine law not already imply those orders / demands / requirements, such that there would be no need for further communication?
Wiki lists a "Riot mode", which is just amazing if it's a thing.
One time when working as a pentester, we were doing redteaming (read: breaking into target buildings, physically). Well, they were doing redteaming; I always wanted to, but never quite got the opportunity. One of the ideas thrown around for achieving the objective was to somehow get ahold of an elevator key, stop it, and hide in there until the building closed. I don't know if they actually did that, but it would've…
my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.
The prohibition is on doing work generally, with a specific prohibition on kindling a fire, which was quite a lot of work millennia ago. Does using a device that allows you to avoid walking up many flights of stairs really violate the spirit of a law prohibiting work on the sabbath?
The other workaround I had heard for this is to have a non-Jew hired specifically to stand in the elevator and push buttons on behalf of Jews on the sabbath. But they'd still have to speak the floor so the attendant would know what button to push, right?
If so, what if an elevator had basic voice recognition? Speaking the floor number to a machine is no more work than speaking it to an attendant, right?
Maybe this rule interpretation was originally made back when elevators generally had attendants and did require some expertise to operate (e.g. to stop at the right spots)? And then didn't get rolled back when it became essentially trivial?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If God didn't intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?"
"If God didn't intend for us to eat people, then why did he make them out of meat?"