Now, if you want to keep kosher, you have to filter your New York City water, because there are microscopic crustaceans in the water. (source)
I fail to understand how Jews and Muslims can believe that an all powerful creator of heaven and earth gives a shit if you eat ham or chop off a piece of a baby boy’s dick — and christians think that the same omniscient and omnipotent dude cares if you jack off.
Free yourselves from this mindless mental slavery. Get this through your head: There is no god, and if there is, there’s no way he is this fucking petty… and on the off chance that he does exist, and he is really that small and petty, he does not deserve to be invited over for a beer, let alone worshipped.
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The Legal Satyricon 
I blew my drink all over my keyboard. :-)
If I was a god, I would make my subjects follow a bunch of pointless rules exclusively for my entertainment.
I would forbid pre-marital sex and implant an insatiable sex drive.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that God would be like that because I would be like that. After all, God made us in His image (if you believe in that sort of thing).
[…] Randazza reacts to this: By: Rabbi Genack […]
“Now, if you want to keep kosher, you have to filter your New York City water, because there are microscopic crustaceans in the water.”
So, now, did all the Jews who died before this was discovered go to Hell? That sucks.
All those rules probably once had a purpose that had nothing to do with religion. 5000 years ago they didn’t know about trichinosis. They just noticed that people who ate pigs often got sick and died. So, hey, don’t eat ’em.
Judaism and Islam are both desert religions. There’s lots of sand in the desert. Maybe uncircumcised men tended to get sand in their peckers and it would get infected. Or something.
It was probably only later that these taboos got attributed to the voice of the almighty.
“Follow the gourd!” “No, follow the sandal!”
Actually, the avoiding-trichinosis thing was a lucky byproduct of the kosher rules. The impetus behind the rules is a compromise between an ideal — compassion to all living beings, expressed most fully as total vegetarianism (or perhaps even veganism) — and the reality of a population that derives its entire well-being from farming sheep and cattle. The Voices of God would prefer that people not eat *any* animals, but that just won’t fly; so the VoGs say, “Fine, fine. Let’s at least make it a rule that they can’t eat *some* animals.” And they fix on pigs, which are less prevalent anyway — and they also eat pretty much any old garbage, including human flesh (Mr. Wu knows all about that), so best to avoid them anyway.
And then they say for the animals you *can* eat, you have to kill them politely, after a nice, candle-lit dinner, so as not to be cruel.
No idea how they came to ban shellfish and bottom-feeders, but it may be analogous to pigs as garbage-eaters.
Now Jews will be stuck between the rock of drinking non kosher, but free tap water and the hard place of actually paying for bottled water.
Hey, c’mon…
or a Brita filter.
Alan Watts argues for the redefinition of our notion of god. The big influence on Watts was Chesterton, who argued that it is not a simple coincidence that cosmic and comic sound very similar. The best thing i have heard on redefining god is that, in terms of Christian mythology, the most serious being in the universe is the devil, Satan.
If you find a copy of Watts’s Game Theory of Ethics it is well worth listening to.
Ahhhh….philosophical views on life.