Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/13/theres-a-hidden-wire-stretch.html
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Thanks for reaffirming my atheism, really. Next up the magic dude in the sky is taking your questions…
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oh my gosh that is SO COOL.
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For the record, that’s $100,000 that isn’t being spent on food for the homeless. Good job, religious guys!
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Because god is a lawyer.
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Boy, if this isn’t a sign of mental illness spread like a virus, I don’t know what is.
Yes, by putting a wire above a city you are fooling the supposed creator of the universe.
Got it. Good job. This makes total sense that you a human, has pulled the wool over an omnipotent, omniscient entity that has no idea how you were able to craft such a clever loophole and sure you’ve evaded sure and swift punishment in the afterlife because of it.
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Gives new meaning to the word “loophole”
and to be clear this sh!t is why we can’t have nice things like jetpacks and moonbases and limitless energy, peace, love and understanding: we are too primitive to get beyond this nonsense (and try to weasel out of it). Uh, good job cheating on your holy beliefs?
(edit - clicked on anonymous86’s link to learn that ‘eruv’ is the Hebrew word for “loophole” lol! derp)
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In practice the people who promise things like jetpacks and limitless energy usually have a lot more in common with religious evangelists than mainstream scientists or engineers.
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the wires, which are inspected by a rabbi every Thursday before dawn
???
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charity isn’t a zero sum game.
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Personally, this is one of those crazy things that makes NYC great. It’s as wonderful as the world’s largest drip graffito with the added wonder of thousands of years of tradition built in.
In case you were wondering;
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The amount of money a given group of people has IS a zero sum game.
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I can imagine an alt headline for this on a purely fictional news program :
CABAL OF NY JEWS CONSPIRES TO INSTALL SECRET WIRES OVER CITY!
Host: “What are they hiding? Now for a strictly factual look at this, we go to an expert.”
Expert: “We shouldn’t discount the possibility that these wires may be part of a plot to turn gentiles gay.”
Host: “Fascinating! But how will this influence chemtrail absorbtion?”
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I actually find this story beautiful and very American.
Every religion and every culture seem ridiculous when viewed by outsiders. I’m sure someone from another culture looking at a baseball game where everyone cheers because some guy hit a ball looks crazy. Sports, ComicCon, Religions, every culture does stuff that makes more sense if you really understand it, but at first glance means very little.
Search “Eruv” on Amazon and you’ll see multiple books written on the subject, some hundreds of pages long. This is a hugely complex area of Jewish law. Obviously if it were just a “loophole to fool God”, most religious people would not do it. The video we watched is just 2 minutes long, obviously they heavily simplified their explanation.
What’s great about America as that while the government doesn’t “support” any religion (the maintenance is paid by the Jewish people who use it not the government). The government enables to the extent possible every culture and community to do whatever they need to do, whether it’s to put up a tiny wire around the city or have a big festival or parade. It’s just another example of the peaceful coexistence that makes America work.
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I think not.
I’m no expert (nor Jewish), but it seems to me that putting a wire above the city reinforces the community of co-religionists. Which is what religion is supposed to do.
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But the group isn’t fixed in size. They move to New York, they move away from New York. They marry, they have kids, they die. They consider some forms of group identity to be important, they consider other forms of group identity to be idiotic and meaningless,
I’m not Jewish. But I’ve been led to understand that “living within Jewish Law” is a really important facet of Judaism-- and even using the so called loopholes constitutes a sort of engagement with the law that god finds admirable.
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It is just like bleeping curse words on TV. Everyone knows what you are saying, but the bleeping shows that you acquiesce to the rule, and that you know those words aren’t allowed.
And if you take the view that the point of that carrying things is not innately a sin, but that the rules of the Sabbath are to re-affirm your commitment to god then putting up, inspecting, and maintaing the wires, and respecting the boundaries they denote might be just as good. That would also explain why it doesn’t work to do the logical equivalent thing of creating a small loop and saying that since the surface of the earth is a sphere, you can designate which side is “outside”.
Yes, its wacky. It isn’t particularly more wacky that plenty of other symbolic things humans do, and that is certainly not restricted to religion.
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Without reading the story, I would have guessed it was going into Trump Tower and Obama put it there.
Not really. I would have to be batshit delusional to think something like that.
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