For any extended cable run, regular visual inspection from trained personnel is always a good thing.
Spots any faults and problems before they occur. I was more thinking like a “Well, as it’s there…”
That would make sense. Interesting stuff, this sort of thing. 
Who knew.
I wear a flannel and jeans, grow my beard out, and keep my hair cut short enough to disguise the fact that there’s not even enough there for me to comb. I have no clue what hoas are. I used to dress up for work more often, when meeting directly with clients, but I wouldn’t want to do that on a daily basis. I’m an R&D guy, so not only do people not want to watch me work, but if I do a good enough job, it’s like I was never even there.
But you’re right, this is a fascinating topic, and more importantly, it’s no more or less ridiculous than anything other religions do.
[quote=“micah, post:68, topic:96891, full:true”]
But synagogues and festive meals are much more accessible when you can bring your children in a stroller, and carry your house key in your pocket, and bring along a dish for the potluck. None of which you can do without an eruv if you abide by certain Jewish laws. [/quote]
A stroller? A house key? What decadent and Godless modernistic evil in the name of “accessibility” is this? Next you’ll be saying that Hasids dressing in something other than the fine clothing of the anti-Semitic 19th-century Polish nobility is an appropriate way to express their Judaism.
I’m sorry, but if you* want people to come to their house you’ll have to leave your door unlocked for approx. 24 hrs. If you want them to bring the kids, they’ll either carry them or have them walk if they’re old enough to do so. And you’ll doing all the cooking, because none of your guests are doing the work of carrying a casserole dish through the streets on a Friday night. That’s how a truly pious person would abide by certain Jewish laws.
Unless, of course, you find a way to circumvent those religious laws with an appropriately silly loophole. I’m cool with that, as long as people are honest about what it is.
[quote=“micah, post:68, topic:96891, full:true”]
Bottom lines: (1) it’s not that simple, and (2) there are real, thinking people who care a lot about this stuff and whose lives are actually impacted by it.[/quote]
I agree with you, especially if you’re using the word “stuff” in the sense of “stuff and nonsense.” If I’m going to waste my time on fandom activities (and goodness knows I do), there are plenty of others that don’t impact my life to this degree.
[* in the sense of “one” rather than you in particular – no idea if you’re even Jewish]
Does he actually ever say that? He thinks they’re wrong, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he thinks they’re stupid. Rather, he seems frustrated that intelligent people continue to believe what he considers to be manifest nonsense.
Clunking, ham-fisted and embarrassing, certainly, but extreme?
Predates electricity?
Or other humans do.
ahh, that’s a good point. : )
Richard Dawkins has been known to hang outside of Brises eating non-kosher hotdogs with ketchup.
You must be talking about Dawkins. He is somewhat extreme in certain senses, for example lumping in harmless adherents to a religion with the fundies and militants as equally culpable for the negative effects. He also goes out of his way to avoid discussing the positive effects of religion and organised religion (e.g community, comfort, driver of intellectual discourse, etc.).
The “brights” thing is also a bit embarrassing to me as an atheist in that it is an extreme characterisation that does imply the mental inferiority of believers (to imply that your typical Jesuit priest or high-level Talmudic scholar is not bright is ridiculous).
That said, I wouldn’t characterise him as an atheist version of a religious extremist. His views are grounded in reason and empirical evidence, not superstition and fantasy. Most of his frustration is that his debates are with intelligent people who none-the-less base their arguments in the latter.
And to me that’s the test of religious extremism; the inability to understand that if other people disagree with you that doesn’t make their views “manifest nonsense”. It means there is something you are not understanding.
Now. As a what if: a millennia from now it’s too dangerous to routinely physically inspect the wire, so the word is sent, in a symbolic act to remind the community of a time when rabbis would actually walk the entire loop.
Yes, but he calls them delusional, and then acts like it’s his duty to save them from themselves.
Not entirely fair:
In his new book, Dawkins relates for the first time the full story of his schoolboy break-out as an atheist. In the chapel at Oundle, he helped lead a small insurgency of boys who refused to kneel. The school’s headmaster was in Oxford on the day that the young Dawkins took his university entrance exam and drove him back. During this lift, Dawkins writes, the headmaster ‘discreetly raised the subject of my rebellion against Christianity. It was a revelation,’ he says, ‘to talk to a decent, humane, intelligent Christian, embodying Anglicanism at its tolerant best.’
I ask him about this. ‘I’m kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition,’ he admits, ‘for its benign tolerance. I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do… I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.’ Would he ever go into a church? ‘Well yes, maybe I would.’
But at this point he turns it back around again. I try to clarify my own views to him. ‘You would feel deprived if there weren’t any churches?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ I respond. He mulls this before replying. ‘I would feel deprived in the same spirit of the English cricket match that I mentioned, that is close to my heart. Yes, I would feel a loss there. I would feel an aesthetic loss. I would miss church bells, that kind of thing.’
And what about the fear of losing the tradition? ‘Yes. I sort of understand that. I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that, I don’t fret about that at all, I’m quite happy about that. But I think I share your Anglican nostalgia, especially when you look at the competition.’
— Interview in The Spectator, September 2013.
No. Religious extremism is the inability to understand that you have no right to suppress views you regard as manifest nonsense.
You can get a special dispensation for that.
Do frog puns count as fish puns?
Which is one of the aspects that makes Dawkins-style Atheism to be basically Christianity Without Jesus; how else to describe the mindset of “other people need to be saved from making the wrong choice that I personally believe will destroy them” that so typifies the evangelical atheist?
Mack Truck Theology without the theology.
The problem is that he’s more known for quotes like this on the topic (Edinburgh in 2014):
“What I do think about the difference, and let’s leave out Muslims specifically, but the difference between moderate religious people and extremist fundamentalists is that although of course it’s only a tiny minority of any sect which is ever going to get violent or horrible, there is a sense in which the moderate, nice religious people — nice Christians, nice Muslims — make the world safe for extremists.”
That last bit is not helpful to those of us who respect him and want to hold him up as a voice of reason.
I think this is exactly how things develop. And I want to make a more general point. Personally I regard myself as a rational nontheist. I derive considerable comfort from the thought that when I am dead that’s it, and that I don’t have any agreement with any supernatural beings. But I am aware that this has roots in my own upbringing - my father is a rational nontheist, so was his father. There’s a sense in which my beliefs are conservative for my family tradition.
But on the level of things that interest me - and remembering I am not an academic and this is not a thesis - key to the development of humans as distinct from, say, pongids seems to be the capacity for abstract thought. The first big example of abstract thought is language; the second is mathematics. But there are other levels of abstraction. Treating a wire on poles as a symbolic city wall is such an example. To the people who are objecting that this is some kind of cheat I can only say, the gradual changes and loosening of religious practice by abstraction seem more to me like progress. It’s undoing the more overt superstition while preserving a link to cultural roots.
I am fairly well up on the Bible, for instance, because I regard it as an important document of our shared culture. The latest generation probably are not very acquainted with it. But that means that they still have cultural prejudices but they do not necessarily know where they get them from. @bibliophile20’s observation about how people often adopt a “Christian” viewpoint unwittingly is, I think, relevant here.
If we don’t know history we are condemned to repeat it, and if we don’t understand the basis of our own culture we risk simply having prejudices which we regard as “rational”. Remembering where we came from and how we got here seems to me to be a good, and if that involves symbolic city walls (or carnivals for that matter) then we shouldn’t mock.
