Why are so many normal things considered a sin?

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Well, firstly, the belief that the laws of Ancient Palestine came from a divine spirit or some crock like that is a complete load of rubbish. It is an absolutely ignorant load of pig spit. The laws were made by what passed for a government in that culture, and they were every bit as fallible as any modern politician.

They really did try. In fact, they actually did a pretty good job of putting together a fairly logical code of law, and most of them actually make pretty good sense in the right context. If you actually read over Deuteronomy and Leviticus and such, you really have to admire these guys for having authored a fairly concise legal code under such miserably primitive conditions. Not the kind of admiration you have for a saint or some sage or great political leader, but more the kind of admiration you have for a guy who shows up for work the day after a traumatic car accident that killed his wife and children on impact and manages not to take his shell-shock out on his coworkers. The everyday kind of admiration you might have for someone you know.

If someone like you or I were set to do that, most of us would crumple on the spot because it takes some real guts to put something like that together when you have lice gnawing their way into your skull, gangrene rotting off parts of your body and people all over the place dying of leprosy and all kinds of really horrible diseases that there are no credible treatments for, and imagine doing it all by firelight in a crappily ventilated building made out of untreated wood and foul-smelling, sun-baked animal skin while stuffing weird and nasty-tasting herbs into your mouth in a vain attempt to treat an abscess that is just as likely as not to rot off half of your face because modern dentistry, fluoridated tap-water and antibiotics wouldn't be around for another three millenia. If there is any mercy in the world, you are high as a kite on opium bought from the same hashish-chewing wackoes who would come around centuries later and try to burn down your entire culture just to satisfy their blood-thirsty gods. Considering the circumstances they were working under, they really did as well as anyone could, but they were human beings.

Consider that, and it makes a whole lot more sense than it does if you have to make a pretense that it was all divine revelation. It's because people insisted on that that we started listening to any and every schizophrenic or dissociative nutjob who started babbling nonsense. We stopped expecting the rules we lived by to follow any form of logic, and that screwed everything up. Most of it makes perfectly good sense in the context of the time, though, if you see the writers of those ancient documents as stressed-out doctors and lawyers who were working under the gun, lucky not to be sick as hell, and not equipped with a modern understanding of how crap actually works.

Let it sink in that people who had an academic bent were not even well respected in society compared to the ham-fisted, illiterate bullies who shook them down regularly for what little they had and probably brutally raped them when their women were on the rag, and it seems almost cruel and twisted to judge them if they couldn't get everything perfect.

Does that make sense?

God made even you.

It is possible to attain understanding like a tiny sparrow, one seed at a time.

@Philologos. Dude, what were you responding to? I usually don't have any trouble interpreting your silly word games into the Queen's English, but I'll need some help here.

Silly is in the mind of the beholder, and my speech is miles less silly should you ask me than posting a stupid video with the Thread Head "Was Jesus a Sectret Philatelist?" as some have done.

Possibly you miss the point because there was no word game. We should test some time to see which of my "word games", which include an English archaic in this century and shaped by academia, a tendency to include Fremdwoerter, a habit of letting thoughts encountered in passing slip into my speech - the birds seem to have enjoyed last night's storm, obscure literary references to for instance the MYOB social code, and occasional deliberate encryption which only the eared and minded can capture, you do in fact interpret. Faites vos jeux.

But, to answer your question in the clearest, frankest way possible, I was responding to the sum of your posts that have passed my eyes, some unread because you combine an expression as wordy as mine with a force of utterance entirely alien and uncomfortable to me, and opinions many of which if I have read them - as in the latest post in this thread - I find problematic.

"God made even you." Simple statement of fact, reminding me that you exist precisely as you are for an unknown but good reason and that I must not fall into the trap of Green Monkeying you simply because you are to me alien.

"It is possible to attain understanding like a tiny sparrow, one seed at a time." Statement of fact with included analogy - I analogize a lot, analogical-compulsive I think it is called - inserted to remind both of us that the path of the scientist to knowledge and of the philosopher to wisdom and of all of us to Truth is stepwise and that what you or I see is no what we will get.

It is normal to want to be happy, joyous and free, and being a slave unto oneself misses the mark. So then, and while all things can be permissible, Self-Inflicted Nonsense (S.I.N.) still makes no sense at all. For example:

1) Masturbation robs oneself of the opportunity to achieve satisfaction while offering pleasure to one's own mate;

2) Copulation during menstrual flow is far from romantic.

Oh, I see what you mean. Makes things far less tedious.

Okay, I'll try to be less crass when you're involved in the conversation.

All I meant to point out was that the laws articulated in the Bible make reasonably good sense if you take into account that they were authored by human beings who lived during a very different time period. They had far fewer resources, and the few people who were given to trying to comprehend the world were living in war-like and almost universally illiterate societies.

Which ones do you think might not still "make reasonably good sense" today? For example, people now still need to flush even though few need to actually carry shovels ...

"Love us, or screw you. Life works how we say it does."

Which - not that one could not talk some of that - is not so new or unreasonable.

There are - I have been forced by interactions and my field to realize - issues of form in communication.

This sample "Let it sink in that people who had an academic bent were not even well respected in society compared to the ham-fisted, illiterate bullies who shook them down regularly for what little they had and probably brutally raped them when their women were on the rag, and it seems almost cruel and twisted to judge them if they couldn't get everything perfect. "

No idea how that strikes others - to me - brought up in an academic seting, it hits me as shall we say belligerent. Not saying you sre, but to say that I would have to be belligerent.

Like if I wanted to say that, it would be - approximately:

"It should be remembered that in such societies those inclined to research and theory were lower in status than the mlitary elite - the Brahmin caste of the Indian system as compared to the Kshatriya. It is not surprising that the finished product would be adjusted in certain ways to reflect the ruling group's interests."

For me, the more emotive / energetic the harder to read.

Quite frankly, I don't give a damn. My main interest is in trying to grasp why certain laws were actually passed. For example, Leviticus 19:23-25 suggests that the Israelites were keen on trying to introduce new edible flora into their country, and they tried to focus on cultivating it for about five years or so to give it a chance to take a foothold. It's logical in the context, and it's fascinating because it bears the suggestion that the Israelites were actively trying to shape the flora and fauna of their nation during this time period. It suggests that their society was really a lot more sophisticated than we tend to assume.

However, I will not argue with you if you actually think that you are going to be "spritually resurrected" after your death. I don't believe in that. If you came from the same background as myself, I would tell you outright that it's ignorant drivel. Since you probably come from a different background or have the same assumptions about the natural world, I don't. If you tell me that, based on your background and experience, you have good reason to hold the beliefs that you do, I should assume that anyone who makes the same assumptions about the world that you do would arrive independently at the same conclusions.

If I picked up the impression that you were being intellectually asinine, I would tell you so, but so far I have not picked up many signs of any such thing and therefore have generally not taken an especially dim view of your habits of reasoning.

Essentially, whether the laws of Ancient Palestine "make sense" or not is not as important to me as understanding why they might have come into practice. Understanding them throws light on the context of their time, and it helps me understand other cultures of the day.

Well, when I was thinking about the topic I was talking about, I was getting strong visions of what was going on and getting a strong sense of the thoughts and feelings of those who might have actually lived in these societies. It gives me insights that I value, but I get kind of caught up in it sometimes. I actually have brief flashes of empathy for a hypothetical historical person, so I was filled with anger and hostility on that hypothetical person's behalf when I wrote that. By getting so involved, I can get a wind as to how the people who actually lived during this time period might have behaved, and this is a helpful tool for me when I am examining the subject objectively.

In hindsight, your articulation is better, and that's the one I would have used when writing a paper I intended to submit for publication in an academic context.

Coming in to edit again later, I think I just realized that this propensity for getting sentimental about hypothetical people might be an outcropping of the fact that processing human emotion in order to form the most appropriate reaction to it is something that I have to do at a cognitive rather than precognitive level.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 09 Jun 2011, 1:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Please forgive me for assuming you might have thought they do not make sense today.

Well, I can't call the whole Book of Leviticus, Numbers or Deuteronomy to mind at once. I for one think it's as likely as not that a number of the assumptions made in the books are outright falderal, but the main thrust of my post was that the people who created these laws should be forgiven if those laws are not perfectly flawless. But, if you want to go on believing that the books are inerrant, that's your bailewick. It's really a subject that I would rather skirt around for the sake of staying focused on points that are in my eyes more important.

That's a little presumptuous. What if i don't have a mate? What if I'm at a point in my life where having a mate would be a bad idea? What if i have a mate who, for some physiological reason, is unable to participate?

Would it still be a sin?

Onan was struck dead because he disrespected his family and failed to uphold his duty as a man. And in the torah, he was struck dead by his in-laws.

"Onanism" is using your brother's widow for sexual gratification without giving her children. And you'd kill a guy for doing that, too.



I have no interest in earning my red wings, but if both parties are game, what's wrong with it?

I'm getting cognitive dissonance looking at these two sentences right next to each other.

Why will you not allow me the same?