Misfit wrote:Married Hasidic Jewish women will cover their hair
I just want to keep this here, as this is my actual fundamental point.
That Jews, Christians and Muslims are all technically obeying the same rule about covering the head. Christianity "extends" Judaism, Islam "extends" Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, Allah does explicitly identify himself as being the same deity as God and Yahweh / Jehovah at one point.
As these religions have undergone schisms within themselves - Catholics and Protestants, Sunni and Shia, etc. - one could also further see these three as really being just larger schisms of the same underlying, originally Jewish, religion.
(Well, actually, maybe "originally Egyptian". There are the theories about Akhenaten's monotheism feeding into Judaism - and, hey, the Jewish Exodus was from Egypt. Plus, you can find aspects of Zoroastrianism creeping into the Abrahamic religion.
Basically, as I would contend, religions don't really come from gods. They come from people, encoding their cultural and moral values in holy texts, ascribed to higher powers, for legitimacy as "the truth". And so you totally do get divergent evolution - schisms in the faiths - and mythology bleeding over from one culture to another. In the same way that you can trace the evolution of the many languages we all speak, you can also trace the evolution of the cultural and moral values and beliefs. Because, really, it's all man-made, just as languages are, so it really actually obeys memetic inheritance and "horizontal transfer" and all the rest of it.
So, an even bigger argument is that you could go up another level and see the whole Abrahamic "branch", as a schism from a wider set of cultural values and beliefs - and stories, like the Flood - that was doing the rounds in that area at the time.)
I just want that one on the record that the real fundamental point here is that we're arguing over the finer details of "interpretation" of what really is the exact same rule about head coverings. That's the point I was making.
Then we can, that established, go on to argue whether those particular photos were a fair representation of Judaism. And, well, when I found that first image, I myself didn't think it was at all fair, which is why I tried to seek something better.
And I don't object to the wife's observations about present day Jerusalem. Compared to the others, Judaism is more ancient and the most mature.
Even in the heart of Israel, there's a heck of a lot of "cultural Jews". Folks who're secular and even atheist, but they maintain their Jewish cultural heritage. Because, unlike other religions where you can "opt in" by belief, Judaism lets you in through marriage rules and so "Jew" is both religious and cultural. Indeed, anti-Semitism is actually racism, as the Jews are a race - as this all passes down family lines and such - whereas Islam is a religious ideology, not a race. And, like, anyone can become a Muslim - just "opt in" to the beliefs and you're a Muslim. No marriage nor prior permission required. Though, before doing so, please remember that many Muslims do still hold that apostasy is punishable by death, so you can "opt in" at will, but some of them try to make it very hard to "opt out" later on.
But, like, I'm not talking about how these religions are today only.
I'm talking about their whole history - indeed, the notion that they're really just one religion, that has had three major schisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and then subsequent minor schisms (Catholic / Protestant, Sunni / Shia) and then all manner of "point release" denomination schisms below that (e.g. Methodist, Baptist, Evangelical, Quaker, Mormon, etc., etc.). Like Christianity alone has actual thousands of denominations.
And, as I say, if you're into your theology, then you can even see how this whole "branch" fits into wider cultural beliefs - that monotheism came out of Egypt with Akhenaten, that there's some really obvious plagiarism from the Epic of Gligamesh / Zoroastrianism in Abrahamic mythology.
Because, sorry, the evidence is pretty obvious, once you examine things at this level, that there are no actual gods here. These are man-made encodings of cultural and moral values, of the culture's beliefs and stories, packaged up into nice "memetic packets" for passing on down the generations, to preserve that culture's values, stories, rules and regulations.
When you look at it like this, then you can see that it works very similarly to how languages have evolved, diverged, borrowed from each other, and implicitly capture cultural thought by the words that are in the language and aren't in the language, and even capture hints of mythology in idiomatic language (e.g. "rise from the ashes like a Phoenix", "slow and steady wins the race", etc.).
And I just want to get that perspective across, because it's kind of a "can't see the woods for the trees" thing. Understandably so. I have perfect humanist sympathy for why all this shit has befallen humanity, and why people buy into it (because, in a misspent youth, I myself did once totally buy into it as well). This is not a criticism or a telling off, but an attempt to explain what's really going on here. To help people see the woods for the trees.
When you're steeped in Jewish or Christian or Islamic culture yourself, then often all you see is how "the other" is not like you. If you subscribe tightly to your culture's values and rules and regulations, then you'll see it in "we're right, and everyone else is wrong" terms.
Indeed, if you believe that it's wrong to drink alcohol then folks going out and getting pissed are, at least, wrong to do so, if not "pawns of Satan", being tempted / controlled by the Devil. Meanwhile, if you're a Christian, Jesus turned water into wine. He's fine with a little glass of red. Indeed, when you do the ritual of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, then his blood is a nice bottle of red.
But I want to go beyond this, to see that - though I'm no Muslim - you can perfectly well see where a culture would pick up the "no alcohol" meme. I mean, Christianity has had its own internal war with this one, with the Temperance Movement and America's Prohibition.
Underlying it, we can all appreciate the pragmatic point. Alcohol consumption can go horribly wrong, in alcoholism. When folks get totally hammered, they lose their inhibitions. Fights outside the pub. To use alcohol in one-off situation to relax and "drown your sorrows" could eventually become a problem, if someone just drinks and drinks and drinks to avoid their problems, rather than face them - just like someone who "comfort eats" could end up no better off and now morbidly obese on top of all their troubles.
If you're honest, then you can totally understand the pragmatics of where Islamic culture got the "no alcohol" thing from. In many of the more dodgy situations that could arise, they aren't actually wrong. If you go down the rabbit hole, then alcohol can very easily become a serious problem.
I feel that, if you look close enough, then you eventually see the underlying pragmatic and
human values that are there. In ye olde dayes, they would wrap up these morals and values and mythologies into stories. Tales to be told around the camp fire. Pass on wisdoms, pass on values, pass on shared culture, encode the social rules and regulations of the culture into stories, or a set of 10 rules that you deity carved into stone for a prophet.
There is evolutionary survival value in this. It's what elevates us humans from our animal cousins. We can talk. Tell stories. Communicate our shared values and come to agreement. Co-operate to a very precise level. This is just how we humans work.
And, even right now, I'm continuing that. Weaving you a little story that connects the dots, so that these thoughts might transfer into your head and you might also feel the revelation of "ah, now I see how it works".
Which, by the way, is the only way to do it. I don't want to ban religions. If there was a magical button that I could hit and make them vanish, then I wouldn't hit it. I don't want to just take away people's beliefs or their culture or their stories. I quite adore a good bit of mythology.
The idea is more one of education. That we all learn why alcohol might be a problem sometimes, why you logically should "do unto others as you would have done by you", what constitutes good hygiene to help us keep those germs and viruses at bay. I don't want to take away or undermine these things, but actually educate and explain them.
I don't want to ban religion, but I would like to see it eventually become obsolete.
Like, personally, I don't want to ban anyone from using "the N word". My take on it is that what we should be aiming for is explaining to people what melanin is, how cultures have evolved in different places, how - because the Earth is round - you get different levels of sunlight at different latitudes (further modified by that 23.4 degree tilt that I've covered before) and that sort of thing.
I wouldn't use "the N word" because, to me, it makes no sense. It doesn't refer to reality. I would never use the word in anger, not because of social prohibition, but because it means nothing to me. I would have no use for such semantics.
This is my vision for Lennon's "and no religion too". Not that it's banned, but that it's just obsolete. No-one's interested in its inferior description of reality. That folks reason out their morals and don't just blindly obey some rules in some book written thousands of years ago (for a situation that, like, doesn't exist anymore).
In fact, I'd say that for the whole of Lennon's "Imagine". That, one day, there won't be countries, just because we no longer need nor care about such "false kin". That there is no need for greed nor hunger, as we finally sort out that problem, for everyone, once and for all. Reaching perhaps Star Trek levels of replicators and shit, so that, yeah, "imagine no possessions". I mean, not literally no things but, well, if you can summon up "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" from a machine and then have that machine deconstruct the tea cup afterwards... you just wouldn't have the same relationship with things and possessions anymore, would you? When you can just magic things up and magic them away.
In a sense, take a step back. See the human beings. See the long patterns of history. See the similarities in beliefs and actions, and recognise their shared common ancestor.
See the woods, not the individual trees.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
