jack

When I was talking about prompts I used the word "spirituality", and simont asked what I meant by it, and I realised that what I really wanted was to spill the religion post onto another day.

Last post, I think I described what I didn't believe about religion. Basically, "anything supernatural".

However, I've recently been feeling that there's something I want to explore but I'm not quite sure what. Partly that I know more people who believe in God, but in total have beliefs really similar to mine, and I want to understand that. And partly that I've been thinking in terms of spiritual health, not in terms of a supernatural spirit, but in terms of "being aware of myself" and "giving up being scared of things I'm scared to try" and of "actually doing things I always felt I should do" and generally becoming healthier as a whole mind. And basically everything that is (I think) part of the mind, but in how the mind itself works or doesn't work, not in how it represents facts.

Where do I stand religiously? Still atheist, about like you'd probably expect. Although more thoughts in a follow-up post.

Is there any particular religion I'm not? I think that's a question which is interesting in potentially several different ways.

I generally expect a religion to be something like "some combination of a culture, a belief system about the supernatural, and a moral framework".

Culture-wise, I'm very much english and vaguely CoE. I do Christmas, and Easter, and other english religious-instigated festivals, and I'd happily do other ones instead if I lived in a culture where that was normal, but it would feel very strange not to do ANYTHING for Xmas. I went to CoE things with school sometimes, and learned hymns and so on, and I hadn't realised how much I'd subconsciously absorbed how I expected religious services to work until I actively compared notes with people who had absorbed _different_ expectations: not just the obvious things, as the things I didn't even think to question (of course you bury people in the churchyard, right?)

And I'm also sopping up a steady trickle of Jewish culture from Rachel and Rachel's friends, and I really value having the experience of another culture, although I doubt I'd get to the point where it would displace my background as my primary religious-derived culture (unless I specifically made an effort to do so).

So in one sense, you might say my atheism is "CoE with the God taken out", although that's not really fair to CoE, nor to people who don't believe in God but come from different cultural traditions.

The other way of posing the question is, what, specifically, don't I believe? Well, basically, "anything supernatural" (where supernatural means something roughly like "outside how we expect physics to work",but you probably know what I mean better than I can describe). Which was always presented to me as a defining feature of religion. With emphasis on "and therefore you should obey this set of rules even if they seem horrible". That's what I'm atheist against, that's what I'm not. Although, my terminology may not be right, because that's the background I'm coming from, but I encounter more religious people for whom that is a small or non-existent part of their religion.

In Prince Caspian, there's a bit where the children are trying to find a way across country to join Caspian before his army is overrun, and their way is blocked by a steep gorge.

They conclude the only sensible plan is to follow the river downstream to the conflux with the great river, where they know there's a crossing quite close to where they're trying to go. However, Lucy sees Aslan in the distance and realises He wants them to go upstream.

When I first read it, I just glossed over this bit confused, but now I think it's an obvious allegory for people knowing what God wants them to do, but not living up to it.

However, even now, this just doesn't seem to make sense with the context of the book.

* Forget "which way along the river". Even if only Lucy saw him, whether the others find this suspicious or not, why don't they rush to where he was in case he's still there? That seems the immediately obvious thing to do, whatever he was trying to tell them.

* If you follow the geography, you realise that what they really want to do was find a place they can cross the river, which is what they eventually find, but (partly my fault), I didn't quite get this from the dialogue, so I couldn't see why they would ever go up the river if they've just said down is the way to where they're going.

* If they want a crossing place, is there any reason other than divine revelation why it's more likely to be upstream than down?

* Later on, one of the older Pevensies makes a comment implying they saw going downstream as "easier", implying they made that choice because they didn't have the determination to go upstream. But if they were tired, I couldn't see why they'd wrongly prefer to go downstream: when I'm tired is exactly when I'd want to take silly risks like "go upstream in case there's an easy crossing place that will take us right to our destination" instead of "go round the long but safe way".

It may not make much difference practically, but the difference seems to be, were the Pevensies supposed to know that upstream was better even without Aslan? Or to know deep down that it was better, but not have the moral fortitude to follow through with it, for some reason?

For that matter, Aslan never says that He's leading them to a way across. For all they know, Aslan is leading them to something else entirely, letting Caspian et al die.

Now, they know Him well enough to trust him at this point. I may not agree with the Narnian theology in the real world, but I think I know that according to the narrative, the "right" thing to do is always to trust Aslan. But "trust in God" encompasses a wide variety of difficult choices.

Is this supposed to be a case of "you know you should do X, but you're scared it won't work, or you'll be embarrassed, or you'll let everyone down" and God tells you to do X? I think that's what most revelations are supposed to be. Or is this supposed to be like Abraham and Isaac, "do this apparently horrible immoral thing because God says there's a good reason for it but won't tell you what it is"?

I think people disagree about the latter even within Abrahamic theologies.

I don't think that's the choice Lewis is trying to present, but because there's not enough logistical and geographical explanation, it feels like it might be, even though I think Lewis intended a simple "they knew that was the right thing, but failed to do it anyway" parable, he just failed to give them a reason to know it was the right thing.

One of the controvertial questions I asked while learning about Judaism is "Is there anything all jews agree on". There is very, very little: almost ANYTHING is guaranteed to start a big debate[1]. However, over four years, I have picked up one or two things that seem to qualify.

Note, I don't literally mean all. For any question about any religion there's always going to be SOMEONE who disagrees. But I mean that, in general, if you ask a couple of people who know, the response will generally be "yes, of course", not "well, you'd think that, and obviously I agree, but actually so-and-so thought that was totally wrong because..." and start arguing about it.

What I've come up with so far:

• There is at most one God
  
• Do not disrepect the torah scrolls
  
• Do not do human sacrifice, ever
  
• Cloths other than linen and wool can be mixed with impunity and linen and wool are ok to be worn at the same time with no way to touch

Lots of people (especially in New York and Israel) identify as jewish without being observant at all, and many more people are observant to a greater or lesser extent, but don't believe in God. But if I understand correctly, there's still rather a taboo against believing in other Gods, so few people still identify as Jewish if they believe something polytheistic[2]

And people outside Judaism may not even be familiar with Torah scrolls, but every synagogue has a big completely hand-written scroll of the Torah, which is held up and paraded round and read from during services. And I can't imagine anyone ever harming one: even if you don't believe it, you'd put it in a museum or something.

Human sacrifice doesn't really need an explanation, it's just hard to find anything that no-one has been in favour of, I cried "aha!" when I found another entry for the list.

Some orthodox people do still follow the no-mixed-wool-and-linen rule. But it seems to be one of the few rules that hasn't accreted a lot of extra suggestions around it over the years (like, "do not boil a kid in its mother's milk" became "do not eat meat and milk within four hours of each other"). So no-one (as far as Liv knew) kept any stricter version of it, which means everyone's A-OK with mixing other things in clothes :)

Are there any other suggestions? :)

[1] Liv cited an example where Bluejo's livejournal asked "What do Jews do on passover" and someone said "We argue a lot" and someone else said "No we don't!"

[2] I'm sure there must be pagan jews, but I think it must still be controvertial?

Sometimes I feel like the Church of England should either disestablish or bite the bullet and actually represent everyone, regardless of religion or lack thereof. I like having a comparatively fluffy national church, but when I saw it did do things I disagreed with, I suddenly felt uncomfortable having it enshrined in the constitutions.

The first is the obvious choice. But the second has some attraction for me. In many ways, couldn't you say that the right to have services and get married in churches, have "moral" representatives in the house of lords, choose the sexual orientation of bishops, etc, etc, are the equal legacy of everyone English, not just the faction which is currently identified as 'chruch of England'? I realise that's likely to be controvertial to both anti-disestablishment and disestablishment opinions :)

This is a brief retelling of a story from the Talmud. [ie. Longer than the original story, but shorter than everything everyone has written about it in the 2000 years since.] However, the story is quite notable, so what I say is almost certain to need significant annotation by people in the comments, as you can read into the story significant generalisations about theology, and not all of the ones I suggest will probably be able to be accurate. It goes roughly like this.

R. Eliezer: *is da man*
R. Eliezer: *is generally accepted as one of the wisest, or THE wisest sage of his time*
R. Eliezer: *has a deep understanding of the universe and the law, which will later be demonstrated by invoking several miracles in order to make his point*
R. Eliezer: You know the bit with the oven of Acknai, where people argue whether [breaking it apart and gluing it back together again] [makes it an object still subject to ritual impurity]? Well, I've been thinking about it, and I'm pretty sure God's law implies that it does and I know what I'm talking about.
Everyone else: Nuh-uh!
R. Eliezer: Yuh-uh!
Everyone: [Retread of long argument, not recorded in this point in the Mishnah]
R. Eliezer: OK, this is rhetorically dodgy, but pretend there's a connection between the fact that I can do miracles and the fact I know what I'm talking about.
Water: *flows upstream*
Everyone else: Hmmm.... But honestly, although you're very wise (and you really ARE) we still think you're wrong about the stupid oven.
Everyone else: See, The Big Guy was pretty clear. He gave us the law. We interpret it according to set traditions. NOT according to whoever can make water flow upstream. Else chaos would ensue! We voted. You lost. STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT!
R. Eliezer: *makes the wall fall down with magic*
R. Joshua: *makes the wall stop falling down with magic*
Walls: *stay in crazy lean*
R. Eliezer: OK, OK, look. (Puts on big voice) If I'm right, let a sign from heaven show it!
Big boomy voice from The Big Guy out of heaven: DUDES, HE'S TOTALLY RIGHT. WHAT HE SAYS IS WHAT I MEANT BY THE LAW ALL ALONG. [1]
Everyone else: Nuh-uh. You gave us the law, and you told us quite explicitly how to interpret it according to the accepted majority opinion. It's RIGHT THERE in the bible. You can't go and take it back now or no-one would do anything in case You came and told them something different five minutes later.[1]
R. Eliezer: *grump* *grump* *is a sore loser.

[1] I am not making this up.

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Talmud

In 70 CE, the romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem (built 500 years earlier to replace the first temple which had been destroyed in a previous siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and subsequent interruption of the orderly running of the kingdom, due to everyone being carted off to slavery or whatever).

Previously, law wasn't written down, but would be ruled upon by priests/rabbis, based on the wisdom, precedent and law accumulated since Moses. However, now Rabbis rightly feared that the Jewish people would be scattered, and generally find it impossible to maintain the continuity, so over the next 200 years rushed to write down all of that oral tradition. However, because the intent was to act as a helpful reminder notes for people who already sort of knew it, but needed extensive details that previously might have been acquired over their lifetime by arguing with people who had learnt it over their lifetime, the form is excessively abbreviated: a few words to recall an illustrative example which the 200CE reader is expected to know and remember the relevance of, very terse, leaving out all punctuation and vowels and so on. [Later on this is filled back in non-canonically according to what later authorities interpret it as having originally meant.]

That is known as the Mishnah. If it were published as-is, it would be somewhat smaller than the bible, but Liv showed me an example, which is six hard-back books, each page containing Hewbrew Mishna, an English translation, and a similar amount of footnotes by a modern author clarifying stuff. (I think the content of the footnotes is fairly standard, but the exact ones are not traditional?) It's the "Big book of Jewish Law, circa 220 CE". (It comes in little sections of a couple of paragraphs, individually called "a Mishnah")

In another three hundred years, people have been passing down oral traditions of Jewish law, but mostly oral traditions of how to interpret the Mishnah, and dialogues between disagreeing rabbis on exactly how the Mishnah applies in such-and-such situation, and extensive digressions on how to make rulings about such-and-such an issue, which didn't have much to do with the Mishnah, but this bit of the Mishnah vaguely reminds us of, and examples of famous cases used as examples where the ruling was that so-and-so, and what Rabbi so-and-so said that everyone else disagreed with but thought was relevant enough to record, and so on.

And then they wrote all that down too. Which is known as the Gemara, and is generally even more terse and impossible to read without context [but nowadays is never published without later commentaries].

Together, the Mishnah, and the Gemara, constitute the Talmud, which is the "Big Book of all Jewish law ever", although it is almost always published in the traditional format in which it was first printed, with the Mishnah and the Gemara in the middle of the page in Hebrew, and medieval commentaries on both, which are closer to modern comprehensibility, and are now regarded as very very standard, but are not as enshrined as the Mishnah and Gemara are. One small section of the Mishnah translates to a giant book of Mishnah+Gemara+commentaries, of which the Talmud comprises sixty.

Attitude to the Talmud

The Talmud is the Big Book of Law. Everyone can/should study the Talmud, and if you study the Talmud ENOUGH and pronounce on it sensibly and fairly you're probably a Rabbi, and ARE a Rabbi if another Rabbi says you are (although now this is a much more codified process, and no-one will say you're a Rabbi unless you go to Rabbinical school).

You should (in very very rough approximation) follow a Rabbi on points of law. There is not one law, it's possible -- indeed, universal -- for different Rabbis to interpret the law different ways, and the Rabbi then may or may not go and argue with other Rabbis what the standard ruling ought to be. However, younger Rabbis should respect older Rabbis, so decisions on law will (notionally) be something like "The Mishnah/Gemara says this, and this respected Rabbi from the commentaries says it means this, and I say that applies in this situation thuswise." Or sometimes "The Mishnah/Gemara looks like it says this, but the Gemara/commentaries say it actually says the opposite of that, so that's probably right." Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you really, really have to think before departing from what was very traditional.

This is simplification and distortion of galactic proportions, for which I apologise, but just intended to indicate roughly how Rabbis writing in the Talmud are seen. Which is extremely venerated, but not literally the word of God -- that's the Torah (bible) which the Rabbis will ultimately have based the law on, but there's a long way from what God dictated to Moses, which was QUITE detailed, to the Talmud, which contains 60 volumes of how you should apply that in day-to-day life.

The piece of Hebrew writing called the Haggadah is the traditional instructions for the passover meal. Basically "here is the story of the exodus and a number of other traditions". People normally do some subset of this.

You should find one of these. Preferably one with text in your native language, or at least a language you read, or at least an alphabet you read. It also helps if the most important things are printed biggest, because then it's much more natural to have a service with, rather than without, the important bits.

But the basic things you should include are:

The story of the exodus I

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It's generally considered polite to leave a brief respectful silence rather than attempt to capture with the best sound a drunken person can make out of common eating utensils the concept of the Holiest of Holies, Blessed be He, God, striking down the Angel of Death. Maybe thunder.

"All my Jewish friends suddenly seem to be gluten-intolerant for about a week and I don't understand why...?"

Dietary Restrictions

On the first day of passover you MUST eat UNLEAVENED bread (also a wide variety of really random things of theological significance). On all the days of passover you MUST NOT eat LEAVENED bread.

Indeed, you must be extra super careful and scrub your house to remove any trace of anything that might ever have been leavened bread ever. Literally. You can't make this stuff up. Well, ok, you can, because someone DID. But what I mean is, I can't make it up. Chametz is everything you're specifically not supposed to eat, leavened bread and leavening agents and anything similar. Mainly crumbs, but also scrub your oven and clean everything thoroughly and so on.

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To come: a checklist of actions you should always include in a passover service to make it traditional/legitimate, in the unlikely event that my blog is your definitive source of Jewish education.

When is it?

Passover begins (within a day or so) on the day of the full moon in the week before Easter, and lasts for seven (or eight) days. Occasionally there's a glitch in the Gregorian/Hebrew calender syncromesh and passover is a on the day of the full moon BEFORE the full moon in the week before Easter, in which case you should urgently go to Eastercon, because it will be one of the few times you can go to Eastercon and your girlfriend can eat in the buffet that serves gluten, because passover has dietary restrictions (see next post) which can clash unfortunately if thrown with little warning into a mix with food service and vegetarianism.

Most Jewish holidays are at the start (?) or occasionally middle (?) of the month, which are always within a day or so of the full moon. What's with all the "within a day or so"? Well, originally there was a harvest festival at about this time of the year, so the year started when it was obviously spring, and the month started at the new moon. But there's a couple of extra days that appear or disappear in order to ensure that certain festivals DO NOT fall on the Sabbath or do not fall ADJACENT to the Sabbath, etc, etc, and do not ask why, because then someone will explain it to you, and then you will say "ah, but what if..." and then they will hand you a book bigger than your head and ask you to read it and then you'll learn about two-thousand years of calendar-fiddling and then your brain will explode.

What's with all the "off by one" days? You might have THOUGHT that a religion (apparently) devoted entirely to pedantry would have extremely precise lengths of major holidays. Well, some time in the last three millennia (you will see this qualification a lot) someone observed that if the beginning of the year and month was determined in Jerusalem, it may take a couple of days for the change to propagate to everywhere else, so people got into the habit of celebrating everything twice just in case they were a day off, to make ABSOLUTELY DOUBLE SURE they got the right day. And (you'll see this a lot too) this became a tradition. You might not have thought you'd need to do this for a festival in the MIDDLE of the month, but there you go. (If it takes the messenger several days to get there, you might still be off-by-one even if you count backwards from his arrival). Eventually someone invented an algorithm and made the calendar just follow that, and then invented magical "internets" which could convey date and time round the world at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, but the tradition remains in most places. This tends to happen more for orthodox and conservative movements outside Israel (?)

But everyone outside Israel celebrates the meal on the first AND second day (?). Which is very nice because it lets you celebrate the first one with your family, and then if you're very nippy on your feet very quickly dash to Scandinavia with your boyfriend in order to lead the service on the second night there. Obviously not EVERYONE does that. It's probably just Rachel. But it's what I'M used to. And in the unlikely event that the earth is destroyed and these notes are the sole remaining Jewish instructions, well, then it will become a tradition, and everyone will say "I don't understand, why is the second night the 'stockholm' night?"

How long is it?

Passover is the whole seven (or eight) days. The meal (the seder) is on the first (and second) nights. (Everything has several names, I often get confused.)

How long will it usually last

We normally start at 6, have a service for an hour or so, have a leisurely meal, and then finish with more service between 10 and midnight. But everywhere will be different.