August 05, 2006

• I kept clicking "no" in the "How To Get Saved" page, and it kept sending me to some form to fill out so they could spam me. Our customer service department will contact you shortly.
• These nut jobs used to come on campus, years back. I never understood. If you thought Jesus was the messiah, doesn't that make you a freaking Christian!?!
• Reminds me of the time my college choir retreat had to share a camp with the Campus Crusade for Christ. We were practicing on the beach and they came down, surrounded us, and drowned us out singing some kind of Christian-pop-music stuff. We left, and they took over our kickass camp fire.
• Wow. You surrendered to the Crusaders? That only encourages them, you know.
• They probably thought you left to read up on all that cool shit thy were singing about.
• The funny thing is, we were singing Christian music, too; Gabrieli's Cantate Domino.
• Old Testament hermenutics and discussion of Christ's messiahood seems out of favour among left-liberal academic circles these days, and i wonder if Jews for Jesus is a way of correcting those abscenses. (sp) Also, where do they get their cash?
• Campus Crusade for C'thulhu was the only religious club I could get behind in college. All these things seem equally silly to this atheist.
• Hey, if Gabrieli had written any antiphonal motets about Cthulhu, we'd've sung 'em.
• Monkeyfilter: if Gabrieli had written any antiphonal motets about Cthulhu
• If you thought Jesus was the messiah, doesn't that make you a freaking Christian!?! Well, yes, but the technicality arises that there is a Jewish RACE as well as a Jewish RELIGION. Because one is born into being a Jew, you can choose not to practictice Judiasm, and another religion instead, like these people are doing. However, it is a very misleading name. They are not technically 'Jews'.
• Ah. I get it now. I knew a girl who was a Jew for Jesus back in California. She was Asian-American, so that confused me. In fact it still does.
• It's a weird group and one that really pisses off the Jewish side of my family.
• Yeah, this group is highly disliked by all the Jews I know (and myself as a nominal Jew); they basically try to present themselves as Jews yet preach that you need to accept Jesus to be 'saved'. As far as I and others see it, they are just using a new evangelical Christian tactic, and are no less scummy (if not even more, to my eyes, by the deception and falsity) than any other aggressive religious group, much like Campus Crusade for Christ. I even suspect that if you put those two groups in the same room, they'd turn out to be relatives; Jews for Jesus are indeed Jews if they claim that heritage, but they no more represent actual Judaism than the Crusaders or Fred Phelps represent Christianity. Or, to sum up, I won't even click the links - they're not getting my page views, just like I won't for hate sites.
• how do legitmate xians handle the jewish history of their faith then, or the concept of the messiah? (honest question, i am not fond of JoJ by any stretch, but tehy force the question)
• As far as what I remember from Church, the Jewish history is just there - they were God's chosen people, but Jesus was explicit about bringing salvation for all people. That's also how the bacon eating was explained - Jesus said the old lies didn't apply. Personally, I think it's that the early apostles realised that the pagans would never convert if it meant giving up bacon. Mmmm....bacon.
• Sorry - I meant to write OLD LAWS - but it makes for a very funny freudian slip. Clearly, if there is a God, he would be pro-Bacon - or vegetarian. I can't imagine allowing your people to eat meat, and then forbidding then to have bacon. That's just cruel and illogical.
• A lot of the old dietary laws have a lot more to do with sanitation and less to do with religion, I think. Pork is apt to get parasites, which old technology could neither detect nor get rid of... so it's just easier to be on the safe side and not eat it. I think that now the laws are more religious, but they began as a way to avoid food poisoning or parasites.
• A lot of old religious laws seem the same way. Any doctrine forbidding sex that can't lead to pregnancy made a lot of sense back in the days of high infant mortality rates, short lifespans, and clan-based societies. Anyone who wasn't engaged in replenishing the rolls wasn't pulling his/her weight for the resources he/she was consuming. When I read the story of Onan, what I saw as his true fault was the failure to provide the heir the family needed, not self-gratification.
• But there are also aspects which have nothing to do with sanitation or being sensible, but with separating yourself from other people. Pork isn't that much dangerous, nor is shellfish (or else people wouldn't eat it all over) - but it may have been that pork was something those other people liked. But yes, the Onan story isn't about masterbation or wasting seed, it's about refusing to do his familial duty.
• The same holds true for old injunctions against homosexuality. Having same-sex sex was ok, as long as it didn't interfere with procreating. In fact, it could even bring certain groups (such as the military) closer.
• Trichinosis may not occur often now in countries where meat is inspected and modern treatments are available, but it is still a scourge in parts of the third world or wherever people consume poorly cooked or uncooked flesh.
• Man, gay pigs didn't stand a chance back then.
• That may be true, beeswacky, but then why was pork an important meat for Europe for millenia? Unless it's just that Europeans are a bit more dim than middle-easterners. I just think there is more than simple logic - if you are a people who, living as herders primarily with cattle and sheep, and you want to differentiate yourself from more settled people who perhaps keep pigs - maybe that's a good way to differentiate yourself from these dirty, pig-eating people?
• Yes, was there not an exploration of this in (e.g.) Mary Douglas' essay on the biblical rules of uncleanness? I (like many) had always assumed "religious dietary laws = health and safety" but the situation may not be so simple, I think Douglas talks a bit about avoiding physically-ambiguous species, as they violate the proper categories. I have Purity and Danger somewhere at home, but no doubt others can better argue its merits (or suggest similar works).
• *is too slack to look up the chapter on the semiotics of biblical abomination in Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur, which certainly references Mary Douglas* (it's late, the book has small print, bad light in here)
• Thanks (for the reference).
• *is too lazy to brush scone crumbs off keyboard*
• LACK OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE FILTER I've always had the impression that dietary laws in religion originate when some bigwig gets food posioning or an upset stomach after dinner, then decides that their deity is punishing them, and bans that food. Some religions then denigrate the item, others elevate it. Wouldn't Jews for Jesus really be for Jewish people who accept Jesus as the Messiah? They'd still live by the old laws, celebrate Passover, Yom Kippur, etc, but acknowledge Jesus's teachings. I understand that he did advocate a separation of temple and state, therefore upsetting the old order and po'ing off the establishment, but how far did he go in denying the past? Wasn't it Paul and the other disciples who said they could ignore the old laws and customs if they accepted Jesus?
• Now I get to talk from complete lack of religious knowledge - who is Mary Douglas? I'm curious. I had heard the rumour (and I do acknowledge it to be n-hand, randomly heard, no actual evidence handy information) that Jews for Jesus might be supported (eg financially) by certain very evangelical Christian sects. Personally, I find all evangelism somewhat distasteful. If you have to schill for your club, it must not be such a great club to get into.
• wikipedia is our friend, jb.
• When one of the major tenets of your religion is that it is necessary to produce converts, then yes, it's easy to see an agenda in all of this, especially if funds are exchanging hands. I propose that athiests start knocking on people's doors on a Saturday morning at 8 am and ask, "Have you made Darwin your personal basis for reality?"
• G's for Jewses?
• wikipedia is our friend, jb. posted by the quidnunc kid at 04:41PM UTC on August 07, 2006 Yeah, but then I'll just get sucked in, and waste even more time not working. Also, you all are so much more entertaining in your explanations. butter 'em up - flatter them, and they will do my research for me! this is a good plan
• okay - two seconds of wikipedia later - that sounds like an interesting theory, though I still have to wonder what the Canaanite diet was like and whether there is any reaction against it.
• Jews for Jesus might be supported (eg financially) by certain very evangelical Christian sects. I don't know about financially, but evangelical denominations *love* messianic Jews. They show up at Promise Keepers meetings stuff like that. The feeling I got when I was still among the fold was it allowed them to feel like they were religiously tolerant -- see? They're Jews, and we like 'em!
• you all are so much more entertaining in your explanations (That's very kind but, )sorry - perhaps I have been a bit not-enough-meaningful there. I mean "I don't know much about her apart from what I google, and her book what I ain't read all of yet" (Hence, OUR friend!) I still have to wonder what the Canaanite diet was like and whether there is any reaction against it I seem to recall there is some discussion in there of that too, and your idea of differentiation of social groups via what they eat. Actually I find I've been a bit too brief in this thread. What I really wanted to suggest was that the idea that biblical dietary laws were promulgated for "health" reasons is one that I have heard a lot, and (due to laziness, perhaps) always assumed had some merit, and then I stumbled across some work that suggested the whole situation is much more complex and interesting, and your comments reminded me of that work, and I wonder if anyone else knows of more research/thinking/interesting writing on that topic (and Wolof, at least, has).
• This reminds me of that episode of the Twilight Zone [and doesn't everything remind me of the Twilight Zone?] where the people of some unnamed town in the atomic war aftermath were relying on the "old man in the cave" to tell them that their food was safe to eat. The people did not question the authority of the old man in the cave. Later, after the eventual uprising, it is discovered that the old man in the cave was actually a machine that measured the radioactive levels of the food the people were eating. Of course, they figured this fact out after they had decided to consume food that they were told was unsafe by the old man in the cave. I wish Rod Serling had been my uncle. What great Christmases we would have had!
• From what I remember of Kristeva (my books are still packed, and Douglas is still on my "to be read" list) there is something to the idea that we use taboos to separate ourselves from groups that we want to make "Other" in some way (ie, they are our enemy, they are bad, we are good, etc.). So if the Cananites were pork eaters, and were less nomadic, and worshipped a different diety, then the ancient Israelites could separate themselves further (since they were already more nomadic and monotheistic) by refusing to eat the diet of their enemies. Kristeva and Douglas agree that things are not "dirty" or "bad" in and of themselves, but only because of the cultural meanings we attach to them -- things are "dirty" for a cultural reason that "works" for us. If the diet of the enemy is turned into the cultural equivalent of dirt (or, as Kristeva says, shit) then so is the person who eats it. I hope this makes sense. I'm far more familiar with Kristeva's work on menstrual taboos from Powers of Horror than on foods. Also, I don't think that this view is incompatible with the health and sanitation view. In fact, each gives the other more power... as Quid says, it's complicated.
• Just misread the sidebar link to this thread as "Jaws for Jesus." Hey, DeLay is certainly a shark, so it ain't so far-fetched....
• I have the most delicious image of Uncle Rod popping out from behind the plum pudding and scaring us all to death, then taking all our presents and trading them for cigarettes.
• ...or trading them for creepy Jacks-in-the-box, or two-headed gophers, or pig-faced masks...
• Why was pork an important meat for Europe for millenia? Several reasons, jb, probably the foremost of which is the nature of Pig itself. Unlike a cow or a sheep or goat, or a horse, who can barely manage to raise a pair of offspring, a sow will usually drop a fair number of piglets when she farrows. One or two dozen at a time is not uncommon these days, though I suspect farrows were smaller way back, (just a supposition, though because breeds weren't so specialized then as they are now). Pigs are omnivores, and will cheerfully eat all sorts and wastes that otherwise end up in kitchen middens and would only have been fit for dressing the fields. Further, if allowed to run loose they could forage in the woodlands and eat things like acorns which have only been a popular people-food in times of war and famine. (Trust me: acorns are very bitter!) In the farmer's phrase, pigs are 'thrifty' animals to keep. (Also hard to fence, being clever, strong, and persistent devils.) That milk ye couldn't get churned before it went off in the heat? Well, just give it to the pigs. Pigs aren't specialized feeders - they will even eat things like mushrooms that most cows and no horses acknowledge to be edible. So ye didn't have to have hayfields and/or sizeable grain-storage to keep the old sow thropught the winter till spring, when she'd present ye with another batch of piglets. Talk about a wise investment way back!
• those are all good reasons, bees, but wouldn't they also be good reasons for someone in the middle east? Why rule out entire survival strategies? (The seafood one is actually more crazy, considering how important seafood can be to survival in coastal areas). I guess I never found the potential dangers strong enough to outweight the advantages.
• Thing about seafood is, it goes bad really quickly. I suspect the difference between the hot Middle Eastern climate and the colder European weather would have made a lot of difference to food safety. With regard to the origins of Jewish food laws, as well as a host of other Judaica, I know a newly-joined monkey who could give us the lowdown: MiriyaB, I invoke thee!
• To further play Devil's Advocate from a position of pure ignorance - seafood would go bad faster in hot weather, but is it that much faster than fish (which is allowed by Kosher law)? And what about all the very hot other places which happily eat all sorts of seafood? I know of China, southern Japan - but also India? Africa? The Carribean? South America? So any of these places traditionally eschew seafood?
• Depending on the humidity, you can dry or smoke your fish. Storing your fish in salt works, too, especially if you live in an area with a salt flat nearby. However, most of the above makes for nasty-tasting fish.
• Mmmmmmmmmm... seafood.
• Monkeyfilter: To further play Devil's Advocate from a position of pure ignorance Wait, wait a minute... FISH isn't SEAFOOD? It's FOOD from the SEA!
• The English used to dry their cod, while the French had a "wet" salting way of preserving it. The English didn't eat their cod though - they sold much of it to Spain and Portugal, because English people preferred red meat. Elizabeth tried to keep up the bans on eating mean during lent (and fridays?), to support the fishing industry, but I don't know how much past her reign it lasted.
• (pointless facts, remembered from an undergraduate lecture. This is the sort of thing filling up my brain, so I can't seem to get anything important done.)
• Mmmmm.... dried cod.
• Yes, Good Queen Bess's long, prosperous reign is often referred to as "The Cod Peace."
• Now, that's a reign I can get behind. Or in front of, as it were.
• For a very interesting and non-wacko take on the matter, monkeys are directed to Irving Layton's book of poetry For My Brother Jesus (1976). He writes to reclaim Jesus' Jewish identity, to place Jesus back within the Jewish society he was addressing, and also better expose anti-Semitism within Christianity itself. Highly recommended.
• I'm currently reading Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and he does a great job of showing Jesus's thinking as being a kind of discourse with Judaism and his Jewishness. Fascinating book; filled with both poetic beauty and a kind of no-nonsense sharpness.