Capybaras are classified as fish in Catholic canon law, on the grounds that they spend their lives in water. I’m guessing that a party of conquistadors was on the verge of starvation and got their priest to petition the Vatican to issue a retroactive ruling in their favour.
Iirc, both Jewish and Islamic law are explicit that if you can break kosher/eating halal if you have no other options for food. Keeping yourself alive is more important.
Is there not something similar in catholic theology?
In Catholic doctrine you can break literally all rules except denouncing the holy spirit, if you confess and repent afterwards.
I’m kinda tempted to go to a catholic priest, tell them my full life story and see if they could even come up with penance for me. Like as a gay trans man, I imagine I’d be told to detransition but I’m far enough along that I can’t really go back - I’m not even sure what they’d consider a sin at this point.
The current pope is pretty lenient towards LGBTQ+ compared to most other religions and especially compared to old school Catholic pope’s. Jesus was a man of peace and the current pope seems to think that was his ultimate message for mankind.
Not a Catholic but fairly knowledgeable about the religion. I believe your transition would be accepted as long as you don’t live in sin by performing any acts of sodomy. The Catholics study theology relentlessly, and I’m sure they already had a way of dealing with the fair number of intersex babies born without dooming them to a life spent in unintentional sin.
The church has never expressed an issue with homosexuality, only homosexual acts. And even those acts aren’t a sin due to the homosexual intent, they’re a sin because of the sodomy.
Remember though, sodomy is a blanket term here for “sex acts not capable of producing children” so for you that would be… All of them I suppose.
I suspect that the suggested answer would be the one they give to all gay men, for you to live as a man, but be celibate. Devote your life to God, maybe even become a monk back in the old days. A lot of monks were “confirmed bachelors”
What what? Are you saying I can denounce “the holy spirit” and no catholic ever gets to bother me again? Not even theoretically? That is great! Also, woud the church become sinners themselves if they know about one of their members denouncing and they proceed to collect church tax? Nice loophole if ;)
You can save yourself from all of them, there is no irredeemable sin in any Christ based faith. Only ones that need more explaining, hedging and tithing than others.
You’re always a sinner anyway in catholics.
If you want to get really technical, in Jewish theory there’s an argument in the Talmud or Mishrad that says that as long as the dish is less than 1/16 or 1/32 (something like that,) of the non halal meat, then it can be considered kosher as well
I’m not Jewish, I just studied religions for a while. Someone who is Jewish can correct me on the proper percentage
I am Jewish, but the only way I will correct you is by saying it’s a bunch of centuries-old religious nonsense that has nothing to do with actual nutritional science.
I don’t have a source for this but I had been told it was in an attempt to try to convert Venezuelans to Catholicism
You don’t like the religion?
Here, we made the big dog a fish, are you happy now?
I can’t believe all this religious people that pull off these loopholes really believe in a god…
If it really exists, it’s gonna bust your ass.
In some religious traditions, it’s not believed that they’re loopholes, or cheating.
If the written rules are the precise literal words of your deity who can make no errors, then if something is technically allowed it’s allowed on purpose.
The deity wouldn’t make a mistake or try to trick people into following a rule that wasn’t written.Yahweh says no tending a fire on Saturday. Alright, what is “fire”? Is electricity fire? Is it a prohibited labor? Time to think.
God says no eating creatures of the land or sky. Well, otters aren’t of the land or sky, so fair game.
Allah says no pork unless your life depends on it. Is processed porcine collagen still pork if it’s used in artificial heart valves? What level of chemical transformation is required to remove the “pork-ness”?The belief that a deity cares about the spirit of the the written rules and not the words is itself a religious belief.
Which, in some religions, means it’s open to debate to figure out exactly what it means. :PThat thinking only works if you don’t realize that it’s all in interpretation, its not a loophole persay it’s a series of loopholes you sorta work around and jump through.
Loophole to me means that you found a way to cheat the system.
If you believe your deity is entirely onboard with being a rules lawyer, then finding clever ways to do things while following the rules is just “following the rules”.
If your deity says no firestarting on a Saturday, so you start it on Friday to use Saturday, why would you be in trouble for following the rules?So if I get some to agree that fire is only flame from wood grown from trees native to Israel, then I can barbecue on Saturday and it’s Kosher.
( The idea being that if rules are allowed to be interpreted, then they can be interpreted into anything. If electricity is fire (many Jewish sects say yes), then my sect can say oxidized propane isn’t fire and also be correct.
Yup, that tracks. As you mentioned, there are disagreements about the exact meaning and consequences of the prohibition already, so if you can find source material to back your argument, you can argue it.
They don’t view it as interpretation, but as closer to a legal argument. There’s the written law, and that’s what matters, the deity won’t judge you based on unwritten laws, because their goal was to write down the criteria that you’ll be judged by and the rules you need to follow, not to judge you based on your ability to infer the intent of the rules based on what they told you. Similar to how, when you go to court in the legal system, you’re judged by the law as written, not by the intent of the congressperson who proposed the law.The belief that it’s the spirit that matters and not the letter of the law is itself a religious belief derived from early Christian rejection of the legalistic aspects of Judaism. It’s why so many people in this thread have such a “well of course you’re not supposed to debate the semantics of your religion, you’re supposed to know what God meant and do that instead”. Same for when someone “cheats” the legal system to “escape punishment” by “getting off on a technically”, since what they did was supposed to be punishable. Legally, that’s called “following the law”, or “making a valid legal argument”.
Some religions and people just don’t hold that belief, and so “what if an argued position clearly subverts the intent of the rule” just isn’t a compelling negative consequence, it’s just part of what happens with debate.It’s got no bearing on either of our points, but I believe the Jewish interpretation isn’t that electricity is fire, generally, but that incandescent lightbulbs violate the prohibition on “igniting a fire”, and that many other applications violate prohibitions on things like “lifting”, “doing work”, or “cooking”.
So electricity isn’t the issue, but rather what you do with it, and even if you argue that it’s only fire if it’s Israeli wood, you’d also have to argue that BBQ wasn’t cooking.Jewish interpretation isn’t that electricity is fire,
Unfortunately that was original the interpretation. It has since been amended into “building a circuit” and/or “doing work” as explanations. Of course neither of those hold up because turning on a water tap or turning a door knob aren’t prohibited.
So there is no basis for following laws. It’s only tradition and tradition can be however you define a word.
BBQ can be declared as not cooking by definition just like turning on a cold water faucet is declared as not work by definition.
I’ll admit that I’m not entirely sure what point you’re arguing anymore. If you think religious law is malleable through argument, then religious law changing after argument or discussion isn’t a problem, it’s just how it works.
Wouldn’t you know, there’s actual debate with citations about faucets and the circumstances In which they’re permitted or not. It’s not “all work” that’s prohibited, but specific categories in certain circumstances. I’m neither a Rabbi, a scholar of talmudic law nor even Jewish so my understanding of the specifics are only about as deep as curiosity has taken me over the years. I don’t think the specifics matter for this discussion.
Yes, there’s nothing actually tangible about any law, religious or otherwise that compells people to follow it beyond cultural momentum. Words lack inherent meaning and it’s only through shared convention that we agree on meaning or order in our society.
No one legit believes any of that shit or they wouldn’t sin in multiple every fucking day.
you reminded me of this as well https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/09/residents-divided-over-plans-for-eruv-in-north-london
One man wrote: “My wife suffered a stroke five years ago. She is no longer able to stand or walk. She is confined to a wheelchair at all times.” An eruv would allow him to take her to the synagogue on Shabbat, he said.
Dude wtf
Can you believe that?
no, but they do
They believe in whatever suits their interests best.
The loopholes were pulled throughout history so people don’t remember the old ways after a couple generation and stop asking why things are changing. If the church kept telling people to fast for 40 days they would have lost a lot more believers way sooner.
The church still tells people to fast for 40 days. I’m in Greece right now visiting my partners family and they’ve just ended their 40 day fast. So not sure where you get that from, unless you’re referring to the Western churches, in which case yes, the fast has been abandoned. But in eastern churches all meat, fish, dairy, egg, alcohol, rich/fatty foods and olive oil (depends on the church that one), is banned and followers are expected to spend those days focusing on their faith, attending church and praying. The very religious restrict themselves to one meal a day after sundown, usually a bean soup of sorts or bread and water (my father in law does this). The faithful are also expected to abstain from things like video games, television etc and engage with family, volunteer and do something for nature and people, but that’s not really followed by many.
Technically they should be abstaining from labor as well.
Any pro-labor aspects of Christianity is always ignored, and abandoned whenever an ancient institutional denomination (Catholic or Orthodox for example) loses actual power against state and more importantly, business.
Oh, that’s nothing compared to what’s going on in Judaism…
My favorite is the string they put all around Manhattan, so that they can trick God into thinking that they’re really at home while running errands on shabbat.
People are different. Some Hasidic groups (like those easy to see in Manhattan of what I’ve heard) do that and even more stupid things, similar to talismans and such. But Judaism frankly doesn’t even have an idea of schism, so.
Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” sent me down a rabbit hole of reading up on all the loopholes, I forget what they’re called now, but they’re pretty fascinating.
Eh, they don’t really view it as “tricking God”, because in their view you can’t trick God.
It’s pretty specific that you’re not allowed to transfer things between “domains” in specific ways, and that a domain is a property of enclosure, not ownership.The intent was clearly to keep people from leaving their communities on the holy day, given that the stories talk about bringing things into and out of Jerusalem being the problem, and use “home” in the context where a new Yorker would reasonably call Manhattan home.
Further, if your religion is literally the source of “the spirit versus the letter of the law” reaction of Christianity, then it follows that your religion might take a more legalistic approach to religious interpretation than the breakaway sect that’s influenced much of the English speaking worlds conceptions of how people should engage with religion.
Eh, they don’t really view it as “tricking God”, because in their view you can’t trick God.
It’s not so much “tricking God” as “shuddup God grown-ups are talking”.
That’s awesome. “God, you specifically gave us a list of rules, one of which says we’re not supposed to listen to unilateral commands from the heavens, so you coming down and giving your opinion on this is kinda out of line” and then God’s just like “<checks notes>…You know what? Fair. Point taken, carry on.”
I love that that’s just a part of the religion, and it pretty clearly underlines the “you’re supposed to think about and debate this stuff” part.
“Herrgottsbscheisserle”
That’s the word you are looking for. We also ate beaver on fridays, they are fish!
Rough translation: “Little god bullshitters”
Maybe “God-foolers”, as in: we’re hiding the meat so god doesn’t know we’re still eating it
Yes. “Bescheisser” is an extra rude way to say cheater.
The suffix -le is the Swabian diminutive, it derives from -lein, but they rarely make the distinction between -lein and -chen. Maybe because, like me, they don’t care about the official grammar on using them (I don’t even know the rules, I would have to look them up lol).
You can also cover the meat in pasta dough so god doesn’t see it
Found the Schwob.
Nett hier
aber
waren Sie
schon mal
in Brandenburg?
Similar energy to drinking in a dimly lit bar makes sure Allah doesn’t see you drinking so it’s fine lol
TIL about swabian ravioli. And now I want some.
Huh so apparently it’s because of Latin?
Quoting an old comment
Fish isn’t considered meat because English and Latin are slightly different languages. For hundreds of years Catholics were not allowed to eat meat on Friday. But the language of the church is Latin, and what Catholics were not allowed to eat is ‘carne’ which is the flesh of creatures from the land or the sky. So fish was fine.
Also. around the mediterrainian, fish is a food staple of the poor. The point is to eliminate excess.
I’d argue that an inlander ordering fish at a fancy restaurant on a Friday during Lent is not following the spirit of the law (which can be more of a discipline than a rule, depending on the local episcopal authority), especially if it’s not a special occasion and the fish was caught hundreds of kilometers away.
The inlander could eat freshwater fish like trout or carp, no fancy saltwater fish.
The point has been missed.
Sorry, I thought it was clear: there was and is also fish ‘Inland’ that is poor people’s food.
Not eating meat on Fridays is an invention of the church. Jesus never said that.
Half the fun of the Christianities is endlessly debating what Jesus did or did not say.
I mean, that’s presumably all written in the Bible. More often than not, the question isn’t what he said but what he meant by it, and there’s certainly no shortage of opinions on that.
I agree that is one of the more common things to debate, probably more common than what he did say. But that’s also only true as long as you confine yourself to the Bible as it exists today. When you look into the history, archeological record, and textual criticism though, things get much more complicated as quite a few more groups wrote about what Jesus was purported to teach than the Catholic and Protestant churches would like you to believe.
Robert Price’s, “Pre-Nicene New Testament” is a good introduction to just how diverse and radically different early Christianity was. Bart Erhman is another great author who clearly cares more about what’s true, than what fits a churches dogma.
Conveniently enough church said beavers are fish so they had meat to eat while others suffer.
abstaining from the consumption of animal flesh isn’t suffering. Quite the opposite.
Spot the vegan.
Implying vegans should be invisible or hard to spot?
Implying any mention of meat you come crawling out of woodwork.
only when it seems to be getting promoted.
For lent, beaver counts as fish
Thats the pickup line I use on devout catholics.
Fish: live in water
Beavers: also live in water
checks out
Some monks also drowned their pigs. They lived in the water until they died, so they are fish
I tried to look this up, but ended up empty-handed. Could you point me in the right direction?
I only found german sources (tabloids, blogs and something from a catholic site), but I don’t know how serious they are. Here the link of the Catholic site:
https://www.katholisch.de/artikel/12474-funf-tricks-zur-fastenzeit
Apparently, they also named pigs “fish”, hence they are then fish too.
Thanks. The article title “tricks for Lent” points to the non-serious nature of it. Plus, it uses the phrase “According to legend” several times and doesn’t even mention the particular monestaries, nor the specific monks involved. I think it’s just meant to be a humorous jab at legalism.
Typically, if practices get so bad that they have to be forbidden by an administrative authority, then you would have some written document forbidding the practice. Although that would acknowledge it wasn’t legitimate to begin with, it would at least suggest the histriocity of it.
