Goycels seething because they can't find loopholes for the sermon on the mount.

Nobody has shit on the Mormons with their soaking
- Or weird underwear and caffeine rules.
  
  I have been wanting to find some one piece underwaar like that where it buttons to my undershirt
  
  Driving across the US, every state had government signs about drunk driving, Utah was the only state that instead had signs warning about drowsy driving and falling asleep at the wheel
- Plenty of people have been shitting on the Mormons for soaking.
  As they should
- Or the earwig shindigs they get up to
- I'm told by an ex-Mormon I know that soaking isn't real, but what they actually do:
  NCMO - Non-Committal Make Out
  durfing - grinding with your clothes on but they made up a silly name
- What are you talking about? When that news hit Hexbear we clowned on them for days.

I am the one non Jew in a majority orthodox building and I am constantly turning on/off lights and plugging things in for my neighbors.
Every week I feel like a hero
- Is Orthodox Judaism like being Amish or something?
  
  Some Orthodox Jews believe that using electricity violates the prohibition on lighting a fire on the Sabbath, others believe it's fine to do so but don't as part of being pious and respecting Sabbath, others maintain it's a form of doing work and thus prohibited, and some believe it's prohibited only because of popular tradition but with no backing in the Torah.
  
  You get the Amish experience every Saturday
  
  Jews can’t turn on the lights every Saturday because god said they can’t, the Amish dont have lights not because of anything god said, they just don’t like modern technology.
- The concept of "untouchable caste" is so ridiculous to me, like, "oh so I can't date the potter's daughter cuz my father is a butcher and my mom a mortician?, well good luck next time you crave meat or your eleventh child dies of diphteria, you dipshit"
- Idk the rules, but I turned a fridge knob to the coldest setting this Saturday because their kids were messing with it and their food was gonna spoil.

Or things like the wire that goes around Manhattan to make it technically count as "inside" so they can do work during shabbat. It's kinda like doing sovereign citizen stuff but with religion instead of government.
- Yeah that one really feels like bullshit to me. At the very least it’s not indoors if I can look up and see the sky
  
  Yea, I don't understand how someone can honestly think that's a "loophole". At that point, just say the wire actually stretches around the entire world except NYC, and so the entire earth is inside. Go whole hog with it.
  
  But skylights though

Ngl I kinda love that the idea of rules-lawyering God—like, hey God, your word is law, so clearly any loopholes are intentional because you wouldn't make a mistake, right? It's not killing God, but it's something. There's even a story in the Talmud about rules-lawyering God and God being like, "Well damn, ya got me!"
(full disclosure: I am not Jewish and only know about this story from one of those Ace Attorney videos)
- One of the best stories to tell children.
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

I have known and worked with several orthodox jews and the loopholes really are incredible. They all can't use light switches on Shabbat but they can set timers ahead of time, they all have different amounts of time they have to wait in between meat and dairy for it to be considered kosher, married women can't show their hair in public but a wig that looks exactly like their hair is fine, etc. Like why are you trying so hard to skirt these rules that you have imposed on yourselves? They are all a sneeze away from self-awareness but always swing in the other direction instead.
- The purpose of the loopholes is to prevent a confrontation between their incompatible beliefs. Then they'd have to actually follow the rules (looking different from others by covering their hair) or reject them (leave part of their identity and community).
  All religions have these things they're just more obvious when a group is more strict, or at least casts itself as such.

Why go through the trouble of finding loopholes when you can just break rules? What's god gonna do, come down and hit you?
- It's a game. God appreciates you finding the loopholes and finds them amusing to watch.
  
  In a deity's defense, The Sims is a lot more fun when goofy stuff happens.
  
  Is this actual faith doctrine? Why even have hell for other people if rules don't actually matter?
- Well if your God is the Old Testament God... Yes.
  
  But when was the last time he did that after phones with cameras existed?????
- The social purpose of all those idiosyncratic little things is to be a noticeable enough impact that it keeps people thinking about them and being cognizant of them, and if anything spending a huge amount of effort circumventing them without breaking the literal letter of them amplifies that. Like if it's a constant/frequent presence in your mind that makes it real within your schema, it creates a sort of solid scaffolding surrounding and supporting less tangible belief and making it solid in turn.
  This is even more true when, obviously, the rules aren't actually real things enforced by some consistent material power and are instead left up to a group's social conventions or an individual's self-policing. That's where the "light switches count as fire? or maybe work? it's gotta be something. Electric stove coils are definitely fire and work, though," stuff comes from too: their community has decided those things count despite not literally being enumerated by pre-electricity scriptures, and similarly their accepted ways of getting around that problem come from the community as well. So in real, material terms they're not cleverly outfoxing an ancient storm/war god's idiosyncratic demands, they're participating in the shared community standards and practices of their neighbors and friends.

Painting the front of my house to look like a church so that God is happy with how much time I spend there

I love these things as it’s almost a comedy of thinking too hard about everything.

Jokes on them; God made those loopholes to test them.

I'm genuinely curious about some of these. I think the light stuff is related to rules about not laboring on the Shabbot - historically they would not build fires on Saturdays, right? I'm guessing the wigs are for technically covering her hair while still presenting like someone who isn't wearing a head covering.
- I think the light stuff is about not starting of extinguishing fires, and electric lights are considered "fire" to ultra Orthodox Jews. So turning the light switch on is starting a fire, and turning it off is extinguishing one. The oven thing could also be to do with that, as anything that produces heat could also be seen as starting a fire. 5 seconds of research that I did states:
  In addition to the general forbidding of all manner of work on the Sabbath, there is a special prohibition against making a fire (Exod. 35:3). The Rabbis considered this to include everything that pertains to the kindling of light, even if no actual work is involved. In modern times, there is a controversy regarding whether the switching on of electric lights and appliances is equivalent to making a fire.
  ...Orthodox Jews do not use electric appliances on the Sabbath, believing that the prohibition against kindling a fire was not based on the physical effort involved in rubbing two stones together to produce a spark but rather on the thought and planning that resulted in its generation.
  For the Hazon Ish, the activation of an electric current and its transmission to sources of power, heat, and light that is produced by turning on a switch is forbidden because it falls under the category of “building” — intentionally causing something to happen. An exception is the refrigerator, which may be opened and closed because any electric current that this produces is incidental and without conscious intent. However, many observant Jews unscrew the refrigerator bulb for the Sabbath.
  Lights that have been kindled before the Sabbath, such as the Sabbath candles, are allowed, as are an oven for keeping previously cooked food warm and a burner to keep water warm for coffee or tea. Similarly, it is permitted to leave an electric appliance running during the Sabbath and to use a timer to automatically turn an appliance on or off, as long as the timer is set before the Sabbath begins.
  Exodus 35:3
  You shall kindle no fire throughout your settlements on the sabbath day.
  
  So basically, what counts as work and fire is largely vibes-based? Neat.

How does this not cause cognitive dissonance? The rules would not have loopholes if it were designed by an omniscient god. If they actually believed, the "loopholes" shouldn't matter because they would want to follow God's will and not find excuses to ignore it in the first place. This is just an exercise in constantly manipulating and trimming passages to fit them into modern society because they're not willing to give up conveniences but they still want the perceived superiority of being holy.
Everything about this points to either it's not real or they don't even believe it. Would God actually be fooled by "Oh well I convinced myself I didn't have to follow this rule because XYZ". It sure sounds like you're engaging in behavior for fear of not fitting in rather than love of God.
- The purpose of the loopholes is to allow yourself to do the thing you want to do, without feeling bad about it. Since God is omniscient, then any "loophole" you find in the divine rules must therefore be put there with the express purpose of allowing you to do whatever you found the loophole for.
- Soaking
  
  If I were the Abrahamic God I would sentence soakers to double hell. Not only did you violate my rules, you violated sex itself which I also made. To the 4th cold Naraka with you
- Yep you can either be a religious fanatic living in opposition to the world, or you can be more secular and less literal and be part of it. These people want both. They want the advantages of being seen as holy and righteous and above the world, but they also want to be part of it and benefit from its comforts. It is truly an exercise in cognitive dissonance.
  Christians have the "loophole" of repentance and atonement and just needing to believe in Jesus, so they can freely sin and not feel bad about it since nothing sticks to your permanent record. Ultra-religious jews do this instead because they don't have a magical "erase" button for their sins built into their doctrine.

Leaving religion was one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life, I'm so glad I'm not like these people anymore, constantly having to follow a set of contradictory rules in order to chase an ideal of perfection that's impossible just so I could get a reward after I'm dead lol.
- I still remember my first moment of disbelief was when I was in Sunday School, probably around five or six years old and the nun was telling us about how prayer was when we talked with God
  Me, being an autistic-as-hell little kid said "But I never hear anything back"
  The nun goes "Well, you don't always, that's not how prayer works"
  And I just bust our with a, "then what's the point? Why bother?"
  They made me sit in the corner for an hour, which was fine because I just played Mega Man on my Game Boy with no sound on
  
  I didn't even have the mental capacity to refute anything, it was always strict obedience. Happens when you're in an echo chamber; they have to get you while you're young so you accept everything as fact and never question anything, it's really disgusting and creepy
- I'm sorry this has been your experience. For me, religion and spirituality have become some of my most important tools to be grounded in space, time, and community. Rout, spiritually dead rules-following is horrible though. I wish more people had experience of religion that is not that.
  
  Nah, no need to be sorry, I'm very glad I got away from it. It did absolutely nothing for me, nevermind the fact that it was used to enslave and colonize Afrika, where queerphobia exists in some Afrikan countries even today because of it.
  Nothing good comes from religion that we humans can't get without it. Morality, community, fellowship, can all exist without religion, without the existence of an imaginary being or a need to attribute it to nature.
  Glad it worked for you tho. 👍🏿