h a l f b a k e r y"Put it on a plate, son. You'll enjoy it more."
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Not only have I read it but it forms a major part of my first degree
dissertation. |
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Leviticus is the best book in the OT! |
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There's not a lot of laughs in it. Well, there are, but
not on purpose. |
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[+} But, replace "Leviticus" with "the entire bible",
and "Physics" with "Anglican State Policy", and you
have the King James Bible in ~1600. |
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The only point being: "Clandestine editing to suit
your purpose" is a very common, old game indeed.
The only new thing here is adding physics. |
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However, I fear the backlash would be for the
science haters out there to just have more
ammunition to say, "Science is just another religion,
& thus has to be taught like a (heretic) religion, not
a mandatory class without challenges". |
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I like Hitchens, & other's tweaks, which are more
playful, such as "May contain nuts", "This work is
fiction", etc. |
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Yes, a [-] from me, because this dangerously starts to suggest an equivalence between physics
(evidence-based, testable, internally consistent, able to change over time as new findings are made) and religion (faith-based, not testable, inconsistent, dogmatic). |
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If you stare at the book of Leviticus long enough, it becomes disturbingly rational. |
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The more startling parts generally fall under one of two headings, namely, things which reduce financial inequality (short of communism) and things which reduce sexual competition (short of celibacy). |
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More generally, it seems to be about group cohesion - and about keeping the group focused outward, on problems of survival and of engagement with a world much larger and more powerful than that one little community, instead of focused inward, on status competition and on keeping track of who's had whom. |
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Now, if you tell me that the people who wrote it and the people who listened to it were delusional morons, I won't contradict you - but, in that case, it may be said that their rules were, in a slightly creepy sense, more intelligent than they were. I got a similar feeling about some of the staff of IBM when I worked there in the 1990s (not that that none of them were intelligent, but that the intelligence of the organisation didn't really reside in or rely on the individuals). |
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Anyway, to falsify this text is a bad idea because it is a falsification of a primary historical source. It is a primary historical source because even it, for the sake of argument, we suppose that not a word of it is true, the fact that a particular group of people had these rules over a long period of time is a significant fact in itself, not least because their group survival indicates that, at some level, the rules worked. |
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Abraham Maslow thought that if you were on the right side of history, then you ought to be allowed to cheat at science. He turned out to be wrong, and his very influential wrongness on this point is one of the major root causes of disappointment in disappointed old Baby Boomers. Being on the right side of history does not make it all right to cheat at science, and does not make it all right to cheat at historiography, either - and cheating at historiography (and at science) is what this idea tries to do. |
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Now, if you could somehow trick people into reading the text, as it stands, more intelligently, *that* would be an idea... but I don't know how you could do that. |
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... Actually, I do, but it's rather over-complex and over-ambitious. |
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