To be fair, that's pretty close to describing the Jewish faith. One fundamental tenet is that God put loopholes there on purpose, and it's the rabbis' duty to debate legalistically to extrapolate what he meant based on what he said. That's why they're called laws. (I was raised jewish, for the record)

One common one that most people have heard of by now since they went viral on youtube a couple years back, is eruvim. Since there's a bunch of rules around how much effort you're allowed to exert on the sabbath (e.g. you're not allowed to move anything from inside your house to outside, or to carry anything heavy more than about half a meter while outside), people hang a wire, called an eruv (plural eruvim), encircling an area ranging from a small neighbourhood to several city blocks to the entire island of Manhattan, proclaiming it to be one big "home", allowing practicing Jews to do anything they're only allowed to do at home, anywhere inside its area.

Another fun one that has a lot of ramifications is that we're not supposed to "start a fire" on sabbath, and rabbi have traditionally declared that turning something electrical on or off is "starting a fire". Because of this, jewish hospitals have elevators that run constantly between floors so people can just walk on without actually pushing a button and causing a circuit to close. Or lightbulbs; for the longest time, the "solution" was just to leave your lights on all saturday in case you needed them, or maybe spring for electronic timers, or just get your goyim buddy to come over and turn em on for you, but with the modern prevalence of LED bulbs, there's now jewish smart lights called "shabulbs" that have internal shutters which cover the LEDs without actually extingishing them, so you can turn it back "on" again without breaking the rules. Some places even sell ovens with a shabbat mode so they stay slightly warm all day and never turn all the way off, don't show the display screen, and don't turn on their internal lightbulb when you open them after sundown on friday! All this because there's a rule against starting fires.

Maybe I got a bit off topic, but my point is, In some ways you might say that finding loopholes in Abrahamic law is practicing religion lol

[–] Sordid@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I've heard stuff like this several times from different sources over the years, but I'm still not convinced it's not some elaborate collective prank. It reads like something written by Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.

[–] Maven@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The really short version is that the jewish belief is that an omniscient god wrote the torah with the complete foreknowledge that people would be debating over its intent in edge cases for the rest of time, and so he wrote exactly what was necessary for rabbis to collectively come to the correct conclusions. If an interpretation would've been wrong, then god would've written that part differently.

Essentially it's D&D rules lawyering

[–] Sordid@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I get that, but at the same time I don't. I mean, it doesn't make sense to me. Expecting endless debate and also expecting correct conclusions to be reached seems contradictory, since once conclusions are reached, debate would cease. This is one of those things that make me feel very uncertain, like when you finish an exam in half the allotted time, watch everyone else keep furiously working, and start questioning whether everyone else is dumb or whether you are and you missed something obvious. I get that feeling a lot when reading/thinking about religion.

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