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I'm from Israel, and while I don't personally abide by any religious rules, I do come into contact with people who do and have an idea: it is important to under
by orisho 5y ago
I'm from Israel, and while I don't personally abide by any religious rules, I do come into contact with people who do and have an idea: it is important to understand that most people do not follow these rules as a functional method to achieve some goal. For example, it's not like they're actively thinking "oh if I press this button on Sabbath then I'll go to hell, and I wanna go to heaven so I won't".
Instead, they're following these rules as a social decree. In their circles, it is the obvious and accepted thing to do to follow these rules, which the community's leading Rabbi sets (or well, gives guidelines which are socially considered binding). If you don't follow the rules, then you're a weird one, and religious communities tend not to be accepting of the different, so they will shun you for turning on the light on Sabbath (if you keep doing it..)
So for one born into a religious community, you're taught to do so and there is a strong social incentive to do so: if you don't, you're first branded an odd one, and in some cases shunned, depending on how severe your straying off the path is. If you were told that were you to use the elevator normally, your parents would be very upset with you and may stop talking to you altogether, you'd think about it twice, even if you don't personally feel that you want to follow Judaism.
Finally, the religious authorities have a power incentive to do this: by setting rules and maintaining their position as the authorities who set rules, they keep a lot of power over a large number of people. Often this even manifests financially, as a respected religious authority can give Kosher certificates (and many products which are not food, like phones, can also be Kosher) - of course, the certification costs money, just like a SOC2 audit. Same goes for Sabbath certified electric devices - someone gave their stamp of approval, and the developer paid for it.
So to summarize - religious authorities enjoy power and money by being those who set the rules, everyday people have a strong social incentive to follow the rules as breaking them is taboo.
I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it.
But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to.
I'd like to point out that this isn't all there is to it - there are very obviously other incentives to do things this way (e.g. personal belief), but I'm just trying to make an analogy with terms from the HNer's day to day to show why you might follow religious rules even if you're (say) a teenager who doesn't care one bit.
- tovmeod 5y ago> religious authorities enjoy power and money That sounds racist and offensive, and like you are just repeating anti-religious propaganda
- andybak 5y agoIt sounded perfectly reasonable to me bordering on "blindingly obvious" Also "racist" is a weaponized word and I think the use of it here weakens any case you might have had.
- reissbaker 5y agoI think this is a bit of an overstatement. In my experience — I'm an athiest who doesn't follow any particular religious rules either, but I was raised Orthodox Jewish — most Orthodox Jews do truly believe in God, and believe that at some level they'll be punished for breaking the rules and rewarded for following them. It's true that teenagers who haven't yet left home might be going through the motions cynically — when I was in high school, I was — but that's generally not true of adults: if you don't believe, when you leave home (either for college in the US, or army in Israel), it's fairly easy to "fall off the derech" and stop practicing now that you're free to find your own community. That might not be true in some of the ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel that are exempt from army service, or the Yiddish-speaking communities in America where there's a language barrier preventing you from interacting with the rest of the world, but for most religious Jews there's a pretty strong element of true belief. Religious Jews are a pretty tiny minority in the world; if you don't believe, it's pretty easy to find something else to believe in or to have a community around. > I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it. But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to. In general there are a huge swaths of rules in Judaism that are expected even within Orthodox Judaism to serve no practical purpose, other than simply God (supposedly) said to follow them. If you believe that God said you can eat a goose, but you cannot eat a stork, why is it any more ridiculous to believe God said you must not light a fire on Shabbat? It's all kind of silly unless you believe in the fundamental premise that these are rules from God, in which case none of it is silly. In the Orthodox communities I was raised in, the idea of a checkbox that you feel silly complying with didn't really exist: either you believed in the premise that God really wanted you to check those checkboxes, or you didn't, at which point why were you not eating shellfish or driving on Shabbat? There are social norms too, of course. But at least for religious adults, in my experience it's mostly uncynical.