Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server
jewjewjew.com
jewjewjew.com
As several others have mentioned, there is absolutely no problem with keeping a server running on the sabbath - computers aren't Jews (Jewish law only expects Jews to keep the sabbath). If it's Jews working to generate the electricity (most "modern" or "yeshivish" Orthodox Jews don't believe this is a problem; I don't know what fraction of "ultra-" Orthodox Jews disagree with that), any public cloud outside of Israel should suffice. If you're concerned with electricity, why not worry that Jews may be working to maintain the server's internet connection (again, this is trivially solved by not hosting it in Israel - all it takes is a non-Jewish majority to provide a reasonable presumption that the workers probably aren't Jewish)?
If you're worried about Jewish users accessing it on the sabbath (in my opinion the least far-fetched concern, but not one addressed by the site), the complete solution would be to shut it down for ~49 hours every week starting from ~sunset on Friday in east Asia - this doesn't require using batteries or really anything special about the site's hardware or even software.
Finally, why call it a 'kosher' search engine when almost anyone interested in such a thing would understand that as being about filtering the search results?
Edit: If you assume that using electricity and/or internet that are maintained by Jews on the sabbath is a problem, I guess you might be able to make a case for avoiding indexing sites in Israel or at all during the sabbath, since then you'd be benefitting indirectly from the work of the Jews that maintained the infrastructure - however, I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of the internet is not served using infrastructure actively supported by Jews during the sabbath so even assuming you're concerned about this, the final answer would probably still be that indexing during the sabbath is fine.
>You have three pieces of meat, two kosher, one not. You lose track of which is which. Can you eat them? Answer, according to (my memory of Sternberg’s account of) the Talmud: Each individual piece of meat has a 2/3 chance of being kosher. So if you choose one of them and ask “Is this kosher?”, a “yes” answer gives you a 2/3 chance to be right and a “no” answer gives you only a 1/3 chance to be right. A 2/3 chance is better than a 1/3 chance, so you should say yes. Repeat three times and you’re allowed to eat all of the meat.
>There is much that is troubling here, because that strategy actually gives you a 100% chance of eating a non-kosher piece of meat, so it matters whether you inquire about each piece separately or whether you inquire about all three as a group. I’m not sure what principle the Talmud invokes to settle that issue. But that’s not the point that concerns us here. The point here is that we’re instructed to focus strictly on probabilities, without regard to any measure of how bad it would be to be wrong in either direction.
>You’re traveling to town with a left pocket full of coins designated for charity and a right pocket full of coins designated for your personal expenses. (In certain circumstances, you’re required to designate these coins in advance, and cannot substitute a coin from one pocket for a coin from the other, even if they’re otherwise identical.) You fall off your horse, and the coins all spill out into one great heap.
>If there were more coins in your left pocket to begin with, then each individual coin has a greater-than-fifty-percent chance to be a charity coin, so each individual coin must be given to charity. If there were more in your right pocket, you can spend all the coins on yourself.
>You take in an abandoned child. Should you raise him as a Jew? It depends on whether he was born as a Jew. Suppose you don’t have that information. Answer: If the majority of your neighbors are Jewish, you assume he’s Jewish. If not, not.
>(A later commentary amends this prescription by directing your attention not to the majority of your neighbors but to a majority of those neighbors who are of such character that they would abandon a child.)
A simple example example is one can't mix milk and meat at all apriori. But if accidentally mixed a small amount of milk into a meat dish (example: one wasn't thinking and took a spoon directly from a milk pot directly into a meat dish), it would be permitted posteriori. But that's only because the act wasn't intentional.
p.s. You may know this, but from the religious POV, you are either Jewish or not, there's no 1/8th Jewish. If your mother was Jewish, you are too, all the way up your family tree. Either that or if you converted. :)
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/all-europeans-are-relate...
There is no "the religious POV" and for some purposes, it seems practically and morally compelling to use a similar definition to what persecutors of Jews use, rather than a traditional religious one.
According to the Wikipedia article on Israel's Law of Return, in 1970, it was extended to people with one Jewish grandparent or married to a Jew.
"There are several explanations for the decision to be so inclusive. One is that as the Nuremberg Laws did not use a halakhic definition in its definition of "Who is a Jew", the Law of Return definition for citizenship eligibility is not halakhic either. Another explanation is the 1968 wave of immigration from Poland, following an antisemitic campaign by the government. These immigrants were very assimilated and had many non-Jewish family members."
Then sunset comes and everyone comes out. If you travel to Israel, plan for it!
A pizza truck.
The only day I’d say things really shutdown is Christmas Day, but even then many grocery stores have limited hours (open from 9am to 2pm).
But Israel truly stops. No buses, no trains, no stores, no restaurants. In the town of 50,000 we were in, we found 1 single fast food place.
I would question that conclusion. There have been times in the past I've wanted to order from B&H, but could not because it was on the Sabbath. In most cases, I just keep looking until I found the item on a different website.
I'm sure they consider the loss of business worthwhile to comply with their religion, but there is a cost.
It may be less than you suspect because the regular bubble in their ordering pipeline might give them time to deal with suppliers, maintain stock, improve their website, maintain systems, relax and refocus, etc.
I doubt it works out better than not doing it at least economically, but there may be enough benefit to offset most of the costs.
The times I've run into the B&H sabbath outage, I just waited and ordered later. There are more thing in my life than just ordering things as fast as possible, and I respect a business for having other priorities. (Plus, B&H is just generally a really good supplier)
On a purely personal level, it's not so much the speed as it is the need to get it done and move on with my life. If I need to order something, I want to just do it and forget about it for a few days (or whatever) until it arrives in the mail. If I have to come back later, that's one more thing for my mental to-do list.
the thing is, the bubble they have includes not doing anything on this list :)
Save twenty bucks by placing the order tonight instead of right now? Sure, why not.
I also find it charming that they've managed to become a massive retailer while sticking to their religious values, although there are plenty of examples of that in other chains in the US that don't sit as well with me, personally (Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, etc).
It does seem like electricity gets a huge carveout though as long as the initial startup wasn't initiated on the Sabbath. One sees that with Sabbath elevators where all the buttons are on and you can walk on without pushing a button and walk off at the correct floor. It still consumes electricity, you're just not making a spark to initiate the work.
work is in quotes, as it doesn't mean doing a job. it also doesn't mean the physics meanin.
As the simplest example: take rabbis in a synagogue. They are doing their jobs.
Another more complicated example: there's no fundamental difference between what an individual can do to prepare a meal they are serving on the sabbath and what caterers can do. Both can't do things defined as "work", but obviously the caterers are doing their job.
Then there's is the whole interplay between biblical law and rabbinic law
This is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that Borer (separating/filtering) is one of the forbidden categories of work.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/StoreInfo.jsp
> Online Checkout Hours
> Open 24/6
> Online checkout will be closed while we observe Shabbat from 8:15pm ET Fri until 9:45pm ET Sat. Although online ordering is unavailable, you may still add items to your cart or wish list.
Kind of an awesome shop. Ever been there?
I have to believe that they have spent a great deal of time considering Talmudic law and all that (I am non-jewish, so I am not aware of the niceties).
It may have to do with the "making money" thing, during Shabbat.
I respect them for that.
I always found their stance to be one of integrity instead of self-righteousness. They are situated in a little enclave - see HN articles about the Eruv, etc. - and are quite genuine and not exclusive to their Jewishness, but simply have a community and a point of view.
The no-shabbat-order-processing feels less like "we don't make the machines make money for us" than it feels like "Look, you can shop online, but we're not gonna load it and ship it until we get back from our families."
Like how I interpret the intentions of that commandment, it forces Photographers to think ahead and plan for that service outage. I may or may not encourage Rest, but again, the commandments weren't for the Egyptians.
That interpretation doesn't make much sense to me. Unless there's a human actually validating each order individually right as you checkout, you could just have a note saying there won't be any shipping on saturday. Or even that orders only ship mon-fri. And nobody would find it surprising.
Other commenters' hypothesis (against doing business on shabbat) make a lot more sense, a checkout would in fact be "doing business" even if the business does that on its own it's still in your name and under your responsibility.
The tradition of the Shabbat goy is interesting here, and suffice to say there are lots of gray area room for interpretation.
There's a reason so many Jews go into law. :)
Many (most?) of their warehouse workers are not Jews- B&H has been sued in the past for discrimination: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170814
Which is too bad- their showroom in the city is like tech Disney. I definitely have mixed feelings about buying from them now.
It's awesome.
[1] https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/108332/what-make...
I've been interested in the idea of having a user-facing website that generates static copies of its dynamic content on a set schedule. Do any of you have more examples of this?
About this particular search engine, though, the search results I received from it either were not very relevant or the service did not display information that made them seem relevant (such as a snippet of text from the page — it did this occasionally but not always).
You can do this relatively easily using Github actions. For example, https://oliverjam.es/blog/schedule-netlify-github-actions/
Sophistry.
The whole purpose of a computer is to manipulate electricity, it is what electronic computers do.
Perhaps it really is kosher (I have no idea, I'm not Jewish and I'm not well informed about what kosher really means) but whatever it is or is not, it is quite certainly not true that 'This computer does not physically manipulated electricity.'
Perhaps the author actually meant something else, if so I'm curious as to what that might be.
Presumably the inclusion of the superfluous word physically means something to the author. To me (B. Sc. Physics) there is no need to include the word because all manipulation of electricity is physical, there is no other kind.
apply to a computer: one can let it keep on doing what it is doing, but he owner wouldn't manipulate it.
Does anyone know if there is some significance to it being calculated on Tuesday? Since Shabbat is from Friday to Saturday I would have picked Sunday or Monday.
Note that assuming UTC reference point you need to bleed into sunday: Kiribati is on UTC+14, and you need to wait until some time after sunset (stars should be visible).
Though that makes me wonder how shabbat works in northerly latitude, how does shabbat work within the arctic circle?
It also means one can pray the afternoon, evening, and morning prayers one after the other.
Only if you exclude the creative and entertainment value of this work. In which case you have described most art.
i.e. there's a concept that if one is going to get on a boat that is going to be sailing over the sabbath, one should get on sunday-tuesday. not wed-friday (saturday would obviously be an issue).
if i had to guess, that is the logic here.
That does sometimes lead to a weird performative "more kosher than thou", which I don't believe is really healthy but every community has equivalent behavior. The finger wagging isn't about protecting their immortal soul, but merely making yourself to be the best at the arbitrary rules and therefore somehow to be most beloved by the community.
That being said, what you described in your second paragraph does happen, yes. Though not everyone who engages in it has the motives you ascribe to them. Some are sincerely trying to do the will of God as best they can.
> It's not a sin to fail to keep kosher
Well, it is for a Jew, but not for a non-Jew. We don't say that non-Jews need to keep our laws, other than a few very very basic ones likes not to murder. Non-Jews can still have an afterlife without keeping kosher.
Jews and other folks that keep Torah do not kindle a flame on the Shabbat. For those who are very strict about keeping God's commandments (basically orthodox Jews), they avoid anything that would create a spark. This spark is like a very tiny, short lived flame. Any time physical electronic contacts join together (like when turning on a light switch), the argument is that there's a very small spark that occurs. The same would happen with the electric contacts in a motor, such as the motor inside CPU fans, desktop power supplies, and platter hard drives. By running on this physical hardware, they're avoiding breaking the Sabbath as much as possible.
source: I'm a gentile Christian that tries to keep the Torah. So I'm more familiar with Jewish laws than the average person, but don't quote me too much.
I've often wondered if "spark" is only considered in the electromechanical sense. Driving a tesla might be ok, since it uses brushless motors that are electronically commutated and has no electromechanical switches or brushes to speak of.
If anyone is about to take this seriously, check out how a transistor works. It most certainly manipulates electricity. The cpu in that computer has about a billion transistors.
Is there a rabbi here to enlighten us?
A specific segment of Jews (namely Ultra-Orthodox) have quite a complicated relationship with the internet. On one hand, that community has experienced the positives of this technology, but they also VERY much discuss the fears and downsides.
So this site can be a seen as trying to wiggle into that tough space of getting use out of it, but in an "acceptable" way.
Here's another example I found by a quick google search: https://koshercell.org/
But in Israel there's also a well-known ISP that filters the internet for you (and your household): https://www.linkedin.com/company/internet-rimon/
I agree about the rest of the infrastructure though.
But you have to agree on some standard what "work" and "fire" is, though. You can't cease all electron movement from Friday to Sunday.
Rabbinic Judaism expanded this to the Jews doing "work" for you. Since this server is hosted in Israel and there are Jews who work for electric company on Sabbath. In addition the he doesn't want the server to work so he has it "work" only on a day when there isn't Sabbath anywhere in world.
The machine can work at any point of the week but a jew cannot operate it on shabbat. A non jew could, but not acting on a direct command.
The rules are quite watertight. Siri and co. are a no-go and there are no obvious ways to adapt smart assistants that would restore functionality. Anything that’s not preprogrammed is not possible.
(I'm not concerned with electricity here so much as with "בורר", selection.)
I find the whole concept quite interesting.
Internet? No
Something breaks, fix it? No
Sit around all day? No :)
For many that keep the Sabbath, the time is spent eating, praying, and studying and there’s somewhat of a schedule. Friday night: synagogue, then big ceremonious dinner. Saturday morning: Synagogue. Saturday afternoon: big ceremonious lunch and study or sleep. Saturday evening: back to synagogue again. It’s a pretty full day.
I assume that's only if not urgent? e.g. pipe blows up or rock hits a window for whatever reason, you can at least effect basic repairs if not immediately call the tradie?
You're not supposed to do either on shabbat unless its life or death.
The only time you can break the Sabbath is if it is "pikuach nefesh" (life threatening if not done)
and being a single guy, I've hosted many a meal where I did the cooking, table setting and cleaning. (though in practice at these meals, there is also a pot luck nature to them and many times there's a whole system where your friends come over help you set the table and then help clean up and throw everything away all the trash after the meal, collecting silverware, wrapping up the plastic table cloth cover with all the crumbs/spills on it).
This is broken out into fine detail in the sources. There are 39 categories of work listed, covering agriculture, food production and cooking, textile production, building, and a few more.
When electricity came along there was a big debate among rabbis if its use comes under one of the existing categories or not. Nowadays among Orthodox Jews it's universally agreed that it does. This obviously wipes out a lot of modern life - not just the internet but even switching on lights, etc.
Reading, learning, eating lots of good food with the family, meeting friends, taking your kids to the park - all totally permitted.
As kids, yes it was sometimes annoying. But now it's amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/39_Melachot
It's not hard to violate them though. Carry something in public? nope. Use electricity/fire? No. etc etc
Sabbath is 25 hours. Typical schedule...
7-10 h sleep
3-4 h prayers
3-5 h meals
0-4 hours religious study
Remainder is light recreational activity, walking to/from synagogue/friends' homes.
- I have two full, sit-down meals with my family and sometimes friends as well, typically with appetizers, mains, the whole she-bang. No cellphones.
- I go to synagogue (when it is not closed due to COVID) and pray. They have a light meal after services where I socialize before going home and having a bigger meal.
- I go to the park and play with my daughter. Other Jewish families in my neighborhood often do the same, so we socialize while our kids play.
- I catch up on reading
Then I go home. Before COVID, we'd visit several friend's houses, walking around the neighborhood, eat a little, have lunch, talk.
Then we'd meet again for the afternoon service. Then I'd go home and read for a while.
Then we'd meet again for evening service and havdalah. Then we'd have a few more shots and go home.
(During the winter when days are shorter, things are compressed. This is "summer mode" with long days.)
* Scrabble and other board games
* Cycling and other outdoor activities
* Reading
* Gardening
* Picnicking with friends (though not so much nowadays)
We don't really subscribe to the very strict definition of "work", and I don't think the rest of our synagogue community does either. But phones, internet, and computing are largely discouraged.
You think your god is all knowing, etc.. but at the same time stupid enough to fall for these work arounds
> [T]he work of law is a work of human activity, and... the Torah itself supports this legal theory. The Torah is not a document of mystery which must have its innate meaning revealed by a minority, but it is instead a document from which law must be created through the human activity of debate and consensus
I'd say that "salvation by faith" is the central concept of Christianity, faith does not require knowledge per se, not in the way that belief requires knowledge.
"Even the devil believes [...]" as the author of the Epistle of James writes.
Christianity as revealed in Scripture is far less about rigid concepts.
On a side-note Catholicism demands significant orthopraxis, but that is heterodox wrt Scripture.
Your supposition requires a form of gnosticism that's really not Christian and is quite contrary to the Gospel IMO, heretical some would say/have said.
How do we know that the loopholes are not there to test the to the letter followers versus the spirit of the law followers?
and how do we know which of those groups does god prefer?
How do we know that to the letter vs to the spirit following is the right course of action for the follower of the religion?
What is the inherent spirit of the law in only eating animals that chew their cud and have split hoofs? Or fish that only have scales and fins? The inherent spirit of not wearing linen and wool together?
There are plenty of places where religious jews go beyond what the law says because rabbis have deemed it important. The prohibition of not eating meat and milk together come from "not eating a kid in its mother's milk" but rabbis said it applies to all meat and all milk.
I'm not sure how legitimate it is to think you know or can determine the spirit of religious laws you don't know the details of.
That is precisely my point. Rabbis might say X or Y, that doesn't mean that it pleases God one way or another.
You can take the view that the loopholes are there to be found and thus prove your commitment, the opposite view or just the view that some are ok and some are not, this is all very theoretical given the impossibility of knowing what the relevant God thinks, as arguments could be made for both situations.
> Upon his death, the philosopher in question found himself surrounded by a group of angry gods with clubs. The last thing he heard was 'We're going to show you how we deal with Mister Clever Dick around here…'
(As mentioned elsewhere, while this particular example may not be great, this sort of thing is accepted practice.)
To play games? Perhaps, but presumably a perfect being is already perfectly happy and has no need for games. You could see it as a test for humans: only the truly devout study the laws closely enough to notice the loopholes.
Speaking as an Orthodox Jew - We believe the laws are there because particular actions affect the universe in ways we might not understand but that the creator does. It's like the instruction manual that comes with a machine. (If it was something we could figure out for ourselves we wouldn't need to be given the laws from on high.)
So it follows that if there is a loophole, in a law given by an omniscient God (i.e. there is no argument that He didn't think of it), it's because following that loophole does not cause the spiritual damage to the universe that breaking the rest of that law does.
Obviously some of you will argue with some of those axioms, but as stated by WJW elsewhere in this thread, this is about people who have already accepted the axioms.
But you don't need to know it to accept the idea, just as you don't need to know how a machine works in order to use it, as long as you follow the manual.
(it's very mysterious that someone would go to all this trouble with an idiosyncratic outsider interpretation of Judaism)
168 W/h gives you about 12 hours between charges.
2400 W-h / 168 W-h = about 14.28x the size of LTM's
12 hours * 14.28 = 7.14 days.
1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...
This is not a religious conflict. China has oppressed the Uighurs because the Xinjiang region was only brought under full Chinese control late, and the Uighurs have been relatively independent-minded.
That this conflict isn't about Islam per se is evident from the fact that 1) there is a substantial Muslim population within China outside of Xinjiang, and those Muslims have not been given the same brutal treatment, and 2) there have also been secularist voices of resistance among the Uighurs to Chinese control of Xinjiang.
Edit: If you believe in a religion, then religion exists in the most real sense possible, as that which guides your relation to the beginning and end of reality itself, God.
If you don't believe, then religion exists in no more and no less of a sense as capitalism: it is a fiction which vast amounts of people believe in and live their lives by, and so it is real. Not in the sense of the computer in front of you, but in the sense of a real social relationship. From a secular standpoint religion and capitalism have no more and no less reality than other fictions like gender and race.
However ;-), I dare to say your argument is weak: Assume "I believe in the apple on my desk". But you will find there is neither a fruit nor an Apple branded computer on my desk. So an outside observer is bound to believe I am going mad, hence my belief shapes my social relationship with others around me. Now does this make the apple as real as religion, which becomes real due to it's impact on social relationships? Or are people who let religion shape their social relationships as mad as I am? Or is the argument flawed? (edit: No, I can not answer these question).
Shapiro's "Thinking about mathematics" springs to my mind, IIRC in the first chapter(s) he gives a nice overview about what philosophers thought about numbers, the realm of numbers and whether they "exist" or not. I think some of that could be applied here. (And, generally, I think it's a great read for computer scientists & mathematicians interested in philosophy, as it gives a great overview across various different schools).
I think the problem with your argument is that you're replacing the concept of religion with the concept of 'apple' which in every sense signifies something that exists as a hylomorphic object. An apple which can sit on my desk. However language is full of concepts which don't share that kind of existence, ones which tend to be the objects of philosophy. Love, justice, power... race, gender, capitalism, religion, God. These exist but not as 'physical' objects, objects whose existence can be accepted or denied according to empirical criteria.
For example, in the market I can say I see capitalism before me, even though it's not a physical object. It's in the exchange of goods, the extraction of commodity and surplus value. In the same way in a synagogue or church I can say that I see religion before me, or in the Oval Office I see power (as well as in the streets, of course).
With respect to comparing God to an apple, I'd take a Kantian line. One refers to belief, the other to knowledge. Got to make space for one in order to have room for the other ;)
Now, regarding Gods and apples: Because that's how I setup the Gedankenexperiment (and assuming I belong to the majority of people, who are neither blind nor suffering from severe neurological problems), if there was some matter in form of an apple on my desk, I should perceive it. IIRC Kant would say that I have a-priory knowledge of the absence of an apple from my desk. (I'm afraid I can't argue against that, so let me rephrase the first paragraph until I come up with something useful on how to convince you that comparing religion to an non-existent apple is perfectly fine reasoning.)
[... some minutes passed ...]
No, I think you're right. The problem is that, as you say, an 'apple' is an inherently physical object. Hence there either is one sitting on my desk and I can see it, or I can see that there is none. I can not just bend the definition of an apple at will, so I think I'm stuck here; accordingly, when I say "I believe in the apple on my desk", I am basing my proclaimed belief on a verifieable-false proposition; and much as with false assumptions, from that I can obviously derive anything. Religion (or other constructs of the mind) don't exist as physical objects (there is no religion-shaped matter), yet they influence and shape (ha!) our world, often even beyond what's possible for a physical object [1].
edit So when I say that I still believe in the apple on the desk even if there is proof of the contrary, I am just acting like an idiot - and that's what's actually influencing/shaping my social relationships ;) end edit
But, one ray of light :) Comparing religion to an apple might not be possible, but I think it's undecidable if comparing God to an apple is: What constitutes God is a matter of belief and hence there is no coherent definition. E.g. some might say there is no physical God, or maybe there is one but not "on our realm of existence" (whatever that means). OTOH, some religious people might even go as far to say that there is a physical heaven and a physical hell, even when presented physical proof of the contrary. So, maybe, there is an apple after all? ;)
[1] I can't resist but to note that, if we were on Pratchett's Discworld, this would be much easier. In that case "the Gods" would probably come knocking on my door for implying that they might not exist.
I don’t think so. There is nothing wrong with criticizing a belief system—it is distinct from more innate characteristics such as race or sexual orientation.
But after you're done with that, at result number 11, you get this interesting web-site: https://abbaszaki.plo.ps/
I feel like the rational outcome would be that only a small minority of people would still buy into these ideologies. But I guess economists already know that people aren’t rational.
Obviously, I’m aware that this website represents an orthodox minority. Most religious people don’t go to these lengths.
Religious rules and practices are just so annoyingly easy to pick apart. For example, doesn’t the change from the Julian and Gregorian calendars throw a wrench into what day we are actually on?
It’s hard for me to buy that God created billions of planets and galaxies with each planet having different orbital properties and that somehow the arbitrary days of the week that weren’t even set to their present status until after Moses was dead for 3000 years are important to him.
This nonsense affects my daily interactions in the sense that I can’t run around questioning obviously arbitrary traditions, it’ll just insult people and it’s just generally mean.
So, I’ve given you more than enough of my opinion, and this isn’t exactly constructive, but to me the sooner you exit the denial stage of grief the sooner you and move on to accepting the reality of life.
That means specifically accepting that the only two roles of religion are:
1. A social construct and group (with legitimate benefits of fellowship and social interaction like a club)
2. A coping mechanism for death, one that prevents its adherents from reaching the painful stages of grief beyond denial.
I fully understand the complete belief or disbelief in a religion. That's the assumption of a system surrounding G-D, but as an Orthodox Jew I don't pretend that there's 100% proof that G-D exists, rather the proof exists for me to maintain my beliefs.
To me, believing or not is irrelevant. I don’t call a lack of evidence “disbelief,” it’s simply a lack of data.
I wouldn’t make decisions based on not knowing.
I wouldn’t plan to drive on interstate 90 to get to my destination if I wasn’t sure it existed.
I don’t consider the rationality of assuming something is to assuming something isn’t to be equal.
If my friend says “I have a million dollars in my trunk, but I can’t open it to show you” I can safely dismiss the remark as “unlikely“ without investing a lot of hope into the unlikelihood of my friend actually having a million dollars in their trunk. I certainly wouldn’t start telling all my friends and relatives about the money in the trunk that I have faith in being there. Could my friend be telling the truth? Sure! But I see no reason to take those words at face value. And disbelief of that story isn’t on an equal level of rationality of belief in it.
Now, if my friend opened the trunk and showed me the money, I could absolutely accept that reality, even though the outcome was extremely unlikely.
Essentially, I don’t agree with the religious that faith as a concept is a desirable human trait.
However, every single day we make decisions based on not knowing. We make those decisions with the best available evidence at hand, both observable and non-observable. To wit, in your example I'd never drive on the interstate 90 to a non-existent destination, but you'd take the drive not knowing what you might encounter along the way; hence the road trip.
I can't prove the existence of a deity. Equally I can't prove the lack of existence. Today I can prove certain phenomena that in the past we were unable to prove. That didn't stop belief, it merely asterisked it.
This is probably no longer literally true; in polling a majority of Europeans who identify as Christian don't usually believe in a personal god, and significant numbers who identify as Christian don't believe in the supernatural at all.
> and all the underlying mythology.
Believing in _all_, or even most, of the mythology, as something that actually happened, is unusual; you're basically talking Biblical literalists, who are a small minority of Christians.
> For example, doesn’t the change from the Julian and Gregorian calendars throw a wrench into what day we are actually on?
For most Christians, the only one that's particularly important that it be on the right day there is Easter, which is dealt with. The Gregorian shift, in any case, was seen as a _correction_; from the point of view of those who initiated it the problem would have been the time that went before.
At my most recent “church session to satisfy family” the preacher talked a lot about handling doubt. I found it very revealing that, on any given Sunday, you might find a preacher feeling the need to re-convince the congregation that the thing they’re there for is “real.” It made me think, “But I thought this was obvious truth to you? Haven’t you moved beyond this point?”
Interestingly, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches don’t agree on which day Easter falls upon!