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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, Judaism permits lending money with interest as long as you engage in accepted loopholes and draw up complicated paperwork to call it an investment.

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This sounds like a good approach because it removes the possibility for consumer credit. In my opinion, you should only borrow money to make a profit on it.

> In my opinion, you should only borrow money to make a profit on it.

only monetary profit counts? i shouldn't borrow to buy something that makes my household more efficient, like a dishwasher?

Compared to saving for it and buying it outright? I think we all know why we should do in this situation.

you can only imagine one possible situation?

The situation was provided by gp, not imagined. The fact that saving instead of buying on credit is being downvoted says something poor about our country.

As someone who has a hard time not optimizing every dollar, I'm ill equipped to answer this question. I would not.

But borrowing money for a dishwasher can be the optimal use of your dollars, if you can use the amount elsewhere at a higher rate.

When interest rates are 0% (as they essentially are right now) you're losing money by not borrowing. Capital investments are good!

"Efficiency" is rarely an objective and well-measurable metric when it comes to household goods. For every good for which that seems to be the case, like a dishwasher, there are a hundred others that would fit the definition - special-purpose kitchen gadgets of all kinds (mixers, vegetable choppers, rice cookers, bread makers, sous vide machines, toasters...), not to mention robotic vacuum cleaners, electric toothbrushes, cup warmers, etc.

If "efficiency" in and of itself is sufficient to justify making a purchase with debt, you will quickly find all of your financial resources going to paying off debt service. Then you find that instead of your tools serving you, that you are instead spending your time serving your tools.

The way out is to only spend cash (or cash equivalent, i.e. to commit to paying your credit card bill in full each month) on items which cannot generate a measurable financial profit for you.

Same with Islam and Christianity.

Not true with Islam. Many Hadiths warn against using loopholes, there's no "tricking" God in Islam.

Nonetheless there is a widely used system of loans which use a fixed fee rather than interest payments which for fixed-term loans ends up being functionally identical.

That doesn't make them Islamic, as a matter of fact, many scholars have spoken out against them.

it is islamic, you just believe it is heterodox. just like any religion, there is not one true islam, but an intertwined cluster of sometimes contradictory cultural practices.

Not true. Scholars can differ on the meaning of certain texts, but all the scholars do their best to follow said texts to the best of their understanding, without retorting to loopholes because those are prohibited.

you: "these are loopholes. these other people say so."

them: "these are not loopholes. these other people say so."

all divine authority is mediated by men.

The difference is that "them" are not scholars. We don't give credibility to any random person that attempts to derive jurisdiction.

yes, but different scholars come to different conclusions, resulting in many islams

Not true. Islam inherently encompasses different points of view, as long as they are based on correct and proper evidence. Of course, this is not a blanket statement, since there are core immutable concepts in Islam, the "roots" to to speak. Minor things can have differing views as long as they are based on evidence.

It's so fascinating. There is no tricking God in Judaism either, but in a completely different way. Since God is by definition all-knowing, you cannot trick him by using a loophole. Rather, He put the loophole there for His own inscrutable purposes and you are not more or less holy for using it. (Unless it's a loophole in a holy text, then you are clearly more holy since you managed to find the loopholes that He himself put in there for the faithful to find)

The Islamic perspective is different. If something is prohibited, then there is no trying to get around the prohibition by stitching together a series of individually permitted transactions, such that the end result is a transaction that mimics the original prohibited one. The prohibition is because the act itself is impermissible, and hence, we are not to try to get around it.

Then the islamic students who we had here for an event 10 years sgo and refused ti eat pork but really liked to drink booze were full of shit when they answered "we are under a roof, god can't see here" when questioned about their drinking

Which Islamic students? One of the most basic tenants of Islam, known to even pre-elementary school children, is that God is Omniscient. If what you're saying is really true, then they're ignorant and/or foolish.

Plus, this doesn't have anything to do with the original topic.

Muslims are real people, with the drives, desires and flaws of real people. The parent comment matches my experience too, my Muslim friends here in Australia will not touch pork at all, but love a bourbon and coke.

My Muslim friend doesn't practice but claims he still physically can't eat pork (or drink much) without getting sick because he never got used to it. We never tried to confirm this.

He doesn't practice or doesn't believe? If he doesn't believe in Islam then he's not a Muslim.

Isn't that personal? I don't want to ask.

And we never denied this. The original argument was that whether or not the religion permits loopholes. If a Muslim chooses not to follow particular teachings of Islam, that's on him, but not because there are "loopholes".

Nevertheless, there is an Islamic Banking industry that offers products which seem economically equivilent to a mortgage with interest, while being theologically different enough to attract some market participants.

Yes, I explained in my other post that many scholars have spoken about such "products". We take our religion from the Quran and Hadith and the understanding of the early generations (Companions and their followers). They didn't have such practices, so we disregard them because they're clearly trying to imitate Western banking practices that are based on usury and interest and other prohibited things in Islam (e.g. shorting, selling what you don't own, gambling, etc.).

Sometimes this concept is exemplified by the Oven of Akhnai story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai

which underscores the idea that (in rabbinic Judaism—clearly other currents divided over this very issue!) human institutions were given responsibility for interpreting the law, including in ways that create leniencies or apparent loopholes. Although there is probably a better story or example about loopholes in particular.

Baked goods that many people are eating this week for Passover might be a good example, because a fair amount of food chemistry has gone into making some of them fluffy and bread-like, while still not technically being chametz. The mainstream interpretation is that the criteria for being "leavened bread" were authoritatively identified and fixed by rabbinic tradition, and that, if you stay within those criteria, you're fine, even if you produce foods that are subjectively reminiscent of leavened bread.

https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/passover-bread-recipes/

https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/passover-cookies/

https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/passover-cake-recipes/

Fun fact: the oven in question is referred to as תנור (tanur). I wondered if this is cognate with "tandoor", and it is, as both terms were borrowed from Persian.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%AA%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A8 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tandoor

There's plenty of "Islamic banking" but I think there's lots of limitations (I think it often involved shared ownership, risk and profit sharing, etc).

There can be some products that truly avoid interest and have proper shared ownership and the like. However, they seem to be far and few between, and scholars have called them out.

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