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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading.

> Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes.

Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. Religions seems incapable of fitting their model over the apparent continuum of life. It was also somewhat humorous to read this.

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Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. This post is about as congenial as religious flamebait gets, but it's still that.

Admittedly the upvotes such a post gets are a bigger problem than the post itself, but there's not much we can do about those. (This post was upvoted to the top of the thread when I saw it. I've marked it off topic now.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think I'll disagree that this is off topic. What I quoted is a literal quote from the article. I wouldn't have mentioned it or caught it if it wasn't. From my perspective, the entire point of the article is the beauty and smallness of things that we are otherwise unaware of. The idea that books thousands of years old didn't anticipate, and thus don't accommodate, such is interesting. And I thought the discussion was good.

"religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth" etc. is generic religious flamebait. We don't want that on HN, because it leads (in the general case) to horrible threads that are as nasty as they are predictable. I'm sure that's not your intent, but we have to go by the effects these things generally have.

You may be right about connections to the article (I haven't checked) but that is not as important as preserving the ecosystem in general, which is the motive behind moderating HN this way; not arbitrarily but based on many years of experience with how these things usually go.

I'm gonna have to disagree here, I don't think the single line from the comment passes the threshold for flamebait. The comment wasn't offtopic, and the conversation it led to was both interesting and not really a flamewar.

I don't often see comments replying to dang's moderation (from people other than the ones he's moderating), and generally, I think dang's influence is beneficial, but I would like to see the moderation be more tolerant (IE, slight adjustment of thresholds around "generic flamebait").

Pejorative generalizations about religion are obviously religious flamebait. This isn't a borderline call. If this thread didn't erupt into a nasty conflagration, that's only by chance, the same way that not every lit match dropped in a dry forest starts a forest fire. It's still not cool to drop them.

I suppose myopic can often, maybe more often than not, have a negative connotation, but it’s just been a word on the tip of my tongue lately (I’m sure there’s a word for that), and I generally mean it as having lack of foresight.

I think there can be a bit of religious protectionism, because I don’t see similar comments being labeled as scientific flame bait, because I have often provided much harsher myopia critique to non-religious topics.

But I can see the general moderation point of view and that, maybe disappointingly so, comments referencing religion can be hot, so to speak, and that my comment train got lucky.

Edit: I made the original comment somewhat in passing, and just commented on the part that caught my eye other than "wow, I need to read more about these things".

Is an interesting case

IMAO This is a trap to force the scientist to introduce religion in their work. Researchers should not spend their time studying religious concepts to validate religious questions. Is bad for them. In the best outcome, the scientist will lose valuable time and their prestige will be linked and borrowed for a religious agenda. At the worse case if the answer is not the same as in the religious books it will spawn more and more questions and the scientist will soon find themself tangled in an hydra of philosophical minutia, and fighting against a closed group in the undesirable role of outer enemy that must be critizised, cancelled or menaced with the goal to reinforce the sense of community.

This people should be redirected directly to ask any religious doubts to a religious figure. Period. Don't let them abuse of your time.

Zoologists are not trained into the subtle details of the concept of kosher. This is the work for a Rabbi. If the Rabbi needs a biology book to study the question, the researcher could kindly suggest several sources so he can start learning.

Unless he has considerable rabbinic training, Walter is not competent to judge whether the (invisible) copepods are kosher or not. The categories in the religious laws have some connection to biology but are not determined solely by physical conditions either. At the risk of over-simplifying, these laws are meant to be possible to follow. Nobody is going to decide that, henceforth, all strictly observant Jews must filter their water to remove microscopic animals.

He was being asked by a rabbi, so I’m assuming they sorted that out, and it’s not really his problem.

Here's my favorite story about scientists judging what's kosher, starring none other than Richard Feynman:

One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions."

Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interest in.

They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?"

"No," I said, "but... what is the problem?"

They said, "In the Talmud it says that you're not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?"

I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t' interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.

https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-mee...

The followup anecdote in that same article was also fun:

I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought "Here's fun!" My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak, yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man." Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully, until I've got them - trapped! And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! AS son as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist - I can't remember how - and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea - phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie - they got right out.

While I agree with his observation here, if his narration can be assumed to be accurate, it is somewhat rich coming from Feynman who was famously dismissive of things he didn't find interesting. He saw the world from a very particular point of view.

Without going into religion, it’s also mildly interesting for the defining veganism.

I've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.

sure, but a copepod is a lot closer to a shrimp than bacteria.

Or the bacteria and fungi constantly living and dying within us. The self cells we continually turn over and instruct to die. The second order predation that balances the ecosystem that sustains us.

Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans.

I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is a big place with lots going on that will forever escape our ability to control. That's how I frame my own decision, but I respect others' too.

That is true, but factory farming is something that we decide to do. You bring up how our ancestors were cannibals, do you also eat human meat?

I guess I don’t see the relevance. Vegans eat other life forms like plants and fungi (it’s unavoidable). Their reservations are specifically about animals. Why would bacteria be an issue?

I think a better example would be the buddhist who goes out of their way to not step on an ant, while simultaneously killing bacteria in his gut.

>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth.

You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..."

Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would find minor, or very major, things to disagree on. Judaism is massively different to say Druidism or Buddhist. Crumbs, _within_ Judaism you have a full spectrum from Ultra Orthodox to unpracticing.

I would thus caution you from viewing the world as falling into either religious or irreligious. Ultimately that classification is not meaningful.

You have AFAICS:

   religious

   atheist

   agnostic

Is it even possible to be a religious atheist I wonder

For sure it is. Scientism is an example. It even has creation myths, the stories of the Big Bang and Copernicus being two examples.

This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.

The guy is catholic, the wiki page of his doesn't mention Scientism, and you describe a belief in science, not any god. So I don't getcha I'm afraid.

The big bang isn't a creation myth, it doesn't say anything about what existed beforehand, and if come up with enough evidence, the "theory" would be invalidated and replaced with one that is less inconsistent with our observations. I am not aware of- but would love to learn of- creation myths which are continuously updated as new data is available.

Scientism is something that philosophers claim exists when they don't want to get in an argument with a scientist.

I’m more talking about the creation myths of science. One example being Copernicus having to break free from the suppression of the Church. The other being the Big Bang, which some claim usurps religion, when in fact it was originally devised by a Catholic priest.

What I’m driving at is that science is an awesome tool, not at all at odds with religion. It’s one, very effective method, but it’s not the end all be all for truth.

The scientism I’m driving at is people putting blind faith in science as a replacement for other forms of understanding. The argument is that religious or philosophical understanding come in when science has reached its absolute limit. The two are not competitive with each other.

It is not always possible to qualify every single word, especially in an Internet forum comment, so I might argue that the trap lies with the reader. As when one encompasses a generality, one should consider that it rarely applies to the totality of the categorical word. While the anecdote presented in the article involves a presumably particular sect of Judaism, I don't think one would be hard pressed to find similar analogs in most of the other major religions in the world. It's no surprise because the foundations of these religions were developed thousands of years ago, in which humanity's understanding of the world beyond itself was still infantile, at least more infantile than today's juvenile understanding. So I don't think it's much of a leap to generalize to religions rather than single out this particular one. Religion is more about culture and control than it is about searching for understanding, the latter of which you might find more in spirituality, art, and science.

I like something Schopenhauer said about a lot of errors coming from either defining a concept too generally or too specifically. Something like that

Why does that strike you as myopic? Just the opposite, if the Rabbinate decided that they've never heard of these little bugs in the water and so they don't count, that would be myopic. The fact that this is a question which was debated a bunch in the orthodox world shows a flexibility that I think is underrated in orthodoxy. Is religion incapable of fitting their model over the continuum of life, or does it continue to adapt to new information?

I'm reminded of a discussion in the talmud. A rabbi says that he heard from an Athenian scholar that there is a type of... mouse? bug? The aramaic isn't clear, some kind of little animal. Anyway, there's this creeping thing which comes to live when the sunlight hits a certain type of mud at a certain time of day. There's a whole discussion about whether these things are really "alive", vis a vis whether or not you can "kill" them on shabbat (this discussion is had elsewhere about lice, which were thought to have generated spontaneously. Jewish law has always been flexible and adaptable and shifted along with changing understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. I don't see how this anecdote suggests any differently.

P.S. most (probably like 98% of) orthodox rabbis I have talked to permit drinking tap water even though it has little bugs in it, because they're too small to see with the human eye and thus are not forbidden to eat. If they were big enough, you would have to filter them, just like you have to check for bugs before you eat lettuce.

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