I thought it might be haram to mix cheese and meat, but apparently that’s just a kosher restriction. Philly Cheesesteaks are perfectly halal.
Ultra Orthodox Jews even follow the rules about not mixing fabrics in clothes. There are even “kosher” fabrics.
This in contrast to not mixing milk and meat, which is an expansion of "do not cook a kid in its mother's milk" from deuteronomy 14:21.
If you look at the two it would seem wearing linen and wool together is much worse than mixing milk and meat.
why is baffling, but thats religion.
For any given moral position you can keep asking why forever and never come to a satisfying conclusion unless you actually define what a moral is.
Is it just an aesthetic judgement on behavior? Is it a product of the ability to evoke pleasure & pain? Is it simply whatever you desire? Does the term even have any meaning at all?
Does anyone have a well sourced "origin story" for why mixed clothes might have been prohibited in Judaism?
It's one thing to dress modestly[0] and to exhibit moderation (circumstance will determine what is appropriate dress for the occasion, whether it is appropriate for one's station in life and within one's means, and so on). It is another to deny others goods simply because others do not have access to them. The latter is envy and a vice.
That seems to misconstrue the nature of law, and we're talking about religious law here (though the distinction between religious and secular law is made first by Christ in Matthew 22:21). There is nothing inherently wrong about eating a cheeseburger per se. The combination of meat and cheese isn't intrinsically evil. So you have to ask what the purpose of these various restrictions are. Naturally, all law has a moral good in mind. That's what law does: it determines the moral or natural law within the given circumstances for a certain end, so a prudential element is involved (and still further in its application).
One answer is that these dietary and clothing restrictions exist as a discipline that perfects its practitioners spiritually. For example, Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays not because it is intrinsically immoral to eat meat on Fridays, but because canon law includes this restriction as an act of penance that is binding on all Catholics. Same with fasting required by canonical law. The discipline of self-denial, of the care shown to meet the law's requirements, its sacrificial nature, point to a higher end for which something is sacrificed. I mentioned penance, which is very important here, but the development of temperance is another, where temperance is the virtue of moderation and spiritual order, which is to say true freedom from the irrational, destructive, and slavish indulgence of the appetites that human beings easily fall into. There is also the cultivation of right obedience that conforming oneself to such practices facilitates. Willfulness is opposed to reason and reasonable faith and trust in divine providence, and human beings are well-versed in acting willfully and even against what they know is right (which is the definition of sin).
Another function of, e.g., Jewish dietary law was to set the Jews apart from other people in preparation for some divinely chosen end.
In any case, the point is that these prohibitions and restrictions are not necessarily condemnations of some behavior or practice as such, considered in itself. They can involve restricting practices that in themselves are morally good as an instrument for some other end. Sacrifice works that way. We sacrifice lower goods for higher goods.
>One answer is that these dietary and clothing restrictions exist as a discipline that perfects its practitioners spiritually.
And what is the need to perfect oneself spiritually?
>Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays not because it is intrinsically immoral to eat meat on Fridays, but because canon law includes this restriction as an act of penance that is binding on all Catholics.
Penance is described by catholics as 'good', which is a moral judgement.
>We sacrifice lower goods for higher goods.
Right, but trading a lower good for a higher good is still an expression of morality, you're just preferring the greater good of the two.
Consequentialism says you look at something's effects and work backward from there. Deontology says you do it by interpreting some moral code. (Usually one received by divine revelation from a source wiser than you, which is why you'd believe you should do it that way.)
Obviously you're free to reject deontological ethics, but It's more accurate to say "I disagree with how they do ethics" than to say "what they're doing is not ethics".
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So I think its fair to say "random rules aren't ethics" instead of your qualification, which is what you get when you're so mired in the names of things you don't think that people can make statements on whether something is ethics or not, which is outright not true.
Ethics are subjective, not objective. I think people can make statements on whether something fits within their definition of ethics.
If you can think of an objective way to define ethics, one that all reasonable people operating in good faith would agree with once they heard it, then you'll have done something no philosopher has ever achieved.
Ethics are a function of values. First you place values on different things, like happiness or virtue or the preservation of life or obedience to god (if you think there is one). Then you work out the implications of how those values influence the decisions you make, and then you have ethics.
As long as you're doing this process, it's ethics. It's somewhat analogous to math in that once you define some axioms, then you can do math. Different people might choose different axioms, after which they won't agree on everything, but they're both still doing math.
Morality is a composite of several concepts.
(A) You start with pain and pleasure -- the definitions I use for those words cover every living thing that tries to achieve homeostasis, with pleasure being moving towards and pain as moving against. This covers pretty much every living thing, including microbes, plants etc.
(B) Sufficiently social creatures create a meta organism (the society.) Virtue and vice are the pleasure and pain of this meta organism, respectively. As an aside, this can clash with (A). Consider the soldier jumping on a grenade to protect comrades (painful-virtuous), or the sexual deviant (pleasurable-vice.) As virtue and vice are a function of a given society at a given time, that is why many say morality is relativistic.
(C) Sufficiently intelligent creatures have the ability to mirror neurons; empathy in other words. Apply this ability to (A) to create the rules for the nodes that represent (B.)
Both Christianity and Islam preserve a place for Jews as Jews in their theology. Only Jews are expected to be required to obey all the rules in the received scripture. Which components of the Jewish law are considered to apply to non-Jews, or carried forward as part of the newer revelation, depends on their interpretation, including the function or purpose they're understood to serve.
Conversely, Judaism itself has both concepts and literal rules for determining and justifying which rules (or derivatives) are supposed to be applied to non-Jews.
Also, though I'm not sure about Islam's perspective, both Judaism and Christianity understand Jews to have (present tense) a unique relationship to God, and part of that relationship demands Jewish obeyance, at least part, purely for the sake of manifesting that relationship. So if God commanded Jews to stand on their head, it doesn't matter whether that rule served some efficacious esoteric purpose; the pertinent function of the rule from an earthly perspective is defining and distinguishing who is a Jew, and especially an observant Jew. If you're commanded to stand on your head, you stand on your hand without asking questions; subservience--faithfulness--is the point.
Many churches and certainly the big catholic one interpret the word of god for their believers (this is called magisterium), so if you are catholic, you don't believe in the bible but in the particular interpretation. And the differences are huge.
Any reading of the Bible is an interpretation. It makes no sense to speak of ANY text, or any spoken word, apart from interpretation. All of them are interpreted. So the question really is: do you have the correct, or at least a licit, interpretation? The Catholic Church interprets Scripture through the lens of unbroken tradition. Compare this with the 40,000 Protestant sects in the US alone, most of which interpret things however they want. That doesn't even touch on the question of translation, as well as how one translation may render something more accurately than another.
And, of course, there's the other bit, namely, that the Bible was compiled by the Catholic Church, again, through the lens of tradition. How else are you going to determine which gospels are reliable and worthy of being made canonical, which books are apocryphal, which are fabrications, and so on, if you don't rely on something parallel to and 'outside' the text? (Luther did somehow manage to convince himself that he was qualified to 'tweak' the Bible, but I'll leave it at that.)
Yeah and also always promoting its own power. So when the Bible explicitly says the bishops should be married men, the Church says actually no we don't like that because it would lessen our power over the bishops so let's make them celibate. Thus making lots of people very unhappy and some commit horrible crimes. How can anyone believe the Church's interpretation is correct is completely beyond me.
I wish people would not make blanket assumptions. A portion of the New Testament is committed to explaining that certain parts of the Old Testament laws were for the Israelites only.
There is probably a joke in there about being so hammy...
I have made some exceptional vegan cheesesteaks with marinated seitan and pumpkin puree + nutritional yeast "cheese" sauce. The key is the bread - if you can head to a local bakery for a proper fresh hoagie roll, the rest will follow. I personally like grilled onions and Bavarian mustard on mine. Fantastic sandwich - just don't put lettuce and tomato on yours!
Good start for cheese.
pumpkin puree + nutritional yeast "cheese" sauce