Legitimate Military Target?

Explain this to me F_alk: How is it possible that two people are cleaining a chimeny, they both fall down and only one of them is dirty? :wink:

I was just trying to show a bit of how the Talmud operates. It takes cases and evaluates them, rabbis have opinions on what the law should be, and there are discussions on each opinion using what has been learned before. Each case is examined so carefully, that every word of the Hebrew of the Mishnah is analyzed. You go form a speific case to arguements that are so complex, that it is exetrmely hard to even remember the original question. The Talmud is extremely precise and it takes a long time of discussions to finalize the law. If you studied a page a day fo Talmud without the commentaries to help you understand and to stop you from getting lost, it would take you roughly 7 and a half years to study the entire thing.

i have to admit - that Jewish philosophy is some neat s**t.

@F_alk:

@EmuGod:

I was just trying to show a bit of how the Talmud operates. It takes cases and evaluates them, rabbis have opinions on what the law should be, and there are discussions on each opinion using what has been learned before. Each case is examined so carefully, that every word of the Hebrew of the Mishnah is analyzed. You go form a speific case to arguements that are so complex, that it is exetrmely hard to even remember the original question. The Talmud is extremely precise and it takes a long time of discussions to finalize the law. If you studied a page a day fo Talmud without the commentaries to help you understand and to stop you from getting lost, it would take you roughly 7 and a half years to study the entire thing.

Well, i must say, your demonstration of how it works didn’t convince me at all. Remember, i am a scientist: Setting up scenarios that just cannot happen doesn’t make sense to me, thinking about the most unlikely i only do when the more likely ones haves failed.
It seems to me the studies of the talmud is more a debaters club (no offense meant) or the study of just one philosophical school ( i respect studying philosophy, but not if you stick to one school and ignore all the others). I am sorry, but the way you describe it, it (a) looks extremely inefficient, and (b) ,even though discussions between people should be used to make up for the individuals flaws and faults, if all the discussing people share the same flaw (like not understanding modern day science), then this one flaw can not be come over by discussion.
There is a nice analogon, not in jewish but american history:
One of the states once wanted to make the circle-number Pi equal 3.
Fortunately, a mathematician cam e around, and could explain why this would not have been a good idea.

How is it inefficient? It’s extremely efficient, just complex. The rabbis in the time of hte Talmud knew all the modern science and math of their time. For example, they could calculate the number of days in the Jewish and Christians calendars in order to know how often to set leap years in order to keep the Jewish and Christian calendars in sync and they knew how to calculate the number of horus required to wait between meat based foods and dairy foods for the dietary laws when following the Christian calendar.

As for the cases, I was trying to illustrate that when the Talmud makes a law, it takes into account almost every possible scenario when creating the law, so that it will be all encompassed. The reason I used such a rare case is because the common cases are obvious! I mean, the law when someone finds something on the street is easy but when two people claim they found it, each one says that he found it first, you have to make a law for that that will work for other situations if the logic is followed properly. also, some laws made by the Talmud are created to stop people from doing something not allowed. For example, writing on Shabbat is not allowed so the rabbis made holding any writing utensil on Shabbat not allowed because it could lead you to accidentaly writing.

What makesy ou know that they don’t know the modern science today? Wait, you don’t know. in fact, there are many that do. One of the rabbis at my school studied chemistry, physics and biology nad did very well in them. It’s statements such as those that make no sense.

Also, the Jewish calendar is quite efficient as it is a hybrid lunar-solar calendar. Let me ask you, what makes the current calendar more efficient? At least with the lunar-solar calendar you know ho many days there are in a month. with the solar you can choose how many days in a week and how many months in a year. There is really no starting point and no defined set of days, weeks or months that you need to have.

@F_alk:

@EmuGod:

What makesy ou know that they don’t know the modern science today? Wait, you don’t know. in fact, there are many that do. One of the rabbis at my school studied chemistry, physics and biology nad did very well in them. It’s statements such as those that make no sense.

Remember the guys Richard Feynman was talking with: They did not want to understand what he had to say.

Also, the Jewish calendar is quite efficient as it is a hybrid lunar-solar calendar…

Did i ever mention effectivity and calendars in one sentence?
The notion of effectivity was about the law making process…… small sigh

I’ve never heard of that case and neither have many that I’ve asked about it. It makes me wonder about it. But as for the law making process, why is it inefficient? It follows a very logical format, moving from one case to the next, analyzing many aspects of the case in order to have an understanding of the criterias that make the law either forbidden or allowed, which can then be applied to new cases. It uses tons of logic.

well, it seems more effective than the North A. circus of justice - applying judgements from one case to another etc. Current jurisprudence looks more like a patch-work quilt than the smooth material of the Talmud.