Trying to get my brother in law in to table to so printed some goblin spiders.

petepaintswarhammer:

Noisy by Eddy González Dávila.

twice-as-many-stars asked:

I need answers. Are mermaids kosher? What did your rabbi say???

prismatic-bell:

yourreddancer:

instructor144:

prismatic-bell:

quezycoatl:

prismatic-bell:

flo-nelja:

jewishpangolin:

prismatic-bell:

As per my rabbi, mermaids are NOT kosher, due to the following:

1) If mermaids are like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, then they have human intelligence and free will. This makes them human (whatever King Triton might have to say on the subject), and thus eating one is committing murder, which is against halacha. (She could convert to Judaism, though!)

2) If mermaids are like the original little mermaid, then they have intelligence (possibly of human levels), but no souls and thus no free will. This means they are not human, but they appear human, and thus eating one is in violation of lifnei iver, which means “before the blind” and comes from the verse “do not place a stumbling block before the blind.” In other words: someone seeing you eat the mermaid may assume the mermaid is human, and thus that eating human is okay, and thus they may commit murder to eat human, which is against halacha.

3) Mermaids that do not fit the “human top, fish bottom” tradition of mermaids may not possess fins and/or scales, thus marking them as not kosher.

Thus: Mermaids are not kosher.

Big Jewish Mood

Wait, creatures with human intelligence but no souls are kosher?

Yes and no.

There are no known animal species that have human intelligence and meet the kosher requirements for their kind of animal. Dolphins and octopi don’t have fins and scales, rats aren’t kosher because they’re rodents, crows eat dead things and are predators. Pigs are being studied for the possibility of human intelligence, but pork is like…the one thing even gentiles know isn’t kosher. And monkeys and apes would fall under lifnei iver. I’m sure there’s another rule that applies, but off the top of my head I can already tell you they wouldn’t be kosher. (Koko the gorilla might even be a good starting point for an argument over whether gorillas have souls. She had human intelligence, memory retention, understood emotions, and acted of her own free will.)

With the understanding that I’m a believer in “G-d created science, so duh, of course His rules would match up scientifically, anyone who says science is the enemy of G-d doesn’t understand the actual text very well,” I’d say that running through these is a bit of proof to me that G-d is, indeed, watching over us. Or, since I’m a believer in “G-d is a computer programmer,” that we were programmed for it to be impossible to be 1) human-level intelligent and also 2) kosher.

Elephants are the other near-human intelligence creatures. Are they kosher??? (I’m seriously just curious about this)

Nope. For a four-legged animal to be kosher, it must have hooves and chew cud. I’m not sure if elephants chew cud or not, but they don’t have hooves.

As someone who’s read the OT twice (not from a devotional perspective, but as someone who finds the world’s various religious texts fascinating) the one thing that leapt out at me  during my readings is how so many of the constraints in the Torah – which a lot of people just write off as one people’s set of peculiar little taboos – actually make sense from a hygienic/health perspective. From dietary practices to concepts of “purification” and “unclean,” the Jews had a lot of practices that, whatever their origin, kept them healthy. It’s a fact that for most of Europe’s history, when the surrounding gentile populations were dropping like flies, Europe’s various Jewish enclaves had a massively lower incidence of those various ills and plagues. To the point that it was not uncommon for the gentile population to blame the Jews for their ills: “We’re being smitten by this pestilence, and yet those Jews aren’t getting sick! They must be doing this to us!” It’s almost like whoever it was that conjured up the various constraints somehow knew that they would keep the people alive and healthy in a world where they were surrounded by populations who did not practice those sound hygienic measures.

As we learned in anthropology class, most ancient culture’ gatherers, retainers and teachers of that culture’s “science and technology” were the priestly castes. If a layman mentioned that hanging with lepers or mixing meat and dairy was unhealthy, people could wave them off with “what do you know?”  But if you codify it and put it into the religious books and practices, because God said it, well THAT’S ANOTHER STORY ALTOGETHER!  Now it has merit!!

And frankly, that’s still true today. Consider the large numbers of people who will only accept something as fact if their favorite news network reports on it, because they “know.” Or the number of people—especially women and even moreso for Black women—who get their pain waved off by physicians, only to then die of something totally preventable because the physician was a dipshit and the woman trusted him to “know.” (Sidenote, if you’re in pain and the doc dismisses you, you dismiss THE DOC. Get a second opinion. Pain means things.)

Or, for that matter, how we’re discovering indigenous methods of farming/hunting/crafting/storytelling are actually hugely beneficial, and the white scientific community writ large is going “whoa! Who would’ve guessed!” and the not-ridiculous portions are going “people who don’t assume that white people just ‘know’ the best way, dumbasses.”

Meanwhile we have furry artists saying “that sounds like Crohn’s” and it is, and kindergarten teachers who could tell you to wash your damn hands whatever Fox or CNN says, and indigenous cultures that have never gone away still doing things as they always have with better results, but nobody listens to them, because they’re common poor. We’ve replaced gods with college degrees and microphones, but it’s the same story.