Why not make a tiny 10cm wire at the north pole to do the entire planet? And bless the oceans for unlimited holy water. Anyone who goes to the beach is baptised.
Your response may strike some as flippant, but it's not exactly uncharacteristic of how Jews, even the Orthodox, navigate adherence to their mitzvot (commandments). For example, the Shabbos Goy and the Sabbath elevator, or the eruv (the wire described in the article) itself.
It does seem to me that an omniscient God would see all these attempts to outwit him via looking at the small print, but then it's not me that would end up in hell or purgatory or whatever the Jewish equivalent is.
An omniscient God can't be outwitted by stuff in the small print. If there's a loophole in the small print, God put it there on purpose. If anything, He would be delighted that some of his followers read the holy books closely enough to find some of the easter eggs that He put in there.
The whole idea of "the spirit vs the letter of the law" is a secular one that came up as a result of imperfect human lawmakers. But when dealing with holy texts, that is obviously not required because axiomatically God doesn't make mistakes.
Isn't it interpreted literally to an extreme degree? For example, the injunction to not boil a kid in its mother's milk [1] has had a bunch of corollaries added going to extreme lengths to ensure this doesn't accidentally happen.
A friend explained it to me like this: they believe God gave the rules, loopholes and all, exactly as intended. His followers were made in his own image. He delights in their creativity in discovering the true intent of his rules, which must include those loopholes because the rules are perfect. If he meant something different, he would’ve phrased the rules otherwise.
I’m not Jewish and this just my paraphrasing of an explanation I’ve heard a couple of times. The idea of God giving us a hacker nature and delighting in it makes me happy.
In some sense, the existing wire is already that. But your question raises a great point: how was it established that Manhattan is actually on the _inside_ of this wire and not on the outside? Not very non-Euclidean to assume one way or the other.
The latter wouldn’t be valid, as baptism also involves an intentional act. Merely touching holy water doesn’t baptize you. In fact, you don’t even need holy water for baptism, strictly speaking. Any Christian can validly baptize any non-Christian by merely pouring any water over someone’s head and stating that they baptize this person in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (Whether it is a licit baptism is another question.)
As for the former, that could very well be an example of the absurdities that Pharisaical thinking can lead to. On the one hand, there is the prudential application of the law. On the other, there is the semantic manipulation of the law even to the point where its observance is rendered comically vacuous and nonexistent.
Adversarially? That doesn't sound especially compatible with the sacrament. Sacraments are generally freely received.
In any case, you can't baptize an adult against his will. In extreme situations, when a person is in, say, a coma, there can be a presumption of consent, but as I understand it, if the person in question was totally hardened against the very possibility of baptism, then the presumption would prove false and no baptism would have occurred.
FWIW, the LDS isn't really Christian. The theological differences are just too vast. Indeed, AFAIK, while the Catholic Church recognizes the baptism of many Protestant sects, it does not recognize the validity of LDS baptism. So a convert to Catholicism from the LDS must be baptized as part of his conversion.
I've heard some claim that it's impossible to dilute holy water, and the resulting mix is still holy water.
Following this logic, the entire ocean has been multiple flavours of holy water at once for centuries. Failing that, the subset which is has become homogenous throughout.
I have placed a small loop of twist-tie in one of my kitchen drawers. For a modest fee I'm willing to commit to it remaining that way indefinitely. With enough subscribers perhaps a webcam so everyone can be assured that the outside is not leaking into the rest of the world (:
