It's not necessarily that weird a take, like the Bible repeatedly describes believing in and worshiping God as "fearing God" I've talked directly to an Orthodox Jewish person who said in his personal opinion using the word "good" for G-d in the modern sense is misleading https://twitter.com/UnknownEnby/status/1255031053204377605 …
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And whether you choose to react to that with worship and gratitude or fear and loathing is up to you But like... you can't actually put the universe on trial You can condemn God for being an asshole for disease and suffering and death happening but they still happen
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You've just got to find a way to deal with it See what you can do to make those things happen less Strike some kind of deal, if you can, and if you can't, well, find a way to think about it that gets you through the day
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One of my thoughts about a D&D type world where the gods are literally real and active entities was that the clerical class are the equivalent of lawyers
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There's this whole list of rules and agreements built up around entities much greater and more powerful than us puny individuals, entities that kind of adhere to human values but are so much bigger than us they're inescapably alien Beings like corporations, estates, governments
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(Of course those beings don't exist in any physical sense, they're just invented by humans, they're "made of" humans, and every action they take is ultimately an action of some individual human who just believes they're acting on its behalf Hot take -- so are gods)
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And the whole thing about being a lawyer is the whole job requires you have a sense of "is" and "ought" separately in your head
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The stereotype that to be a lawyer is to be totally amoral is wrong -- in fact if you didn't have ANY idea of "ought" you couldn't be a lawyer, every lawyer who practices law is fighting in some small way for a worldview, even one they don't actually admit they hold
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But the whole point of your job, what your job actually is, is to work within the "is" of the status quo You tell your client what will *actually happen* if they run a red light, or if they illegally download The Last of Us 2, or if they allow Russia to interfere in an election
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Like in my limited experience a big big part of the job -- the point of being a lawyer, the reason everyone tells you "talk to a lawyer before you do X" -- is to try to readjust a client's expectations between how things *should* work and what actually happens when you do things
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That "lawyering" mindset is very much there in religion, especially Abrahamic religion, rooted in the so-called "ancient Near East covenant" model The Ten Commandments are a contract God makes with Moses as the representative of his people
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The other stuff is there -- a personal emotional relationship with God as parent or lover or object of devotion But the core is the Law "These are the rules, this is how it works, this is the procedure by which we exchange sacrifice and worship for safety and prosperity"
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End of conversation
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