Laws of Nature

Christianity mostly has devolved into the cult of "Nice G-d."


G-d is not nice, sometimes not at all nice. What G-d is, is good, and that can be a very different thing.

There's a heck of a lot of the Torah that deals with, how do you keep from getting sick, and mostly, how do you keep society as a whole from getting sick. Sick medically, but also sick socially.

The slogan of Star Trek's Vulcans is, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Nowhere in the Torah are human beings allowed to make that measurement of need. The basis of individual moral action in the Torah is not Utilitarianism but principle. Adherence to the Law. The Laws of G-d however, which are actually based on proper natural laws, DO make that measurement. They express a point of view that the needs of the whole community are more important than the needs and certainly the wants of the individual. They express a focus on the well-being of the people as a whole, which if it is not attended to will inevitably have an adverse impact on the well-being of the individuals in it.

Take the commandment against homosexuality, for instance. If someone else is a homosexual, that, in the words of Jefferson, neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. So it is unlike many other laws in that no immediate injury to person or property is involved. Why is it a commandment nevertheless? Because homosexuality attacks and erodes the family structure that is the fundamental building block of society. Same with adultery. Same with cross-dressing. The structure of male fathers and female mothers exists for a reason, a reason tested by millennia. So for the "hygiene," the health of the whole society, these things are forbidden in the Torah even if they do not DIRECTLY harm others. It's like allowing a woodpecker to bore into your foundation posts. You don't mess with your foundations, no matter what your particular desire is. Your house will fall down if you do.

Stoning people is not nice. Not at all. Not in the slightest bit nice. Yet it was the punishment listed for adultery, for homosexuality, and even for breaking the Sabbath (though I somehow doubt that this was often enforced, given how much Sabbath-breaking the prophets described.) Why? Because the needs of the many, the health of the whole society, demanded it. Demanded the sacrifice of the desires and if need be, the life of the individual. Because you open the floodgates to pleasing individual desire at the expense of the health of the community, then soon you are sacrificing babies to Molech (or having abortions) and having cross-dressing priests and having fathers abandoning their children, and on and on.

Quarantine is called for in many situations in the Torah. You separate the individual for the health of the whole. It is not pleasant for the individual, but is better for the whole. Many foods are forbidden: these foods can be found to have adverse health effects and that was very much more so in 2000 b.c. Nowadays you get trichinosis or shellfish poisoning, you go to a hospital and probably live, though this would be an unnecessary drain on medical resources. THEN, you would likely have died. You had pigs running around eating human corpses, and shellfish in the hot waters of the Red Sea were a case of food poisoning looking for a place to happen. As far as meats go, only animals that eat grass were allowed to be eaten, and only some of those. All plants were okay to eat though. This is because other kinds of animals can accumulate toxins or act as magnets for diseases. You don't eat predators because being high on the food chain, they accumulate more toxins in their bodies. You don't eat animals with long lifespans for the same reason. These laws were meant for the health of the individual, but also the whole society.

THESE LAWS ARE BASED IN NATURE AND THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEINGS. They are not in the least arbitrary. I know the prophets often talked of such and such a society angering G-d and G-d wiping them out because of it, but honestly it was just the application of G-d's Law that wiped them out. They wiped themselves out by not following G-d's law, just the same as jumping off a building will lead to your death because of the law of gravity. You hurt yourself AND your society by breaking these laws. You might get away with breaking them for awhile, but sooner or later nature snaps back, to your ruin and the ruin of many.

Now the Law as written does have a shortcoming, and that is that it was written 3000 years ago. If G-d had said, "Thou shalt not engage in any unnecessary international travel," no one would have understood what the point was. It would be like someone saying now, "you should not fly to Jupiter." The world has changed drastically, though not human nature. Back in 2000 b.c. there were no cities as we would now understand them: the vast majority of cities at that time were what we would call villages or small towns. They were very few and far between. The overwhelming majority of people lived very rural lives. The total population of the world was a couple hundred million at best, and wouldn't reach 1 billion until 1804. Most people died within a few miles of where they were born. The Torah was written for a rural pastoral people.

However, understanding the Law then for those people, you can understand what a hypothetical new Moses would relay to us concerning G-d's laws for us today. For one, he would say that cities are breeding grounds for poor physical and societal hygiene. Every form of disease and uncleanness, whether medical social or cultural, breeds better in cities. Certainly regular diseases do: the current coronavirus pandemic is an inevitable consequence of an urban and globally interconnected world where ordinary people travel to other continents. Sooner or later, it was inevitable. And if we keep being globalist, keep being urban, keep being interconnected and with porous borders, it will at some point be worse than this.

And this is pretty bad by itself, the city that I for the moment live in is under a shelter-in-place order. What would a coronavirus-equivalent event happening EVERY YEAR do to our civilization? The global economy would grind to a halt, people would starve. Or else we would just say, "so people will die en masse: the economy must go on." In which case our cities would start looking like the cities of 18th Century Europe when people were dropping of the cholera like flies. That trade-off is coming, sooner or later.

And people will ask, "why does G-d allow this, this isn't nice!" No it isn't nice, but G-d didn't do it. You did it. Follow His Laws which are laws of the natural order of things; or suffer. That's about the size of it.