So Yahweh ruled in favor of Monsanto, too.

So would some bible student please explain to us why these things mattered. What in the world would it matter if I mixed fabric? What would it matter if I bred a better cow? Why in the world does this joker care if I plant beans with my corn?

I've wondered that too, Mr. Pope. A long while back I asked and got an answer on Slog about what happens at suburban-mommy 'bible study'groups.

A better question to ask is if the controversial or outright weird parts of the Bible ever come up for 'study', and if so, what the 'study group' concludes.

Jeez, @1 you have to get up pretty early to beat you to the money punch line.

Hey, Farmer Brown, yer cattle are polymorphous perverse!

i have never seen linen/wool blends in any clothes i've had. is this why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatnez

ask wiki and ye shall receive. fucking ridiculous.

Sorry, but I can't take anyone who doesn't eat bacon seriously.

All Dogs go to Hell, then?

@11, fucktwit: Goldy quotes scripture, without comment. No attack necessary because the words speak volumes all by themselves. Understandable that fucktwits like you would consider your own words as a attack.

The authors of Leviticus were totalitarians. It didn't have to make sense as long as everyone was obedient.

11.
The Old testament may come from Judaism but Christians rely on the old testament to back up their bigotry all the time.

@11, well, that's true. And they do it ignoring the non-Orthodox Jewish scriptural exegesis which has rendered these particular commandments to be simply examples of the social world of a small tribe 3,000 years ago. The "honor your parents" type stuff we've kept, because that's pretty important.

The fundamentalists of every religion,on the other hand, are still living back then.

Is mana from heaven a GMO?

Yay, pissy mcslogbot's back! (Best Slog handle ever.) What, you quit for six months just to prove you could do it?

@8 So, wait: You can't wear Shatnez, because the Torah says so. But if you're a Rabbi, it's okay to wear Shatnez. Because... some other Rabbi said so?

This is what's so off-putting. That article you linked is great, because it shows how ludicrous it is to use the Bible (or the Torah) for a guide to, well, anything. It shows all of the silly exceptions to the rule, changes to the rule, different interpretations to the rule, and modern adjustments to the rule. All to try to explain what God meant when he made the rule.

@2

This Levantine group became the founding population of all humans living today.

NP theory argues that modern human physiology, sexuality, aggression, propensity for inter-group violence and human nature all emerged as a direct consequence of systematic long-term dietary and sexual predation by Eurasian Neanderthals.

http://www.themandus.org/

@1 While the verse clearly speaks in favor of monoculture, it could also be interpreted to prohibit GMO, for what is a greater mingling of seed than to plant seed that includes genetic material from another species?

@16 -- I think you may have mixed up "mana" and "manna". "Manna" is the edible stuff, and if it's GMO at least it dropped from heaven that way and Monsanto had nothing to do with it.

Blessed are the cheesemakers

@21: Yeah, I pretty much interpreted that as saying Monsanto GMO pushers are the ultimate unholy, myself.

@8: Thanks, that was a very interesting bit of background.

Thy seed! Come upon thee!

Heh. It's the donkey dicks and horse bukakke all over again. These ancient Hebrew writers only had one thing on their minds.

So long as it's cool I can mix plaid with my polka dots.

thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed

Sounds to me like any sort of hybrid corn (as in, most of it) is against God's command. But it could also be just a prohibition against letting weeds grow with your other crops, in which case it sounds like RoundUp is doing His will.

@8. So a garment made of linen and wool symbolically represents the mixing of Egypt and Israel, which is bad, therefore the Shatnez is holy and only priests get to wear it. I understand now.

@27: Just you wait until SLOG Bible Study gets over to the Song of Songs.

Lots of the stuff in Leviticus is about not mixing this with that or that with this. For example, there's another section about not eating the flesh of something that chews cud (or in the case of most of the animals mentioned, gnashes its teeth so that it looks like it's chewing cud) but doesn't have hooves or of things that live in the water but don't have fins and scales.

Basically, Leviticus likes things to fit into neat, clean categories. It's not clear why. It might have something to do with the human desire for a world that's easy to understand. It's not clear how not mixing categories like this would have given these people a cultural or survival advantage (or the case of not eating pork, a lack of disadvantage, because it was a luxury food).

A real historian of the time would be able to tell you what impact blended and non-blended clothes would have on the actual daily life of someone from that period. Maybe the act of blending the fabrics required expensive imported equipment. Maybe it was a custom associated with neighboring peoples, with whom the leaders did not wish them to intermarry.

Uh, guys? How is going "It's dumb! Chuck it!" without looking into the deeper context any better than going "It's holy! Obey it!" without looking into the deeper context?