How the Rabbis once captured the evil inclination but had to release it because they couldn't find a fertilized chicken egg.

Why stranding someone in the desert at night, causing them to die from sunstroke isn't legally considered murder in Jewish court.

Things I didn't learn:

How to operate the weather machine.

Someone knocked on my door real loud, twice. I was in the bathroom. So I'm a bit grumpy. Open the door and a tall young woman is there, with her silkscreened polo shirt and laminated page binder. Like, teenager young.

I immediately think, collecting for something, possibly a cult or a scam. I hear her out. She needs $20 to fill her quota for the day, I can easily spare half that today, so I do.

She's all sweaty 🥵 and hot looking, so I offered her a bottled water, we have a few left in the pantry.

I do this because I remember my Spouse calling me out ten years ago for giving a couple of Mormon missionaries a wrong address for our house. I thought of it as a bit of a prank on obnoxious kids, he pointed out they're KIDS, left on their own to survive without support. They are being intentionally trained by the cult that outsiders cannot be trusted and won't help you.

And I also remembered that post here on Tumblr about the same thing. Being a data point of human kindness might help them out down the road.

I give her the $10 and the water bottle. She gives me a receipt. I thought it might be a situation similar to those Mormon boys, so we DO look it up after she left and that particular group IS marked down as a religious cult.

Wishing I had followed the impulse to give her the contact information for the YWCA, who provide aid for vulnerable folks in need.

Things I learned over the last couple weeks:

Anyway, I can't find the original post to reblog and correct myself, so I just wanna say somewhere that I was wrong about Mennonites shunning and threatening shunning to anyone who is going to leave. It does happen, but it's not absolutely universal the way it is with the Amish, the Mormons, or with the Fundamentalist Christians.

When speaking of cults vs. religions, I think it's very important to double check these things because understanding if someone is going through a cult experience vs. a shitty church experience can be very, very different.

Like, the Catholic church on paper (and on twitter) is just a pile of shitbags. But there's also a lot of Catholics who loudly speak out about fucked up church doctrine and other fucked up church practices. That's not a cult. That's a bad church experience. You get me?

Looking at the wiki article, which is wonderfully detailed, I see the reason I thought all Mennonites practiced excommunication is because I grew up near Old Order Mennonites, who DO practice excommunication. But they are just one of many variations on the practices. Lots of schisms went down over time.