- Feb 25, 2011
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A discussion I'm having elsewhere seems poised to turn the idea that I'm some sort of 'atheist holy man' into a running joke... but it has raised a question about Christian theology: why /is/ someone who follows the rules of Naziritedom more holy unto the Lord than someone who isn't? (And, secondarily, is being a Nazirite /the/ way for becoming holy unto the Lord in this sense, or just /a/ way out of a number of possibilities?)
One option that's been suggested is that the rules are, essentially, arbitrary, and could have been almost anything - the point being that someone who follows them is being obedient to God's expressed will, rather than anything inherent to the rules themselves. However, this seems to run up against the theory of omnibenevolence, in that arbitrary rules would seem to do less good in the world than rules that had some usefully good purpose. But, if our finite mortal minds can't figure out that purpose, then this might serve as a fallback position.
Another option could be that there is some purely physical good that comes out of avoiding cutting one's hair, avoiding grapes and wine, and avoiding dead bodies in Middle-Eastern climes. We were able to come up with a few possibilities, but they don't seem very likely, and we don't know as much as we'd need to about the sanitary conditions of the time to come to any definitive conclusions either way.
The idea that we find most likely, since it seems to be applicable to all three rules, is that following them helps remove some of the bigger distractions of this world, allowing the person who does them to concentrate on more important things. (This also implies an answer to my second question, in that Nazirite vows are a useful tool to achieve that focus, but not necessarily the only one.)
Of course, it's entirely possible that all three of the potential answers we came up with are true at the same time, or that we're entirely wrong about all of them. What do you think?
One option that's been suggested is that the rules are, essentially, arbitrary, and could have been almost anything - the point being that someone who follows them is being obedient to God's expressed will, rather than anything inherent to the rules themselves. However, this seems to run up against the theory of omnibenevolence, in that arbitrary rules would seem to do less good in the world than rules that had some usefully good purpose. But, if our finite mortal minds can't figure out that purpose, then this might serve as a fallback position.
Another option could be that there is some purely physical good that comes out of avoiding cutting one's hair, avoiding grapes and wine, and avoiding dead bodies in Middle-Eastern climes. We were able to come up with a few possibilities, but they don't seem very likely, and we don't know as much as we'd need to about the sanitary conditions of the time to come to any definitive conclusions either way.
The idea that we find most likely, since it seems to be applicable to all three rules, is that following them helps remove some of the bigger distractions of this world, allowing the person who does them to concentrate on more important things. (This also implies an answer to my second question, in that Nazirite vows are a useful tool to achieve that focus, but not necessarily the only one.)
Of course, it's entirely possible that all three of the potential answers we came up with are true at the same time, or that we're entirely wrong about all of them. What do you think?