Technically Weren't Not Allowed To Use The Bathroom.

"Get a divorce. Mm-hmm."
"But isn't that a sin?"
"Marge, just about everything is a sin. Y'ever sat down and read this thing? Technically, we're not allowed to go the bathroom."

-Secrets of a Successful Marriage,
Season 5, Episode 22,
Original air date: May 19, 1994.
​

Actually, in this conversation between Marge Simpson and Reverend Lovejoy, Lovejoy is correct. In the Old Testament, anything that exited the body made a person spiritually unclean. That would include urine and feces. There are numerous references to it in the Bible. Leviticus 15:4-11 and Deuteronomy 23:12-13, just to name a few. And doing things that made you spiritually unclean, like eating pork or going to the bathroom, were the exact same thing as evil and sin. It probably comes from a natural gene all humans have to be clean and avoid things that made us sick in the past.

But so, no. According to the Bible, technically weren't not even allowed to go to the bathroom.

 

You're talking about a belief system that pulls its values from a book that contained passages on how to treat your slaves.

 

During my early days in the west end theatre, I spent a few weeks in one of our houses setting up for an incoming season by the Welsh national opera.

The morning after the final night of the outgoing performance, I got a call from the production office, asking me to check what had happened overnight at one of the cast hotels. They had reported a blocked toilet.

One of the stars had invited half a dozen other cast members to his suite for a last night fetish party.
They had spent the night pissing and crapping everywhere, beds, settees and even the kitchen worktops and table.

I went straight back to the theatre and sent a note to the producers office, telling him that the plumbing was fine and since the problem came under artistic licence, it did not come under theatre engineering, so his department could clean it up.

The sets were being struck and packed for a move to Manchester, so I heard nothing more about it.
Fortunately the WNO were not using that hotel.

 

The only suit the producer had was made in Savile Row. I assume that he went to the hotel with his fat cigar and an even fatter wallet and the hotel janitorial staff cleaned it up. Short run productions in the early 70's were a pain in the ass, the actors thought that they ruled the world. When it all went belly up they blamed everyone else, then the bottles and needles came out again.
American non mainstream productions touring the UK were the worse. I was extremely lucky, I got Barbra Streisand and Mel Brooks. Some people found Mel Brooks very intimidating, but I found him great fun. Every moment in his everyday life was like on-set in one of his films.
Sadly, today these are but fond memories. Life today is geen screen and boxes of digital tricks.

Fortunately we still have the Met,....... But the Viena State really surpassed them this time.
Even you will agree that it is a far cry from your image of a fat lady wearing a tent, singing like a cat being tortured.

 

At the outdoor performance in Rome at the Baths of Caracalla, they added real live horses, African elephants and giraffes.
To the best of my knowledge, it was not professionally filmed.

The Chinese version makes me crease up laughing.

 

I was waiting for their socks or underwear elastic to ping..... Naughty me.

 

Sorry, but Rev. Lovejoy is badly confused on this matter. Leviticus 15 is concerned with ceremonial or ritual impurity, not morality in the usual sense; and whether or not we need to follow it at all depends on whether or not we're Jewish. It's part of the Laws of Moses given to the Jews. Christians aren't under the Law of Moses and are not bound by these particulars (Rom. 6: 14). And no set of rules makes going to the bathroom a sin in the usual moral sense of the word. Taking a crap is a natural, necessary function, but not one we think of as edifying. It's one of those activities we regard as "profane"--i.e., kinda nasty, associated with foul odors and impurities, for which hand washing is in order. A society concerned with exalting God as a model of perfection would want to emphasize the distance between shit and the ideal of cosmic perfection.

Normal emissions from humans, including from sexual activity, nocturnal emissions, and elimination of feces and urine are not sinful, and do not require any special measures for atonement other than washing. Menstruation is an exception, requiring seven days of isolation, and anyone who touches her or a place where she sat is deemed unclean until evening (Lev.:15-19). The same rule of seven-day isolation applied to discharges resulting from disease, infection, or bodily malfunction. A sacrifice of two doves was required for the latter conditions, after completing the required period of isolation. One of the doves was for a "purification offering", which generally involved unintentional acts and didn't imply immorality. Instead, they were given in advance, to make up for any possible defilement of God's sanctuary. This was the kind of offering made by the Virgin Mary and Joseph when they presented Jesus in the Temple. Mary was ritually unclean for delivering the baby Jesus, and Joseph was ritually unclean for touching her. Needless to say, it would be odd for God to regard the birth of His Son, conceived by the Holy Spirit as a sin, since He was responsible for it.

This is why it's risky to draw on the Simpsons for theological understandings. The distinction between immorality and ritual impurity is subtle, and to the modern non-Jewish mind, may be hard to grasp. Tum’ah, “ritual impurity,” is the “absence of holiness”. https://www.chabad.org/theJewishWom.../jewish/On-the-Essence-of-Ritual-Impurity.htm Sin is wilfullywicked or immoral behavior that is ordinarily wilful (idolatry, adultery, theft, incest, murder, etc.) involving harm to self or others, while ritual impurity involves unintentional or unavoidable normal conduct that falls short of the pure or uncontaminated and must therefore be remedied to avoid polluting God's sacred space. Unfortunately, the term for "sin" hhatah (falling short of the mark) is used for both, but the intentional, avoidable kind carries serious moral consequences, while the latter doesn't unless deliberately flouted or not cleansed. Purityis is a somewhat arbitrary concept defined by the priests who wrote Leviticus, but in general it was to induce a sense of awe and sanctity to religious life, or as Durkheim might put it, to separate the sacred from the profane (Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life). Both Moses (Exodus 3:5) and Joshua (5:15) were commanded to remove their shoes because they were standing on sacred ground. Most of Jesus' conflicts with the Pharisees and Sadducees seemed to involve his flouting of the norms of ritual purity. (See Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus).
For Judaism, perceiving its survival as maintaining a distinctive identity setting it apart from the peoples around it, the notion of being "holy" or "pure" was thought to be central to national survival. And of course it was central to the position of the priests who wrote Leviticus. "For I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy." (Lev. 11:45)

 

Yes, that's the Bible--chuck full of passages advocating genocide, slavery, and violence, along with inspiring passages some of us live by. I find it useful to see how people thought back then, and how religion evolved to emphasize universalist values of justice, peace, love and understanding. But I wouldn't want it all to be taken literally as the "Word of God".