"Sabbath Mode"

So I'm shopping for a new oven for my dad's place, and I see that it has something called "Sabbath Mode." Never having heard of it before I looked it up.
http://www.star-k.com/kashrus/kk-cooking-SM.htm
Weird with a beard. Freakin' religios.

This is just stupid.
How do you think the manufacturers would respond if they received a request to build a special appliance for atheists? There are a lot more atheists in this country than there are Jews.

Well on top of that it's exceedingly duplicitous I think to build an oven which will cook your food on the Sabbath through a minor technicality on the rule that you cannot turn anything on or off on the Sabbath. I mean even setting a timed bake seems like cheating. If the ruling is so damned important why find loopholes? If not, why bother at all?

Come on. The religious, and notably the Jews, claim to live by all these strict rules, but spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to get around them. No surprise here.

But why bother APPEARING observant if you don't care about the letter of the law? Is god so easily outwitted?

Apparently. In 1968, I worked in Santa Barbara. The boss (a Jewish gentleman) had am office party at his house one night at which there was a giant ham. All of the Jews in the office referred to it as pink chicken and consumed large quantities.

As an aside, one of the employees was a guy named Duncan Renaldo. You may remember him as The Cisco Kid on television. My brother and I (my brother also worked there) were huge fans when we were kids.

At that point I would decide "this is stupid!" and declare myself unobservant or even atheist.

At the hospital, there was a "sabbath elevator". It ran continuously, stopping at every floor, so you could get on at any floor and (eventually) get off at your destination floor without pressing any buttons.

My wife used to be an executive secretary. She always said, when she went out to lunch with the other secretaries, she could tell which ones were jewish. They were the ones ordering BLTs.

That is unfuckingbelievable. I mean, the intelligent Jew has to look at the religious prohibitions with a skeptical eye. Obviously the ban on pork was because of trichinosis before they knew what it was and how to prevent it. Obviously the ban on throwing switches on the sabbath is sheer lunacy. I get that anybody jewish with half a brain would ignore these silly and outmoded customs.

What I don't get is the half-hearted, even duplicitous attempts to *seem* to be observant. Who do they think they're fooling? I mean, "pink chicken" really?