What actually do JREF religious believers believe?

[Skeptic Ginger]

How do you propose the ancient Jews were to distinguish undercooked pork? Meat thermometers? In a culture in which both giving and receiving hospitality was important, if your host offered you pork would it be easier to refuse it outright or determine whether or not it was undercooked?

Thou shalt not eat pork unless it is cooked until it is white throughout.

Even if it wasn't perfect, it would have been more than sufficient most of the time.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make so help me out.

Do you think humans connected trichinosis with eating pork and therefore banned it as a religious restriction? AFAIK, no one at the time, as far as any literature goes, recognized the connection.

Do you think avoiding trichinosis was an accidental benefit? If so then what the point as far as the food restriction goes?

Do you think a god gave Jews special knowledge so that they could avoid trichinosis? Because if so, why not tell people to wash their hands, something we know today is the most useful simple measure one can do to lower infectious disease risks.

Or do you think something else altogether? Because I'm not seeing your point.

Also, toxins produced by clams are not destroyed by cooking, so banning their consumption would provide at least the health benefit of not being poisoned by them on occasion.

When the sea is red, thou shalt not eat shell fish from the sea.

 

[tsig]

I do see people on this forum at times giving atheism quite a dogmatic quality I find distasteful.

People who enter a religious discussion with no regard for what is being discussed just to announce for the thousandth time "there is no god so it doesn't matter", as if that has any bearing at all on the context of the discussion where atheists are engaged in discussing theism with theists which takes a degree of hypothetical acknowledgment for the sake of argument alone.

Off the top of my head Tsig and Daffyd regularly seem to do this on this forum, where for the sake of argument non theists are discussing gods and religions with theists when they enter the thread and pick some isolated statement to quote simply to reply with something which is basically the equivalent of "but there's no such as god". As if such a statement was news to the people on this forum.

There is no good reason for that kind of behavior here, other than for someone to reassert their own convictions for the thousandth time. It offers nothing to the discussion, and renders the efforts non theists go to here in order to discuss theism with theists as meaningless.

I wish they'd stop doing it as it seems like dogma to me, but it's not against the rules to my knowledge.

Evidence?

 

[zeggman]

I have no time for nonsense which just postulates such knowledge among ancient people that just somehow never wrote anything about it.

I'm not postulating any knowledge among ancient people, I'm saying the dietary laws had health benefits.

Cook it over a slow, smoky fire until it falls off the bone/can't pick it up with a fork. If it's pink on the inside, smoke it some more.

Smoking doesn't kill trichinosis.

If you (or your host) cut it up with vegetables and made soup, you'd have to examine each little piece before you ate it.

As far as clams and oysters and the like - I don't eat them, but cultures have thrived on them.

They can still be poison from time to time and not kill a whole culture.

 

[John Jones]

[...]


Smoking doesn't kill trichinosis.[...]

.

Oh really? It's good I never claimed otherwise. Slow cooking over a smoky fire does wonders to kill all manners of invisible agents of illness.

 

[John Jones]

[...]
They [clams and such] can still be poison from time to time and not kill a whole culture.

Icicles can fall off the roof and put your eye out. There's nothing in Leviticus proscribing us from living in snow-prone areas.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I'm not postulating any knowledge among ancient people, I'm saying the dietary laws had health benefits.....

Only because in retrospect one can say about lots of things, you avoided the illness associated with that food..

There are illnesses one can get from eating a lot of things, beef, spinach, pork, seafood, whatever. Heck, in a particular region in China people get esophageal cancer and the local vegetables are suspected.

Now say that food is restricted in a culture.

Great, technically one avoided the illness risk associated with that food.

You need to show that overall disease risk was lessened by said food restriction.

 

[JihadJane]

I believe in miracles, you sexy thing!

 

[HansMustermann]

I'm not postulating any knowledge among ancient people, I'm saying the dietary laws had health benefits.

Unless they actually have some knowledge on which to base it, they didn't know it had any health benefits, and it's still just an arbitrary rule.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I once heard a "Jewish spokesman" of some sort- I don't recall his "qualifications"- argue that it's the very silliness and difficulty of religious rules that makes them worth following.

He sounded a bright, articulate chap, which made me despair all the more.
How does stupidity of this degree survive?

 

[zeggman]

Unless they actually have some knowledge on which to base it, they didn't know it had any health benefits, and it's still just an arbitrary rule.

I believe most of the rules were arbitrary, meant to distinguish "God's chosen people" from "the rest of you rabble". The rule against mixed fibers even seemed to make a metaphor of it.

 

[The Norseman]

I'm not postulating any knowledge among ancient people, I'm saying the dietary laws had health benefits.

Sure, this particular one had some health benefits. However, the issue is that many theists use this dietary law as evidence (or 'proof') of god's existence and it's loving care of humans. I, and many here it seems, think that if an all-loving god gave a certain commandment in the interests of health, then, as Skeptic Ginger keeps pointing out, this god could have commanded people to simply wash their hands.

I think this is much more persuasive in that people made these commandments and said they were from god rather than an actual god giving these commandments.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I'm not postulating any knowledge among ancient people, I'm saying the dietary laws had health benefits....

I think you need more evidence than a self selected coincidence.

What do we need to show to satisfy the claim, dietary laws had health benefits?

You'd need to show that the benefit outweighed the loss. Dietary protein is scarce in some areas of the world. Did they have plenty of protein where you believe there was a benefit?

You use the plural, "laws". So are there more examples besides the pork?

And, can you really say a coincidental benefit is relevant? Otherwise, is there evidence the benefit was more than a coincidence?


I think the health benefit may be grossly overrated, especially given some people claim a god was passing out special knowledge. Granted you say you don't make this claim.

 

[HansMustermann]

Actually, the claim that there was more than one law is quite trivial to support. The restrictions against for example mixed grain or boiling goat in specifically its mother's milk (how did that get taken as a restriction against cheeseburgers, is a different question) are different verses.

Now whether it was a health benefit to effectively condemn more than a million people to live on bread and water, and at that a single grain... THAT I doubt.

On a tangent, I think though what we're seeing is a question of tech level too in forbidding pork. Or for that matter shellfish.

In the case of pork, I think the biggest problem was that meat fermentation (i.e., making sausages or salami) was not invented yet, so there was no way to safely preserve the meat for later. So basically there was limited use in fattening a pig, when a family can't eat all that in a couple of days.

There's also a big problem with holding pigs in a fairly hot and arid region. Pigs need water (or mud) to even keep their internal temperature within the range where they can even live. So they'd be much more expensive to raise there than goats or sheep, and use up a very limited resource, unless you're right on the shore of a river.

So it seems like a relatively safe thing to forbid. "Safe" in the way that nobody will riot about forbidding something most people don't do anyway. If you want to have an us-vs-them difference, you can't get much easier than picking a difference that was largely in place anyway.

Of course, a God could have just told them how to ferment meat. (You can still fry it later before eating it anyway, if you're worried about trichinosis.) Or made better pigs for its chosen people. But, ah well, I guess that's the problem with a non-existent God. The things it could do are also non-existent.

At any rate, it's kinda funny that a god is depending on the tech level of his followers. Hardly a century passes before the Romans get there, and have that technology, and God sends his son to lift that restriction. One could almost think God is impotent to do things himself and needs people to do the relevant stuff

 

[zeggman]

You'd need to show that the benefit outweighed the loss. Dietary protein is scarce in some areas of the world. Did they have plenty of protein where you believe there was a benefit?

I've read references to plagues of locusts, so (while I'm not an expert) I'd say probably yes.

You use the plural, "laws". So are there more examples besides the pork?

I believe I've already mentioned "clams" a time or two.

And, can you really say a coincidental benefit is relevant? Otherwise, is there evidence the benefit was more than a coincidence?

I'm not sure it's more than a coincidence, or what evidence might be offered if it was. And relevant to what? A coincidental benefit is relevant to the claim that there were health benefits to some of these dietary laws, which is the only claim I made.

There were also laws against eating baby animals boiled in their mother's milk, and as far as I know there's no health benefit to following such a practice.

 

[HansMustermann]

Err, no. Actually spectacularly no.

1. There's a reason locust invasions are called PLAGUES, not happy times. I don't think there ever was any time when eating the locusts even offset the crops destroyed, much less made up for extra animal protein too.

2. The thing that makes it an epic fail as a defense of Jewish dietary laws is that... leviticus 11 puts restrictions on that too. You may only eat 4 species of locust. If your crops got razed by another, just starve and die.

 

[Halfcentaur]

Evidence?

Here's a recent example right here. I'm not going to spend an hour searching through this forum, the topic has come up before and I've even pointed it out to you before. If you want to deny it, deny it. I have no vested interest in slandering people I usually agree with if you feel this is me slandering anyone.

From No "Right" and "Wrong" Without A Higher Authority

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=247223&page=11

In reponse to:

I am not at all saying that there is no objective morality without God. Quite the contrary; what I am saying from the Christian perspective is that there is objective morality, fundamental to the way the universe and particularly humans operate and not dependent on God any more than the rules of basketball are dependent on the referee.

However, just as the player's rule-abiding conduct will depend on the instructions of the referee because the rules give the referee authority over the player, so a human's mortal conduct will depend on the instructions given by God because it is objectively moral to obey God and immoral to disobey God.

That would be fine and dandy if any god actually existed.

There is no point for a theist to even attempt to discuss theism with us here if we're just going to randomly assert there is no God anyways in the middle of a discussion. It's nothing but self assertion and offers nothing to the value of the conversation. It smacks of dogma to me.

 

[dafydd]

It smacks of dogma to me.

It smacks of the truth to me.

 

[tsig]

Here's a recent example right here. I'm not going to spend an hour searching through this forum, the topic has come up before and I've even pointed it out to you before. If you want to deny it, deny it. I have no vested interest in slandering people I usually agree with if you feel this is me slandering anyone.

From No "Right" and "Wrong" Without A Higher Authority

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=247223&page=11

In reponse to:







There is no point for a theist to even attempt to discuss theism with us here if we're just going to randomly assert there is no God anyways in the middle of a discussion. It's nothing but self assertion and offers nothing to the value of the conversation. It smacks of dogma to me.

dafydd =/= tsig

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

....
There is no point for a theist to even attempt to discuss theism with us here if we're just going to randomly assert there is no God anyways in the middle of a discussion. It's nothing but self assertion and offers nothing to the value of the conversation. It smacks of dogma to me.

So if one doesn't preface the no-god-exists assertion with, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion no-god-exists, then it is a self-assertion smacking of dogma?

Do you preface evolution, plate tectonics, and the Earth isn't flat assertions with, 'the evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion'?

 

[zeggman]

2. The thing that makes it an epic fail as a defense of Jewish dietary laws is that... leviticus 11 puts restrictions on that too. You may only eat 4 species of locust. If your crops got razed by another, just starve and die.

Not true, you're allowed to eat any insect which has jointed legs for hopping on the ground, which includes all species of locust, grasshopper, katydid, and cricket. That's four species of insect (well, properly, only three, since grasshoppers and locusts belong to the same species), not four species of locust.