Bible circumcision

[hadespussercats]

The foreskin was a human sacrifice substitute.

I call my foreskin Isaac.

[Tero]

Did you here the one about the rabbi who did not want to be paid for the job? He only took tips.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

All I'm saying is if you read the religious texts re- not eating pig, you're not going to find a discussion of trichinosis prevention. Just words to the effect that pigs are filthy ad god will be very mad if you eat them.

Hades, everybody knew that pork went bad quickly in the summer heat. The priest hijacked that and said that pork was a dirty meat and God didn't want us to eat it.

[Audley Strange]

Well they wandered the deserts so perhaps they were getting a lot of sand under the foreskin and found this made them highly irritable so they lopped them off.

[Tero]

Zappa had a song: Don't you ever wash that thing?

[Svartalf]

Yeah, that smacks of ritual impurity, like the thing with women in their bad week, and their blood, and their need to take a special bath rather than a normal one... rather than actual hygienic concerns.

[hadespussercats]

All I'm saying is if you read the religious texts re- not eating pig, you're not going to find a discussion of trichinosis prevention. Just words to the effect that pigs are filthy ad god will be very mad if you eat them.

Hades, everybody knew that pork went bad quickly in the summer heat. The priest hijacked that and said that pork was a dirty meat and God didn't want us to eat it.

That doesn't change my point, which is that the law was an appeal to fear and faith, not reason-- even if there were good reasons to avoid pig meat at the time.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

All I'm saying is if you read the religious texts re- not eating pig, you're not going to find a discussion of trichinosis prevention. Just words to the effect that pigs are filthy ad god will be very mad if you eat them.

Hades, everybody knew that pork went bad quickly in the summer heat. The priest hijacked that and said that pork was a dirty meat and God didn't want us to eat it.

That doesn't change my point, which is that the law was an appeal to fear and faith, not reason-- even if there were good reasons to avoid pig meat at the time.

The one thing all the tribes had in common was religious law, so that was the way to mandate a safety measure. Another example I use is the holy cows of India. Once the cows were used to plow the fields. Without the cows the crops would be very small. So the religious edict against harming the cows came down. This got out of hand and we have the present situation in India.

[Blind groper]

I have a Sikh friend, who will not eat beef. He told me that if he accidentally ate it, he would automatically up chuck till it was all gone. The whole idea nauseates him. I once tried to pull his leg by telling him I was going to sneak some beef into his curry. His reaction was so powerful that I have never even hinted at anything like that ever again. It may not be rational, but it is very, very powerful.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I have a Sikh friend, who will not eat beef. He told me that if he accidentally ate it, he would automatically up chuck till it was all gone. The whole idea nauseates him. I once tried to pull his leg by telling him I was going to sneak some beef into his curry. His reaction was so powerful that I have never even hinted at anything like that ever again. It may not be rational, but it is very, very powerful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoy_Mutiny

[Svartalf]

What? it started as a Potemkin incident?

[Mysturji]

I thought it had something to do with teen boys masturbating. Not sure how the Bible would have worded it. Plus there is the pork stuff, which seems to have some health reasons then. They could have claimed the penis is cleaner.

The teen boys masturbating bit is from the Victorians-- they popularized it as a method to encourage self-control.
The non-kosher-ness of pork may have health justifications, but they weren't part of the biblical dictate to not eat animals with cloven hooves (I think that's the description.)
And the bit about penis hygiene isn't part of the original mandate, either. I've read about circumcision and subincision rituals in tribal cultures-- usually they were part of the ceremony by which boys were recognized as men. It was about being able to withstand the pain, and be physically transformed by it.
If I had to guess, I'd say the Biblical procedure has similar roots.

Actually, I doubt so.

Pork may be a relatively dangerous meat if not properly cooked, but we have no reason to believe the proper ways to cook it were secret, and FAWCT, they had been known since the neolithic.

OTOH, the pig shares one of the very worst reputations as an animal among people of that area... in ways, it's less of an insult to be called a baboon than a pig... never go why.

All I'm saying is if you read the religious texts re- not eating pig, you're not going to find a discussion of trichinosis prevention. Just words to the effect that pigs are filthy ad god will be very mad if you eat them.

It's not just cooking pork properly. Pork goes off very quickly if not refrigerated. There were no bronze-age refrigerators, and it's hot in the desert, so by the time the hunter got back to camp with his freshly-killed boar, it wasn't quite so fresh anymore. In their hunger, someone rushed the cooking process and the whole camp got botulism or something. Therefore, God says pigs are unclean.
I've no doubt that shellfish are un-kosher for a similar reason: Moses probably ate a bad prawn.

[hadespussercats]

The teen boys masturbating bit is from the Victorians-- they popularized it as a method to encourage self-control.
The non-kosher-ness of pork may have health justifications, but they weren't part of the biblical dictate to not eat animals with cloven hooves (I think that's the description.)
And the bit about penis hygiene isn't part of the original mandate, either. I've read about circumcision and subincision rituals in tribal cultures-- usually they were part of the ceremony by which boys were recognized as men. It was about being able to withstand the pain, and be physically transformed by it.
If I had to guess, I'd say the Biblical procedure has similar roots.

Actually, I doubt so.

Pork may be a relatively dangerous meat if not properly cooked, but we have no reason to believe the proper ways to cook it were secret, and FAWCT, they had been known since the neolithic.

OTOH, the pig shares one of the very worst reputations as an animal among people of that area... in ways, it's less of an insult to be called a baboon than a pig... never go why.

All I'm saying is if you read the religious texts re- not eating pig, you're not going to find a discussion of trichinosis prevention. Just words to the effect that pigs are filthy ad god will be very mad if you eat them.

It's not just cooking pork properly. Pork goes off very quickly if not refrigerated. There were no bronze-age refrigerators, and it's hot in the desert, so by the time the hunter got back to camp with his freshly-killed boar, it wasn't quite so fresh anymore. In their hunger, someone rushed the cooking process and the whole camp got botulism or something. Therefore, God says pigs are unclean.
I've no doubt that shellfish are un-kosher for a similar reason: Moses probably ate a bad prawn.

Red tides, I expect.

Listen, I'm not saying there weren't behind-the-scenes sound reasons for many of these dictates-- just that the laws themselves were never based on an appeal to reason. The laws were (and are) about blind obedience, not reason.

I'm making an issue of this, because I think it's tempting for some to take examples like these and extrapolate that there are sound reasons behind religious laws-- that religious laws on some level must make sense. They don't. You can find good reasons for some religious laws, but that doesn't make the laws reasonable.

[Mysturji]

I think we're in agreement. There USED to be good reason to avoid eating pork in a hot environment 4,000 years ago. Not any more.

OTOH, where the obsession with foreskins comes from is a complete mystery to me.
As is the current location of mine.

[Animavore]