What actually do JREF religious believers believe?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by zeggman

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.

Originally Posted by zeggman

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]

Originally Posted by Halfcentaur

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]

Originally Posted by HansMustermann

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.

Originally Posted by John Jones

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.

Originally Posted by John Jones

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]

Originally Posted by zeggman

[...]


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]

Originally Posted by zeggman

[...]
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]

Originally Posted by zeggman

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]

Originally Posted by zeggman

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]

Originally Posted by HansMustermann

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]

Originally Posted by zeggman

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]

Originally Posted by zeggman

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]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

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.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

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

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

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

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]

Originally Posted by tsig

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...247223&page=11

In reponse to:

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

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.

Originally Posted by dafydd

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]

Originally Posted by Halfcentaur

It smacks of dogma to me.

It smacks of the truth to me.

[tsig]

Originally Posted by Halfcentaur

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...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]

Originally Posted by Halfcentaur

....
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]

Originally Posted by HansMustermann

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.

[Myriad]

I believe that God is an aspect of personal experience.

Which is not saying that God does not exist, or is a delusion.

The evidence for the existence of God is comparable to the evidence for the existence of, say, fun. Many people claim to have personal experience of God or being close to God, just as most people claim to have personal experience of having fun. Those experiences of God are associated with certain activities, behaviors, and measurable mental states, as are experiences of fun. Vast industries exist that claim (with varying success rates) to help provide experiences of God, just as in the present day even vaster industries claim (with varying success rates) to help provide experiences of fun. People who have experiences of God believe that those experiences improve the quality of their lives, as do people who have experiences of fun.

Yet you can sift through every molecule of the earth and every atom of the universe, and not find a single particle of fun. (Unless you really enjoy sifting...) While you're at it, you can look for God too, but I don't think you'll find that either. So does fun exist? Is it a delusion?

Big surprise: it turns out God isn't really a guy with a beard and a crown on a throne in the sky. Just as pain isn't really invisible demons poking your body with invisible pointy sticks (causing, recursively, pain), and dreams aren't really astral journeys into a spirit world, and creativity isn't really an invisible flying woman whispering ideas into your ear. Pain, dreams, creativity, and God exist nonetheless.

Believing as I do, why do I call myself a Christian? For the same reason I call myself an English speaker. In both cases, it's a language I'm reasonably proficient in and is effective at getting the ideas across. The reason I'm proficient in it is that I learned it (its narratives, practices, and experiences) an an early age. I'm fully aware that had I been raised a Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist I would describe my religious practices and experiences in those terms instead, just as I could easily imagine myself describing those experiences in Arabic, Hebrew, or Chinese instead of English. My use of English does not, therefore, constitute proselytizing English as the One True Language. That is exactly why, in past discussions where I've discussed my experiences in Christianity, I have refrained from proselytizing Christianity.

Many will be unsatisfied with that. "Do you or do you not believe that Jesus lived on Earth as an incarnation of God and gave us all access to eternal life by dying on the cross?" you will want to know.

That is a narrative. I know the narrative. I understand the narrative. The narrative relates to my experiences in a deep though abstract way (not literally; I've never been tortured to death for my beliefs, though many others have), so in a comparably deep way, I accept the narrative. That, in my view, is more important than literally believing. But to answer directly: I do not believe that particular narrative is literally true in all respects, especially those respects that appear physically impossible. I am agnostic about other aspects of it.

On that basis you can go ahead and call me a Universalist, or a mystic, or an agnostic, or an atheist in denial, if you must. I won't argue because the label is irrelevant. In the balance, I consider myself and call myself a Christian, because for me, practices and experiences outweigh narratives.

Experiences and practices, by the way, are what ruin the analogy between God and Harry Potter. Both are entities with well-known narratives written about them. On that basis, focusing only on narrative, atheists claim that they are equivalent. But do people who meditate deeply, or are near death, or whose brains are affected by fasting or drugs or injury or Persinger's electromagnetic stimulation, tend to experience Harry Potter, as often as they experience the presence of a universal "all" or a comforting divine presence? Do many people experience a feeling of being "called" in life to aid house elves or support persecuted half-breed wizards or oppose Lord Voldemort or any of Harry Potter's other causes? I would say not, despite isolated examples.

The big question, the question I care about, is, "do experiences of God mean anything, beyond their possible (good and bad) effects on the perceived quality of people's lives?" Experiences of fun, for example, do seem to have a meaning beyond the subjective: they are associated with, and apparently help motivate, certain kinds of learning which during recent evolutionary epochs (those that involved mammalian brains) have been valuable to survival.

There are possibilities that experiences of God serve a similar function (promoting social cohesion, or acceptance of mortality, or some comparable advantage). But given the kinds of circumstances in which experiences of God tend to occur, it also seems plausible that experiences of God are directly associated with subjective experience itself. Either as some kind of inevitable side effect, or as a contributing cause. Awareness remains a deep mystery to me, despite being able to visualize every functional component of a system that would act as self-aware. (The ability to generate a narrative from memory appears to be the key; self-awareness is then simply the presence of the self in that narrative.) I can't see how that would create a subjective experience of awareness. so I wonder if that property might actually, in a sense, be inherited from an unknown property of the universe.

That is of course a "god of the gaps" argument. But it is a very large gap, much larger than those filled in by meteorology or evolution. Without awareness, the entire universe becomes a gigantic Russell's Teapot, undetectable (because there is no one to detect it), and therefore not only useless, but more reasonably assumed not to exist at all.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Last of the Fraggles]

Originally Posted by Halfcentaur

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...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.

Well no...it's kinda VERY relevant when someone claims we can derive an objective morality from what God tells us.

The lack of an objective basis to presume any God renders that argument invalid.

[HansMustermann]

Well, I certainly won't argue with that. But sometimes there's more piss to be taken by pointing out that even if there was a God or a divinely-dictated Bible, most of that stuff still doesn't follow. Mind you, it depends on the actual argument.

[MarkCorrigan]

Originally Posted by westprog

Well, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I do have the consolation that you will burn in hellfire for eternity.

I have to chime in and say that I think Westprog is dead wrong in this thread, but I found this and laughed. A lot.

I got the joke even if other people didn't.

[Soapy Sam]

People do eat locusts in the middle east. They are considered a delicacy in Saudi Arabia for instance. (Except the pink ones, which apparently means the WHO has sprayed them with some hormone or other.)

[tsig]

Originally Posted by Soapy Sam

People do eat locusts in the middle east. They are considered a delicacy in Saudi Arabia for instance. (Except the pink ones, which apparently means the WHO has sprayed them with some hormone or other.)

That would be the gay hormone. A man eats one of those pink locusts and he will start experiencing anal anxiety and oral obsession leading to complete societal breakdown.

[dafydd]

Originally Posted by tsig

dafydd =/= tsig

Great minds think alike.

[bruto]

I must say I find the arguments about dietary laws amusing in an odd sort of way. I think the original point was that they did, at times, prevent some illnesses. As far as I can see that's true even if the laws were 90 percent crap, no matter who decreed them, no matter how much better they could have been done, no matter if there was or wasn't a god, no matter if they also forbid things they shouldn't have. Did observant Jews get trichinosis or die from red tide? If the answer is no, it is not yes even if there were a million better ways to get there.

The argument here comes across like this:

a: Well, at least Christians who go to church stay out of the rain for an hour a week.

b. Nonsense, there is no god.

[tsig]

Originally Posted by bruto

I must say I find the arguments about dietary laws amusing in an odd sort of way. I think the original point was that they did, at times, prevent some illnesses. As far as I can see that's true even if the laws were 90 percent crap, no matter who decreed them, no matter how much better they could have been done, no matter if there was or wasn't a god, no matter if they also forbid things they shouldn't have. Did observant Jews get trichinosis or die from red tide? If the answer is no, it is not yes even if there were a million better ways to get there.

The argument here comes across like this:

a: Well, at least Christians who go to church stay out of the rain for an hour a week.

b. Nonsense, there is no god.

You seem to have missed this:

Believer: The bible says to not eat pork, pork can make you sick therefore the bible is true and the word of god.

[rcfieldz]

It's had an awesome effect on my career...

[Foster Zygote]

Originally Posted by rcfieldz

It's had an awesome effect on my career...

Yeah, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, too.

[HansMustermann]

@bruto:
Well, it's not just one thing. It's that if you do a shotgun approach and forbid a few dozen random things, even by sheer chance one or more will have some aspect which can be argued as worth avoiding.

Especially when

A) we're talking about ancient technology, where basically just about anything is a health hazard (E.g., if they had been forbidden to eat sheep instead, sure, then you can't get brain damage from scrapie sheep,) and

B) one doesn't have to do a balanced tallying up of the pros and cons, and weigh it against what is given up by having that restriction.

But really, there are ove six hundred 'don't's in the OT. I'm almost tempted to write a program that extracts 600 random words from a dictionary file just to make a point, and I'm betting that if you put appropriate 'do's and 'don't' next to them, you'll find a few which can be defended as good ideas. By sheer chance alone.

[tsig]

Originally Posted by rcfieldz

It's had an awesome effect on my career...

So the creator of the universe has been waiting around for all of eternity just to give your career a boost because you decided to believe in him/her/it?

[HansMustermann]

Correction: the creator of the universe has been watching with indifference for about 197,000 years out of our 200,000 on this planet, and not intervened even for whole tribes massacred on accusations of sorcery, nor was moved by genocides that included stuff like impaling whole villages in Mesopotamian warfare or disemboweling pregant women in ancient midle eastern warfare. And in fact not only he wasn't moved by their dying screams, but he was planning to fry them in hell for eternity anyway, just because Jesus wasn't born yet to save them.

And going further back in time, we know that the Neanderthals had ceremonial burial, and included tools, weapons and supplies with their dead, or sometimes came and put flowers on the tombs. And therefore they quite likely had some kind of religion or at least a concept of some sort of afterlife. You don't go to such trouble if you don't think it will matter somehow. That's some 800,000 years of a sentient species looking up to the heavens for help and guidance, and God didn't give a screw about them. He didn't step in to save the last Neanderthal tribe, or anything.

And again, if I listen to the fundies, he couldn't save them because Jesus wasn't born yet. That's 800,000 years of people who asked heavens for help and guidance, and at best heavens never cared about them, while at worst heavens was just waiting to fry them for eternity for no more than being born too early.

But that God will totally leave all else and show up to help some Joe Random with a job interview

[rcfieldz]

Originally Posted by tsig

So the creator of the universe has been waiting around for all of eternity just to give your career a boost because you decided to believe in him/her/it?

The experience was different for me. And if I tried to explain, this post would end up in AAH like my others.

[Resume]

Originally Posted by rcfieldz

The experience was different for me. And if I tried to explain, this post would end up in AAH like my others.

What's the dif? Explain away. Long as it's on topic.

[rcfieldz]

Maybe he will appear to you someday.

[Resume]

Originally Posted by rcfieldz

Maybe he will appear to you someday.

He who?

[dafydd]

Originally Posted by rcfieldz

Maybe he will appear to you someday.

Who?

[kerikiwi]

Originally Posted by rcfieldz

Maybe he will appear to you someday.

Why doesn't the silly bugger just go ahead and appear?
After all, he seems to think it's important to our well being that we know he is there.