It's a great read-only site.

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Click
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That's it -- I'm emptying my mind!


Science-fiction wallah, storytelling gorilla, man wearing a hat: Cheeseburger Brown.
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The split between temple and rabbinical Judaism, Islam 1200-present, ...

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I suppose it's my way of rationalising the madness in religion, but a lot of what today is irrational can be traced back to "best practice" for survival way back when.

I suppose it is the lack of updating these best practices that I take issue with...
-- The revolution will not be televised.
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Meditation is mental hygiene. You are trying to wash the memes out of your brain, stopping the repetitive, crufty thoughts, much as soap and water tries to wash the germs off your hands.

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it might be truer that they "boil down to" a series of frameworks for living, which includes hygiene in all senses of the word.

For a culture in isolation, the concept of "religion" makes no sense whatsoever. There's no way to discern between religious and non-religious beliefs, religous and non-religious practices, etc. It's only when comparing beliefs and practices between cultures does it stop being conceptually absurd.

Even with context it can be quite difficult to define in practice. Think of a marriage rite for example. Where is the divide between religious rite and social custom?

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I think "religion" is more of conceptual bin where we pile together diverse elements. But none of those elements is essential. Buddhists have a religion without a belief in God. The Greco-Roman pagans had a religion without a moral/ethical system. Traditional Judaism had a religion without an afterlife.

Ritual purity laws are certainly an important part of many religions: Hinduism, Judaism and Islam for instance.

But I think it can be too simplistic to say they're all about "hygiene". A lot of purity laws have nothing obvious to do with hygiene: wearing clothes made from different threads, only eating animals with cloven hooves. And while it's easy enough to make up just-so stories explaining that the rules have origins in health reasons, it's hard to actually prove.

For example, it's often said that the ban on eating pork is because pigs were particularly prone to parasites. But look at the Gadarene Swine for instance: gentiles living in the same area at the same time as Jesus must have been eating pork for them to bother raising pigs. The Chinese domesticated pigs for food in prehistory. Those groups managed to eat pork and survive.

I think there are other factors as well. Being fussy about food can be a handy way to display status. Maybe someone in prehistory started to show off "Hey look, I'm so rich I can turn my nose up at perfectly edible food", and everyone else ended up following rather than look poor or weird? Or maybe it's a good way of reinforcing social bonds and group identity by making everyone eat together.
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It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?
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This comment has been deleted by aggressive cyclist

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