Studies Confirm: Your Steak is Possessed by Demons

[cbayer]

http://religiondispatches.org/studies-confirm-your-steak-is-possessed-by-demons/

BY TRAVIS PROCTOR MARCH 26, 2015

The North American Meat Institute is going to battle this week over new federal guidelines that suggest that “a healthy dietary pattern is…lower in red and processed meat,” just the latest installment in an ongoing debate over the health effects of meat. Is meat essential for children’s health, a terrible toxin, or a great tool for eliminating fat? Is it the highway to heart disease, or the key to unlocking your ideal preindustrial self?

If you’re confused, you’re in good company. People have been debating the merits of meat for centuries. Dig back to one of the earliest of those arguments, and you’ll find surprising prescience—as well as a reminder that our perceptions of food are always entangled with our larger views of the world.

Your meat is full of demons

It was the 3rd century CE, and Porphyry of Tyre had a problem: his good friend Firmius Castricius had abandoned vegetarianism and returned to a meat-based diet. You can’t really blame Castricius for his carnivory. Ritual meals of sacrificed animal meat were central to ancient Greco-Roman religious practice, and avoiding meat involved foregoing some widely accepted cultural customs. But Porphyry, a renowned Platonic philosopher, viewed vegetarianism as essential to the life of an intellectual. So he penned a five-part treatise, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, in order to convince his wayward friend to resume a vegetarian diet.

On Abstinence is the earliest surviving vegetarian treatise of the Western world, and it anticipates several contemporary pro-vegetarianism arguments, including the immorality of unnecessarily killing sentient animals, and the detrimental health effects of carnivorous diets.

more at link

[guillaumeb]

1. Is a large can of worms being opened by this post?

Also from the article:

"What can we make of this strange confluence between ancient superstition and modern medicine? Porphyry’s demonology reminds us of something that ancient philosophers knew all too well, and that modern humans have been slow to appreciate: our bodies are caught up in complex ecological systems, surrounded by, and interacting with, a wide range of cosmic agents and organisms."

So ancient philosophy, another word for religion, thought by many to be based on foolish superstition, might be correct in this case after all?

It is important to remember that new words are created as new knowledge is created. Porphyry did not have a word for bacteria, nor did he have the tools to discover bacteria. He used words he did have to attempt to explain an observable phenomenon. Is that not the essence of all science?

Words like bacteria, chromosome, etc did not exist 4000 years ago because there was no need for the words. But sometimes ancient words describe something that can only be proven with better tools and methods.

[cbayer]

2. It is very interesting to me that many religious rituals and customs seem to

have some practical underpinnings. Whether they understood that at the time or not, I don't know.

We recently had a discussion about the hindu proscription against looking at an eclipse. Well, that makes perfect sense after your community does it and some go blind. If you don't understand the science behind that, it makes good sense to just make it a religious rule.

[guillaumeb]

3. and THAT was my point in an earlier discussion

about DNA. Lacking words to describe something is one thing, but describing something with no obvious physical manifestation, the whole XX/XY matter, is another thing entirely. I think that sometimes people become so fixated on a word that they miss the meaning behind the word.

When you wrote:
"If you don't understand the science behind that, it makes good sense to just make it a religious rule."

the first thing that I thought of was the Jewish dietary proscription against pork. They did not have a word for trichinosis, nor could they test for it, but they observed something and drew a conclusion. Basic science.

[cbayer]

4. Yep, the cloven hoof rule certainly had some basis in science, they just didn't know it.

Circumcision and kosher rituals were also probably due to some kind of problem.

If you have a big public health problem, but have no understanding of where it is coming from, might not be a bad idea to invoke some religious proscriptions.

I would drop the chromosome story. I appreciated it but it has become a meme whose only purpose is to beat people up.

[guillaumeb]

5. consider it dropped

by me. I agree that it does provoke argument with no possible resolution.

Thanks for the reminder that I should not have needed.