Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
That is just more superstition. You need to study human nutrition a little more thoroughly. Then you will better understand how the acids and enzymes in your stomach and other organs break down food into smaller molecules, so the nutrients can be assimilated by your body. Blood is basically a tissue like skin, bone, muscle, cartilage, brain, nerve, gland tissue, etc. The cells just happen to be suspended in a liquid medium so they can flow through your blood vessels to do their job. Once blood tissue is broken down by acids and enzymes, it is nothing but a collection of amino acids just like any other animal tissue. Your intestines, liver, pancreas, etc., coordinate their functions to make those amino acids available for your body to regenerate its own tissue. At this point the proteins from cow blood are utterly indistinguishable from the proteins from cow muscle ("meat") or pig ears or lobster tail or clam muscle or the body of a worm--or from the protein in nuts, seeds, beans and grains, although the amino acids will be in a different ratio.
The only substances in an animal's blood--or in its meat, heart, lungs, skin or other tissues--that can harm you are:
- Bacteria. "Germs" that have gotten into its body through an open wound or in its food, water or air, the same way they get into our bodies. Many bacteria are very sturdy and can survive the digestive process without being torn apart, and cause illness in your body.
- Toxins. "Poisons" that the animal has gotten from its food, water or air, or a wound. Poisons are often large, heavy molecules that resist being disassembled by digestion just like bacteria.
- Drugs. Farm animals are routinely given antibiotics to counteract the bacteria in the filth in which they are raised. They are also given drugs to make them grow larger, to sexually neuter them, etc. Like bacteria and poisons, drugs are also very sturdy molecules--they're constructed that way deliberately so you (and any animal) can take them orally.
The insult "meat-head" refers to someone who is so stupid that his brain is nothing but a slab of meat. It has nothing to do with his eating habits.
Do you eat shrimp and lobster? Crustaceans are arthropods like insects, spiders and centipedes.
Poor people everywhere eat whatever they can find, so throughout history dogs have been eaten during bad times. To eat a dog opportunistically, when you're starving, is a logical way to survive. But raising dogs for food is not a sensible agricultural practice. Cows eat grass, which we can't digest, and turn it into meat, which is healthy for us. But dogs are carnivores; we might as well eat whatever they eat instead of giving it to them; it would be a much more efficient process.
Dogs are raised for food in North Korea because the country is a failed state and people are starving. They can let the dogs eat garbage, like pigs. It's not very efficient but what else are they going to do. People raise dogs for food in the Philippines because they consider it a special treat. It's one of the primary reasons that Filipinos are not one of the best-loved ethnic groups in America.
The Chinese ate dogs during WWII when they were starving and then after the Communist revolution when they were still starving. They also ate cats, which makes a little more sense since cats eat small vermin and birds which are difficult for humans to catch and use for food. Hell, the Chinese are a consummately practical people and during the worst times they (reportedly) even ate their own dead (with Mao's blessing, I've been told) because at least that way they didn't die in vain: why let all that protein go to waste when the entire village is starving?
But since the 1970s China has become sufficiently prosperous and nobody eats dogs and cats anymore, except perhaps in the most remote back country regions where civilization is a little shaky.
Dairy farming became a major agricultural technology in Europe, so the European population slowly evolved the ability to continue producing the enzyme lactase, to digest milk, after weaning. In much of the rest of the world this type of agriculture was never developed, so the mutation was not selected for. Lactose intolerance is prevalent in East Asia. Some other peoples drank the milk of goats, sheep, yaks and horses, which have different chemistry. Llamas don't produce enough milk to be useful so the South Americans had to get along without it.
We've got copies of the Koran going all the way back to about 800CE, and they are word-for-word the same as modern editions. This is not all that remarkable, since there are much older Bibles and Hindu scriptures.
You're using the word "translate" incorrectly. The Koran [to hell with that trendy new un-English way of spelling it that looks like a Klingon word, and yes I still pronounce "Celtic" with a soft C because I speak English, not Gaelic] is still written in the original medieval dialect of Arabic. Since all literate people know this dialect, it is the basis for the standard transnational dialect used by newscasters, politicians, lecturers, diplomats, etc. New editions of the book are merely transcribed, not translated.
Since, according to Islamic doctrine, the text of the Koran is the literal word of God, as dictated to Mohammed and memorized verbatim by hundreds of disciples (to correct for inaccuracies) for about 80 years before anyone got around to writing it down, it is actually frowned upon to translate it into other languages or even into modern dialects of Arabic. To become a proper Muslim one must learn medieval Arabic, just as one must learn Ancient Hebrew in order to become a bar mitzvah.
This is actually quite sensible. Look at all the misunderstandings caused by different translations of the Bible. The entire "Jews control the world's banking system" thingie is a perfect illustration of this. The medieval Christians interpreted a passage in the Old Testament to mean that any lending of money for interest is sinful, and this discouraged any Christian from converting his surplus wealth into capital, stalling the development of the European economy. Fortunately every educated Jewish man can read the Torah in the original Hebrew, and they knew that the proscription applies only to usury--"predatory lending" as we call it today. So if a Christian wanted to borrow money, the only folks who were delighted to lend it to him--at a mutually reasonable interest rate--were the Jews.
I went to my first bar mitzvah ever yesterday, and for the first time I looked at a Jewish copy of the Old Testament--the Torah.. One fourth of each page is the original Hebrew, another fourth is the English translation, and a full HALF of it is critical commentary, analysis by various rabbis over the centuries, arguing over the meaning of the words. Jews argue about everything, even the meaning of God's own words! In the original language! I really understand why the Muslim leaders insist that translations of the Koran are worthless.
Uh... Can you guys PLEASE do the poor overworked Linguistics Moderator a big favor, and help me keep discussions on track when dealing with such a controversial and emotionally charged topic as RELIGION, by trying to stick with halfway standard definitions of words?
Terrorism MUST include physical violence of military or paramilitary scope, against civilians or civilian infrastructure. Knocking down a building and killing all the children inside, THAT is terrorism. Lying to people is NOT terrorism! I have enough trouble convincing people that knocking down the Pentagon was not terrorism, because the damn thing is an obvious MILITARY target, and in a real war any enemy would salivate over the thought of bombing it.
You know I'm no apologist for monotheistic religion. My studied judgment is that it works against the progress of civilization by reinforcing our Paleolithic tribal instinct. But I also love our language and I don't like seeing it abused.
My wife is studying Buddhism and adopting many of its ways, and she insists that it is not a religion because it has no gods. The Buddha was a regular fellow like you and me who lived and then died. In fact many of its sects have no supernatural component at all. It is just a philosophy. And since it does not claim to have the answer to every question, it embraces science and any other discipline that looks for answers.(somebody else said:
So if you find Buddhism to be different from the Abrahamic religions in many important ways, there's a good reason for that. Buddhists understand that God is a metaphor. Christians and Muslims don't. (Some Jews do too; Judaism is a system of laws, not doctrines.)
The Pope and the leaders of almost every major religious group on earth accept the evidence for evolution. Only the Religious Redneck Retard Revival, a purely American phenomenon, hews to the interpretation of the Bible from the Dark Ages, and Christians in most other countries find it to be an embarrassment to their faith. The proudly uneducated Christians in America's Bible Belt are so ignorant of science that they don't understand the difference between evolution and abiogenesis. The former is part of the canon of science, proven true beyond a reasonable doubt, based upon mountains of evidence from two independent fields of scholarship: paleontology and DNA analysis. But the latter is merely a promising hypothesis that has not been proven.
We KNOW that all living organisms evolved from lifeforms that existed a couple of billion years ago that were so simple that it's not even quite accurate to call them "cells." What we don't know is how those first lifeforms arose. We keep closing in on the explanation for how organic material developed from inorganic material, but it is far from complete and it is not unreasonable to doubt it. If you have a hunch that the first organic molecules were created by a supernatural force, your hypothesis is extremely weak, because it raises more questions than it answers. But it does not contradict science.
But if you believe, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that complex lifeforms have not been evolving from simpler lifeforms, for about half the lifespan of this planet, then you are unreasonable: you are contradicting science. Since SciForums is a place of science (it says so in our name), to make an assertion that claims to contradict science, without offering any respectable evidence, is trolling, which is a violation of the forum rules. If you continue to repeat this assertion, now that it has been challenged, without providing such evidence, you will be permabanned just like any other troll.
The only place you can say this without incurring consequences is right here on the Religion subforum. Do NOT go outside this little ghetto which we have set up for you and your lies. You have the world's other ten zillion websites to spread your preposterous notions. This one is ours.
Apparently not. Evolution is a canonical scientific theory. Any claim of falsifying a canonical scientific theory is, by definition, an extraordinary assertion. By the Rule of Laplace, one of the cornerstones of the scientific method which governs this website and all scientific inquiry, every extraordinary assertion must be accompanied by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat it with respect. For you to make this assertion without providing evidence disrespects science and contradicts your statement that you "love" it.
Homo sapiens is a species of Great Ape (which includes gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans). The clade of apes (which include the gibbons or "Lesser Apes") broke away from the clade of Old World monkeys around 30mya. Since the infraorder that contains both of these parvorders is distinct from the tarsiers, which are not monkeys, it is named Simiformes and taxonomically is defined as the clade of all monkey-like mammals. So it actually is reasonable to say that man, and all apes, are indeed descended from primitive monkeys.
If anyone is displeased with that reasoning, there is no controversy over the fact that we are all descended from primates.
What bothers me is that if we assume he was a real historical figure, he was one who lived in the Roman Empire. The Romans were meticulous recordkeepers. Here is a man whose mother was a virgin, whose birth was announced by a star and attended by foreign dignitaries, who walked on water and created food out of thin air, and finally was reanimated from a thoroughly dead corpse! Yet there are no records of his existence? The first accounts of these miraculous events weren't written down until a generation after his death?
This absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence to disprove his existence, but it certainly puts the burden of proof on his advocates to present us with any sort of respectable evidence to the contrary! For a long time we were all quite satisfied with the references to him in the writings of Josephus, a respected Roman historian of Jewish ancestry. However, analysis of these writings using recently developed forensic techniques has proven them to be forgeries, accretions from a later date.
Well okay, they are both legends. But there's a key difference. Everyone knows that Paul Bunyan and his Big Blue Ox are only legends. I think a better comparison would be King Arthur.
We've only recently become certain that King Arthur was not a real person, or at the very most is a wildly exaggerated version of a much more humble real person, or possibly an amalgamation of more than one real persons.
But the comparison goes beyond this. Both King Arthur and Jesus are archetypes. Similar legends, or similar combinations of bits and pieces of various legends, occur in other cultures. And like any archetypal myth, it is not terribly important whether they were real people, exaggerations, or complete fabrications. What is important is what they tell us about ourselves!
I'm not a scholar of Old England and I don't know much more about Arthur than I learned by seeing "Camelot" several times and learning some of the songs. But as a citizen of the Western World I know as much about Jesus as the next non-churchgoer.
"Turn the other cheek." "Let him who is without sin among you throw the first stone." Jesus was a pacifist. Jesus was the first hippie. Jesus understood that what every little kid says on the playground is true: "It all started when he hit me back." Jesus understood that the first rule of civilization, the only thing that holds civilization together, is: You don't get to kill people just because you hate them. If this were not true, then we'd have to devote so much of our time and effort to protecting ourselves from each other, that the productivity boost that makes civilization superior to the Stone Age would disappear.
I hate the religion that was founded in Jesus's name--in fact many scholars insist that it is an insult to his name and should truthfully be called Paulism instead of Christianity. I hate the evil that has been done in Jesus's name--the thousand years of antisemitism that defined European Christendom, the Crusades, the persecution of Galileo, the Inquisition, the obliteration of the two New World civilizations, the 125 years of uninterrupted warfare that defined the Reformation, the abomination oxymoronically known as "creation science" that was briefly institutionalized in Kansas and still has a museum in Kentucky. I hate many of the most prominent Christians--the pope who turned a blind eye to priestly pedophilia in his younger days, the American televangelist who says God sent the earthquake as punishment to the supremely Christian people of Haiti who welcomed boatloads of Jewish refugees to their impoverished shores during WWII after America turned them away. I hate people who call themselves Christians but use their religion as an excuse for war, slavery and ignorance.
But I do not hate Jesus. I don't care whether he was real or not. I love Jesus. I just wish he had a little more influence among the other people who claim to love him.