4 ms·

I'm not sure how you can say that. Look at the moral aversion regarding eating pork for some religions. It is completely conceivable that they saw people gett

I'm not sure how you can say that. Look at the moral aversion regarding eating pork for some religions. It is completely conceivable that they saw people getting terrible wasting diseases from parasites from people who ate pork and came to their own conclusions that they were 'dirty animals'. Local authorities banned pork consumption. A few generations later it became necessary to describe why people shouldn't eat these animals and what made them different. There were no longer any examples of human disease people could point to so it simply became 'because God said so'. Who knows if this is how it actually happened but we do know early societies attributed to the divine all sorts of stuff that seems silly in terms of attribution but wise in terms of action today...I recall a story of one village in SE Asia surviving a devastating tsunami because of old religious lore about what to do if the ocean receded.

bobwaycott 10y ago
> I'm not sure how you can say that. Because available historical records are quite informative. > Who knows if this is how it actually happened... Given the available historical record, we do. Sure, we cannot identify every possible reason behind every religious prescription, but we can at least identify the point in history that certain moral aversions were drafted, and the reasons given for them by those who created them. > It is completely conceivable that... That some creative scenario is conceivable has nothing to do with its place in history or its likelihood of being true. Just because some religious notion happened to centuries later be found to have a grain of sensibility doesn't in any way counter that, historically speaking, the known moral aversion predated any known danger. Many religious prescriptions are part of carving out an identity and social rules for its adherents. Hence casting them in a moral dimension, to add the weight of divine approval/disapproval to the weight of the religious source of obligation. They established and perpetuated power structures in human relationships.
- clavalle 10y ago
  >Because available historical records are quite informative. Pointers to said records? I wasn't aware there was a historical play-by-play regarding how the dogma of today's dominant religions came to be.
  - bobwaycott 10y ago
    1. Choose a dominant religion. 2. Grab the source material of said religion's scriptures and other authoritative texts. 3. Jot down the approximated date of said authoritative text's believed/identified authorship. 4. Interrogate the scriptures and authoritative texts for presented rationales. Admit these to be the primary offered reasoning, and the highest source of obligational determination for adherents. Where possible, include comparative and secondary sources that identify and illuminate social, cultural, political, intellectual, scientific, and philosophical understanding and reasoning of the period that may also be additional sources of obligational determinative weight. 5. Compare to known timeline of understanding physical risks of prostitution and other sexual behaviors. 6. Place everything on a timeline and see which came first. Trace the development of human ideas, beliefs, and knowledge through time. I'm not making any radical suggestions here. This is just basic intellectual and cultural history.
    - clavalle 10y ago
      You are making a radical suggestion; that scriptures (or their 'source material') are the whole truth of how they themselves came to be rather than the end of a long process pre-dated by unknowable oral tradition. Further that there is a 'known timeline of the understanding of risks' -- IOW when, exactly, did humanity start to recognize some idea of cause and effect when it comes to disease. You have to recognize that this is all impossible and it is perfectly legitimate to say 'I don't know how this happened but here is a plausible scenario'. To say 'oh yes, this knowledge is out there and perfectly knowable' is quite radical.
      - bobwaycott 10y ago
        > You are making a radical suggestion; that scriptures (or their 'source material') are the whole truth of how they themselves came to be rather than the end of a long process pre-dated by unknowable oral tradition. I have in no way made such a claim. There is a known timeline of human understanding of germs, bacteria, viruses, etc. That knowledge is out there, and the timeline we can build with available records is perfectly knowable, insofar as humans are capable of perfectly knowing anything based on available evidence. That you seem intent on persisting in arguing the plausibility of undocumented and truly unknowable alternative scenarios makes for very boring discussion. Let's just say aliens did it. We cannot possibly prove otherwise.

bobwaycott 10y ago

> I'm not sure how you can say that. Because available historical records are quite informative. > Who knows if this is how it actually happened... Given the available historical record, we do. Sure, we cannot identify every possible reason behind every religious prescription, but we can at least identify the point in history that certain moral aversions were drafted, and the reasons given for them by those who created them. > It is completely conceivable that... That some creative scenario is conceivable has nothing to do with its place in history or its likelihood of being true. Just because some religious notion happened to centuries later be found to have a grain of sensibility doesn't in any way counter that, historically speaking, the known moral aversion predated any known danger. Many religious prescriptions are part of carving out an identity and social rules for its adherents. Hence casting them in a moral dimension, to add the weight of divine approval/disapproval to the weight of the religious source of obligation. They established and perpetuated power structures in human relationships.

clavalle 10y ago
>Because available historical records are quite informative. Pointers to said records? I wasn't aware there was a historical play-by-play regarding how the dogma of today's dominant religions came to be.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  1. Choose a dominant religion. 2. Grab the source material of said religion's scriptures and other authoritative texts. 3. Jot down the approximated date of said authoritative text's believed/identified authorship. 4. Interrogate the scriptures and authoritative texts for presented rationales. Admit these to be the primary offered reasoning, and the highest source of obligational determination for adherents. Where possible, include comparative and secondary sources that identify and illuminate social, cultural, political, intellectual, scientific, and philosophical understanding and reasoning of the period that may also be additional sources of obligational determinative weight. 5. Compare to known timeline of understanding physical risks of prostitution and other sexual behaviors. 6. Place everything on a timeline and see which came first. Trace the development of human ideas, beliefs, and knowledge through time. I'm not making any radical suggestions here. This is just basic intellectual and cultural history.
  - clavalle 10y ago
    You are making a radical suggestion; that scriptures (or their 'source material') are the whole truth of how they themselves came to be rather than the end of a long process pre-dated by unknowable oral tradition. Further that there is a 'known timeline of the understanding of risks' -- IOW when, exactly, did humanity start to recognize some idea of cause and effect when it comes to disease. You have to recognize that this is all impossible and it is perfectly legitimate to say 'I don't know how this happened but here is a plausible scenario'. To say 'oh yes, this knowledge is out there and perfectly knowable' is quite radical.
    - bobwaycott 10y ago
      > You are making a radical suggestion; that scriptures (or their 'source material') are the whole truth of how they themselves came to be rather than the end of a long process pre-dated by unknowable oral tradition. I have in no way made such a claim. There is a known timeline of human understanding of germs, bacteria, viruses, etc. That knowledge is out there, and the timeline we can build with available records is perfectly knowable, insofar as humans are capable of perfectly knowing anything based on available evidence. That you seem intent on persisting in arguing the plausibility of undocumented and truly unknowable alternative scenarios makes for very boring discussion. Let's just say aliens did it. We cannot possibly prove otherwise.