WHY is eating ~PORK~ bad for me?

Originally posted by karl 12
The bible is literaly spilling over with erroneus factual innacuracies and spurious declarations-not to mention hysterically unhinged socipoathic and homicidal instruction for it's cult members.

so burning lepresy rags after they are infected? yes horrible!

Ah yes ,prophecy-people in robes making stuff up -very good.

do your homework. or, if you dont feel like it, ask any scholar. or google babylon. or maybe read daniel 9.

Historical accuracy:

I nearly choked on my cornflakes when I read this one-if anything the bible is one of the most innacurate historical fables of all time.
As for the church, it has done it's utmost to harrass,impede and antagonise the progress of rational free enquiry down the years with regard to Earth's beginnings and historical geology.

read up on assyria and its relation to the bible

Literal harmony:
What about all the glaring contradictions,blatant paradoxes and factual discrepencies-maybe this is what happens when lots of different humans take lots of years to compile a book.

oh you mean all those "contradictions" those bible hating websites pull up? the same ones that nitpick on on translation errors?

In today's production agriculture, hogs are not fed parts of slaughtered hogs. Feed companies are prohibited from doing so, (USDA) I don't think blood meal, bone meal or meat meal can be fed to any animal.

We also use products that take care of the parasites. Most of the pork you are getting at the supermarket as a very lean product. Really to lean for me, no flavor.

Roper

Originally posted by theRiverGoddess
you are so far from a dingbat

Thanks, but you've never seen me try to get everything together to leave the house I am the person whose friends lie to her about what time things start, cause they all know I'll be 20-30 minutes later than I think I'll be.

When I was in college I studied anthropology, and I was especially fascinated by food taboos. It's one of the few things that every human culture has rules about. One of the universal beliefs among humans seems to be some version of "you are what you eat."

I think the tie with the unclean spirits is interesting too. I'm going to recap the story, in case anyone is following the thread and doesn't know it.

The story is found in Mark, Matthew, and Luke – Jesus encounters a man possessed by (a) demon(s). The demon(s) tell him "I/we am/are Legion, for we are many" – there's some unclearness about translation. Jesus is going to cast the demon into the abyss, but instead drives them into a herd of pigs, which run down the hill into the water.

I don't know the history at all, but it seems to me that the herd of pigs must have belonged to a Gentile (non-Jew), since the kosher laws would make 2000 pigs pretty useless to a Jew. So it could be evidence that pig farming was associated with non-Jews, which could be a reason for the kosher restriction (you are what you eat; not eating pig is a way to signify that you are not the same as a new tribe you meet who does).

The question I guess is whether Jesus chooses to put the demon into pigs because pigs are inedible anyway, or whether there is thought to be an affinity between pigs and demons which is what makes them inedible in the first place.

(please note that as far as this goes it makes no difference whether Jesus is real, or God, or a character. We can believe in the story as truth, as parable, or as fiction – no matter what it tells us a lot about the beliefs of the people it's about)

I can't think of any possessed-pigs stories from the Old Testament, but that doesn't mean they're not there, there's lots of the OT I've never read. I also wonder if there are possessed-pigs stories from other traditions – Hindu, for instance.

It would be awesome if someone would come along and clarify why pork is considered to be particularly bad if you're trying to experience OOBE, or other spiritual practices in other traditions.

P.S. – my two cats love ham, sausage, and bacon. I've never tried pork chops, but I bet they'd go for it. One cat will eat canned tuna or salmon, one won't eat human-quality canned fish, but will eat catfood-quality canned fish. I think cats are just very individual in their dietary preferences

[Why heaven hates ham
Christopher Hitchens, National Post
Published: Thursday, May 10, 2007

All religions have a tendency to feature some dietary injunction or prohibition, whether it is the now lapsed Catholic injunction to eat fish on Fridays, or the adoration by Hindus of the cow as a consecrated and invulnerable animal (the government of India even offered to import and protect all the cattle facing slaughter as a result of the bovine encephalitic, or "mad cow," plague that swept Europe in the 1990s), or the refusal by some other Eastern cults to consume any animal flesh, or to injure any other creature be it rat or flea. But the oldest and most tenacious of all fetishes is the hatred and even fear of the pig. It emerged in primitive Judaea, and was for centuries one of the ways -- the other being circumcision-- by which Jews could be distinguished.

Even though sura 5:60 of the Koran condemns particularly Jews but also other unbelievers as having been turned into pigs and monkeys -- a very intense theme in recent Salafist Muslim preaching-- and the Koran describes the flesh of swine as unclean or even "abominable," Muslims appear to see nothing ironic in the adoption of this uniquely Jewish taboo. Real horror of the porcine is manifest all over the Islamic world. One good instance would be the continued prohibition of George Orwell's Animal Farm, one of the most charming and useful fables of modern times, of the reading of which Muslim schoolchildren are deprived. I have perused some of the solemn prohibition orders written by Arab education ministries, which are so stupid that they fail to notice the evil and dictatorial role played by the pigs in the story itself.

Orwell actually did dislike pigs, as a consequence of his failure as a small farmer, and this revulsion is shared by many adults who have had to work with these difficult animals in agricultural conditions. Crammed together in sties, pigs tend to act swinishly, as it were, and to have noisy and nasty fights. It is not unknown for them to eat their own young and even their own excrement, while their tendency to random and loose gallantry is often painful to the more fastidious eye. But it has often been noticed that pigs left to their own devices, and granted sufficient space, will keep themselves very clean, arrange little bowers, bring up families and engage in social interaction with other pigs. The creatures also display many signs of intelligence, and it has been calculated that the crucial ratio -- between brain weight and body weight -- is almost as high with them as it is in dolphins. There is great adaptability between the pig and its environment, as witness wild boars and "feral pigs" as opposed to the placid porkers and frisky piglets of our more immediate experience.

It would be merely boring and idiotic to wonder how the designer of all things conceived such a versatile creature and then commanded his highermammal creation to avoid it altogether or risk his eternal displeasure. But many otherwise intelligent mammals affect the belief that Heaven hates ham.

I hope that you have guessed by now what we know in any case -- that this fine beast is one of our fairly close cousins. It shares a great deal of our DNA, and there have lately been welcome transplants of skin, heart valves and kidneys from pigs to humans. If -- which I heartily trust does not happen -- a new Dr. Moreau could corrupt recent advances in cloning and create a hybrid, a "pig-man" is widely feared as the most probable outcome. Meanwhile, almost everything about the pig is useful, from its nutritious and delicious meat to its tanned hide for leather and its bristles for brushes. In Upton Sinclair's graphic novel of the Chicago slaughterhouse, The Jungle, it is agonizing to read about the way that pigs are borne aloft on hooks, screaming as their throats are cut. Even the strongest nerves of the most hardened workers are shaken by the experience. There is something about that shriek ...

To press this a little further, one may note that children if left unmolested by rabbis and imams are very drawn to pigs, especially to baby ones, and that firefighters in general do not like to eat roast pork or crackling. The barbaric vernacular word for roasted human in New Guinea and elsewhere was "long pig": I have never had the relevant degustative experience myself, but it seems that we do, if eaten, taste very much like pigs.

This helps to make nonsense of the usual "secular" explanations of the original Jewish prohibition. It is argued that the ban was initially rational, since pig meat in hot climates can become rank and develop the worms of trichinosis. This objection -- which perhaps does apply in the case of non-kosher shellfish -- is absurd when applied to the actual conditions. First, trichinosis is found in all climates, and in fact occurs more in cold than in hot ones. Second, ancient Jewish settlements in the land of Canaan can easily be distinguished by archaeologists by the absence of pig bones in their rubbish tips, as opposed to the presence of such bones in the middens of other communities. The non-Jews did not sicken and die from eating pork, in other words. (Quite apart from anything else, if they had died for this reason there would have been no need for the god of Moses to urge their slaughter by non-pig-eaters.)

There must therefore be another answer to the conundrum. I claim my own solution as original, though without the help of Sir James Frazer and the great Ibn Warraq I might not have hit upon it.

According to many ancient authorities, the attitude of early Semites to swine was one of reverence as much as disgust. The eating of pig flesh was considered as something special, even privileged and ritualistic. (This mad confusion between the sacred and the profane is found in all faiths at all times.) The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropomorphic root: The look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human.

Porcophobia -- and porcophilia -- thus probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which the "holy" texts often do more than hint. Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offence for which he plies the lash.

Porcophilia can also be used for oppressive and repressive purposes. In medieval Spain, where Jews and Muslims were compelled on pain of death and torture to convert to Christianity, the religious authorities quite rightly suspected that many of the conversions were not sincere. Indeed, the Inquisition arose partly from the holy dread that secret infidels were attending Mass -- where of course, and even more disgustingly, they were pretending to eat human flesh and drink human blood, in the person of Christ himself. Among the customs that arose in consequence was the offering, at most events formal and informal, of a plate of charcuterie. Those who have been fortunate enough to visit Spain, or any good Spanish restaurant, will be familiar with the gesture of hospitality: literally dozens of pieces of differently cured, differently sliced pig. But the grim origin of this lies in a constant effort to sniff out heresy, and to be unsmilingly watchful for giveaway expressions of distaste. In the hands of eager Christian fanatics, even the toothsome jamon Iberico could be pressed into service as a form of torture.

Today, ancient stupidity is upon us again. Muslim zealots in Europe are demanding that the Three Little Pigs, and Miss Piggy, Winnie-the-Pooh's Piglet and other traditional pets and characters be removed from the innocent gaze of their children. The mirthless cretins of jihad have probably not read enough to know of the Empress of Blandings, and of the Earl of Emsworth's infinitely renewable delight in the splendid pages of the incomparable author Mr. Whiffle, The Care of the Pig, but there will be trouble when they get that far. An old statue of a wild boar, in an arboretum in Middle England, has already been threatened with mindless Islamic vandalism.

In microcosm, this apparently trivial fetish shows how religion and faith and superstition distort our whole picture of the world. The pig is so close to us, and has been so handy to us in so many respects, that a strong case is now made by humanists that it should not be factory-farmed, confined, separated from its young and forced to live in its own ordure. All other considerations to one side, the resulting pink and spongy meat is somewhat rebarbative. But this is a decision that we can make in the plain light of reason and compassion, as extended to fellow creatures and relatives, and not as a result of incantations from Iron Age campfires where much worse offences were celebrated in the name of God. "Pig's head on a stick," says the nervous but stouthearted Ralph in the face of the buzzing, suppurating idol (first killed and then worshipped) that has been set up by cruel, frightened schoolboys in Lord of the Flies. "Pig's head on a stick."

And he was more right than he could have known, and much wiser than his elders as well as his delinquent juniors.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

www.foxnews.com...

www.foxnews.com...

On the flavor of human flesh, by an adventure writer who went a little further in his research than most:

"I took a big swallow of wine, a helping of rice, and thoughtfully ate half the steak. And as I ate, I knew with increasing certainty what it was like. It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable. As for any other special taste or odor of a sort which would be surprising and make a person who had tasted it not knowing exclaim, 'What is this?' it had absolutely none. And as for the 'long pig' legend, repeated in a thousand stories and recopied in a hundred books, it was totally, completely false.

Source

At least one Seattle firehouse prides itself on its pulled pork recipe:

my brother came to visit this past week, and he brought one of the dishes that they love to make in his firehouse in seattle. it is a recipe for pulled pork. that name - so short and sweet - does not even begin to touch the deliciousness of the dish. he got the recipe from one of his crew members, and everyone who's had it, loves it. he claims that there are never any leftovers (firefighters are always hungry!).

Source

A 15% Human Sheep has been created:

Moving on, Esmail Zanjani, a University of Nevada researcher, has created chimeras by injecting human bone marrow stem cells into a developing sheep fetus. Approximatel/y 15% of the fully grown sheep's body was made of human cells.

Source

On the matching of one segment of DNA in humans, pigs, and cows:

Regions of introns 2, 3, 10, 17a, 18, and 21 and 3' flanking sequence corresponding to human CFTR DNase I hypersensitive sites (DHS) showed high homology in the cow and pig. Cross-species sequence conservation also enabled finer mapping of other human DHS, including those in introns 1, 16, and 20. Additional potential regulatory elements not associated with human DHS were also identified.

Source

On replacement heart valves:

“I’ve looked at your film Adam,” Dr. Trento said as he sat down in his leather chair, “You definitely need a new valve.” He continued, “Now you have some options. You can select a pig valve. You can select a cow valve. You can select an artificial or mechanical valve. Or, you can opt for your own valve using the Ross Procedure.”

Source

So, sorry Mr. Hitchens, neither the genetic relationship of pigs and humans nor the taste relationship is closer than that of the cow. Not gonna explain kosher laws.

@Miriam – why is it so important that the kosher laws reflect a "scientific" health concern? Aren't they just as valid if they reflect a spiritual or cultural concern?

[edit on 11/21/08 by americandingbat]

reply to post by theRiverGoddess


Hi theRiverGoddess!

It's really hard not to talk about the Bible when it comes to the issue of eating pork but I've followed your thread in the paranormal and participated on it, so I think I may have something that may interest you since I know you like to oobe.Lol

People should always try to do their best not only for their physical bodies but also for their spiritual bodies as well - because if someone is spiritually dead (which you are obviously not since you are oobing) their whole point of being here is absolutely useless.

Two of what we call the deadly sins would come in to play here. Deadly sin goes against your spirit and hinders your advancement. The first would be what is known as "sloth." If you look at a pigs personality and in a sense, it's spirit, the first thing you notice is that it is big, fat, dirty and lazy. We all know that obesity is not healthy - so even though it taste good, look real close at what the final state of the hogs life is and you'll see what is wrong with what you are about to ingest.

The other deadly sin, that would hinder your spiritual development for oobing would be gluttony. As we get older, the more we eat, we pack on the pounds and get lazier. Eat less, sleep lighter and oobe more.Lol

Jesus actually says in the Gospel of Thomas - that when we eat what is dead, we make it come alive in us. Would we then necessarily want the spirit of something that wallows in a mud pit because it is so hugely obese, slothfullness has taken over it? Nope.

See ya around!




[edit on 21-11-2008 by Myrtales Instinct]

Originally posted by americandingbat
Carrot gave a really good, succinct, persuasive account of one of the big reasons that modern vegetarians within meat-eating cultures give to avoid pork: the egregious conditions of industrial farming. This includes the pharmaceutics and other chemicals that livestock are fed as well as what goes into their feed to provide them nutrition, and the squalor and cruelty demonstrated on huge for-profit farms.

Why shouldn't we eat pork?
1) the Carrot explanation – because pigs are fed disgusting stuff on modern farms. But this really applies to all meats, not just pork.
2) the nutritionist's explanation – they're high in fat and many forms are high in salt. Again, this really applies to all meat.
3) there is something peculiar to pork that interferes with human spiritual energy – this is what I'd love to hear a response to, if anyone out there knows?

From a Health Perspective, it doesn't make sense to eat things that are bad for us. High in Fat = larger waist line. High in Colesteral = Heart & Artery problems. I am overly cautious of what I put into my body. Religious teachings aside, religious values aside, religious explanations aside - It's no good for us. (This is my personal opinion only)

But then again...what is these days? Everything is so chock-full of perservatives to give it a longer shelf-life, for convenience, and for the purpose of what? So these toxins can build up in our Bodies? Your body works as well, as the fuel you put into it. (Ever seen Supersize me, anyone?) This is an extreme case, conducted over the course of a Month, but consider, if you were to eat anything chemically processed for a long period of time. Sure the timing and exposure is different, but over a long period of time - I can't help but think we are going to pay the price for ingesting these things in the long run.

Has anyone done a cleanse? A weeklong cleanse consisting of Vegetables and Fruits and Water? I did one in the summer, and I've got to tell you, I felt the best I ever have. I did it shortly after I stopped eating Meat, and wasn't surprised at how good I felt. Why? Because i was putting GOOD stuff into my body.

An observation: The number of people who have Cancer these days (which I believe is a man-made virus, but thats another discussion), is relative to the number of people who smoked 30 years ago. Back when you ddin't need ID to buy cigarettes, back when cigarettes were .50 cents a package. People today, are seeing the side affects of continued exposure to these chemcials used in cigarettes.

....What side affects are WE going to see from the chemicals, hormones, and continued exposure to them, found in our Meats? This is why I'm a Vegetarian.

Perhaps I'm a little too paranoid - I've been called worse... But I am far too nervous to trust the people in charge of handling our meat - and I am not a huge fan of being the next test study group...which is what we will be when 30 years from now, the NEXT discovery is made about long-term exposure to chemicals we ingest.

I know this is a Religious discussion, but I think its important for the Health aspect to be acknowleged as well, as the question is "Why is Eating Pork Bad for Me?" ...

- Carrot

Asala was kind enough to move this thread OUT of the Faith forums and
THANK YOU ASALA FOR SAVING THIS THREAD!!!!

Ok all you bible thumpers and quoters may now leave us in peace to have our discussion, without you feeling it your spiritual duty to push your ideals down the throat of the people wanting to discuss the PORK eating issue sans biblical stance.

Lets see if maybe there are solid reasons why pork would be worse for us than mercury saturated sea food and GM produce.

I know from personal experience that pigs are not inherently 'dirty' animals. If left in a mud waller they can't help but be dirty, but allow them a choice & give them a kiddy wading pool and they LOVE to bath and be as fresh and clean as they possibly can be. Seems to me they like to exfoliate in the mud then rinse it off for a squeaky clean finish.

True ....pigs are not cannibalistic ENOUGH to hunt and eat other live pigs, but I think for sure if a dead pig is left in the area they would eat of the carcuss without compunction .......

Swine have been used to dispose of the evidence of dead humans for VERY long time....and I think MAYBE this is the basis of the fear of pork, that you may by accident be somewhat cannibalistic by eating a porcine that had been fed human flesh.

CA ARROT I am a huge advocate of The Master Cleanse.........I do it quite often and even journal my experiences here in BTS.......
www.belowtopsecret.com...

I appologise for editing everything but my dyslexia makes it a MUST. I would rather appear as an edit monster than someone who communicates in tungs.....



[edit on 21-11-2008 by theRiverGoddess]