It always amazes me people think this being that created the universe cares what meat they eat.
A lot of food handling instructions in religion are rudimentary sanitation practices. For example, food must be consumed same day, not left out. Don't eat raw shellfish. Don't drink blood. Wash your hands.
Pretty much all religious texts at their core are "how to not die," "how to make more of you," and "how not to be an asshole," with an overarching guilt system to enforce it.
Everything else is either people misconstruing things because they can't make sense of their own existence, either through mental illness, misguidedness, or plain old ignorance.
Hey there’s also hallucinations in there
You're telling me this enormous being with 6 wings surrounding flaming wheels covered with eyes that God is speaking to me through isn't real?
Hey sometimes the mushrooms in the desert hit different
I'd never thought of religion as a form of Darwinism before.
Is is, in many interesting ways. In the sense of Dawkins ("the selfish gene"), who coined the term 'meme', religions are complex memes. Ideas which need hosts to survive and spread. This puts evolutionary pressure on these ideas to become good at convincing brains that:
"This idea is worth listening to. This idea is worth remembering. This idea is worth spreading."
Naturally, religions became good at these things or went extinct. In many cases, their evolution converged to extremes. A powerful god is obviously beaten by the all-powerful God. A stronger incentive than living a decent life on Earth is obviously receiving eternal bliss in heaven.
Religions take great efforts to emphasize they are very important - sorry: the most important - ideas. And some which emphasize how important it is to spread them happened to spread, driving others extinct in the process.
To this day, religions evolve in the attempt to adapt to their changing environment of culture, politics and technology, lest they go extinct. New denominations form and rise in the process.
I agree to @capt_wolf@lemmy.world's observation. Does the frequent inclusion of these very existential ideas ("how to not die") hint at how early in the human evolution religions started playing a role? If so, if religions helped early humans survive, that would make being susceptible to religious ideas an evolutionary advantage for early humans. So maybe there was a synergy between genetic evolution and memetic evolution. And maybe that's also why conspiracy theories are such a pest, piggybacking on the same mechanics.
The reason these practices are in place are historical
Think about a time before modern sanitation. You eat THIS meat, you fucking die. So obviously God doesn't want us to eat it because otherwise he wouldn't have made it a dirty, deadly meat. Even today, these meats kill people occasionally.
I'm an atheist, but I think it's still worthwhile to understand the perspectives.
Bad chicken will kill you dead too. Apologists of these religions advance these hypotheses but they're not really supported by anything scientific or in the historical records.
Food taboos of all kinds are a common cultural feature (for example, modern Westerners don't like insects), and the Judaism-derived religions incorporated the food taboos of the Jews sometimes.
Cares about the meat you eat and the meat you beat
If you read through the stories that define them, it makes a lot more sense. Blood and sacrifice are intertwined with life and righteousness. God is holy and set apart, and can't be in the presence of less -- so their lives and habits are built around remaining in relationship to their God.
So the careful handling of death, food, and blood makes perfect sense from that worldview, whether you personally agree with it or not.
That makes even less sense.
No, no it does not. Like, not at all.
And isn't it funny how the gods are always concerned with the same things their worshippers are? It would be odd to care deeply about regulating the sexual and dietary habits of the ants in our backyards. If god(s) were real I'd expect their interests to be wild and beyond our understanding, and not about what hats humans can wear and what meat is acceptable.
The in-lore explanation is that we are created by the god(s) in their own image. Much like if you made a toy to play with other toys, you'd probably make something humanoid, or at least anthropomorphic.
Unless you want to talk about Lovecraftian horror gods, but in that lore, humans weren't created by the gods (as far as I know).
organized religion is and always has been about using laws to control people and take their money through brainwashing backed with death threats where and whenever they can get away with it
Just wait till you find their opinions on the oppsite hole.
I once asked a Muslim neighbor over for dinner.
They explained they could never eat anything I have prepared in my kitchen, because I eat pork.
Way to go religion, keep making sure your arbitrary rules keep people apart.
Religion was (and often still is) a way to keep poor people in check.
The whole idea of heaven/hell, reincarnation, karma etc. is so people accept their shitty roles in life.
Don't worry that the king is living in luxury and you are suffering as it'll all even out eventually.
As you say preventing them mixing with other groups is also a great way to keep your cult going.
Opinions on religion aside, more acceptance of lab grown meat is better for energy efficiency and reducing unneeded animal cruelty.
I'm glad to see lab-grown meat clear another hurdle. The better and more common this technology is, the closer we'll be to finally getting rid of the meat industry and factory farming.
It is a bit weird to think though that the eradication of factory farming is going to lead to a decrease in global cow populations. So based on raw numbers alone this is actually a bad thing for the species.
We should at least factor in how natural or pleasant their existence is. Or else a maliciously engineerd creature which spreads like crazy but is genetically bound to suffer immensely all their life is somehow preferrable over a local population of happy birds.
The species we use to harvest their products and body parts are often unable to survive naturally, some suffering from accumulated genetic defects, like being unable to support their artificially increased body weight.
If we don't need to reserve pastures for human-cows, there might be a chance for natural species to grow their numbers again.
Not really. We had a similar reduction in the global horse population at the beginning of the 1940s. We used to have basically a couple horses per person there for a few thousand years. We still have plenty of horses, most even have better lives now. Hopefully we can finally make horse racing financially unviable so we stop killing so many horses for no good reason.
There are already people who have pet cows that they won't eat when the cow dies. Those people will tend the smaller herds.
So many rules and hurdles to overcome just to stubbornly avoid eating plant-based foods.
To be fair, plant based food can be good, but it's a different food, not an alternative. I've tried a few and none of them got close to tasting of feeling like meat.
If we can manage to produce lab grown meat at a large industrial scale, it could solve the animal suffering, pollution and water consumption problems caused by current production
Also to be fair, it only tastes "different" when you know it's different. I remember seeing a blind taste test with a panel of trained chefs and none could tell they were eating plant-based meat.
Of course, meat doesn't taste like meat once you've seasoned it, salted it, put sauce and other condiments on it, and otherwise made it taste anything like meat. LOL
So, we can eliminate a great amount of the "it's not the same" factor simply by not marketing plant-based food as "gross" and "different". Let the taste, texture, versatility, and cost speak for itself.
Second, yes, on an industrial scale lab grown meat is better than factory farms. They likely come with the same detriments to human health as real meat, but that aside, I think lab grown meat would make a fantastic alternative to farmed meat used in pet food.
On the climate front, lab grown meat might not be better than beef. It would honestly be a shame if the world all went to lab grown meat, only to find out decades later that it caused more harm than good.
But, in the meantime, we have plants :)
I agree with almost everything you've said, but God I wish there was a way vegans could come across as anything other than preachy and annoying.
It's tough changing minds in general, especially when the topic entails labeling your past and likely present self a serial animal abuser. Something most vegans went through already and had to overcome.
If you agree with almost everything, would it be worthwhile to find a wording which preserves the good content while ditching the bad form?
I also wonder how much of the annoying part is the speaker, and how much of it is the reluctance of listeners to question themselves.
You're on fire in this thread, you make me wish I could subscribe to a user on Lemmy.
At least it comes from a place in the heart, and not a rub it in your face, "I'll eat two cows because you aren't having any!", ignorance.
Glad the OU certified this as kosher. This has been a big question in Jewish communities.
How could it not be? It's not real meat.
I always think that lab grown meat is a weird idea why don't they just do something interesting why don't they do lab grown velociraptor. I want to eat a velociraptor please.
Or better yet go through the fossil record and find the tastiest animal, and then grow that.
Yeah I wanna try some Dodo bird, must have been good if it was hunted to extinction.
I think the Galapagos tortoise was also almost hunted to extinction for being so delicious.
They already did a big wooly mammoth meatball, so you're not alone there.
There's no Jewish or Islamic pope so what a lab-grown meat producer has to do is simply find a Imam or a Rabbi that will agree to say it's halal or kosher. They can pay them nice consulting fee for that. I've seen kosher light switches and cell phones before. Other Rabbis will say it's not actually kosher but everyone can choose which rabbi to follow.
Still most muslims just follow what scholoars agree on, this is pretty good
Yes, but which scholars? For some things there's a consensus - pork is haram - but for others there's not, and different scholars will contradict each other. I'm guessing this is still in the early stages where there's no consensus.
That being said, I hope they decide cultured versions of halal meats are halal because there's no good reason not to.
There was once a thought experiment about whether a hypothetical potato containing a pig gene (to make it tastily fatty) would be halal and/or kosher. IIRC, because of the different philosophical bases of the two taboos, it would have been one but not the other, though I can’t remember which.
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