g.johnson

Wilfrid is down with it. That I get. What I don't get is the idea that pagan animal sacrifice somehow morphs into human martydom. They seem too different. One hurts the other doesn't.

Martydom implies human, no? Obviously, I'm missing something.

I bow to your greater knowledge, but did human sacrifice occur in the Hellenic world of the early church? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Macrosan does not believe that his personal faith justifies imposing his beliefs on others. The KKK are religious. Stalin was an atheist. Macrosan is religious. You’re an atheist. I don’t see either of you leading the march to exterminate blacks and kulaks. That's because you're both decent chaps and the KKK and Stalin are/were not.

I do? I’m not sure about the chicken bones, but no, there does not seem to be any well defined process through which physics* progresses (and it does progress). Sooner or later your physicist ends up saying that theory A is preferable to theory B because of simplicity or elegance although neither of those concepts can be clearly defined. Lakatos, whom I admire, did come close to codifying how it’s done but I think he fell short. He substituted the idea of a ‘progressive’ theory (i.e., one which suggests more and different experiments) for the idea of elegance, but there is still no way of measuring just how progressive one program is relative to another. So, yes, I do think Feyeraband had a point. Physicists are manifestly successful at determining the truth or falsity (always provisionally) of statements about the world but it is currently impossible to say quite how we** do it. *Biology is rather different, I think, more a catalogue of correlations. **Smug physicist bastard. Edit: I should say that none of this poses any problems for the physicist, only for the philosopher of science.

Some of my best friends are pigs.

But all you are saying is that some circumstantial evidence is sufficient to prove one's case and other circumstantial evidence isn't. And the reason it is sufficient in science is because scientific formulas based on electrons actually work. That is totally distinguishable from saying pork is "unclean" without any scientific data to back it up, including people getting sick from eating it. That relies on people having faith based on no evidence directly related to the item. The evidence arises with a higher power that has no connection to the item other then through his words. And I assume that the reason that nobody has seen an electron isn't that it doesn't exist is it? I'm just guessing but, idoesn't it have to do with finding something to measure it which allows us to see it physically? Erm, I was agreeing with you, Steve.

Brains.

I’ll use the example of electrons rather than black holes. No one has seen an electron. You could therefore argue that the evidence for electrons is circumstantial. But if you accept the existence of the electron you can theorize about its properties and build working computers and MRI machine. At this point the ‘tautologically designed piece of scientific apparatus’ impinges on the world. If the MRI shows you a tumor in your liver, the surgeon will go in there and find it. (Don’t make me post the murine pancreatic tumor again.) Science is not tautological and circumstantial evidence can be very strong when it is internally consistent with the vast edifice* of modern physics. *Cliché alert

What’s with the Guinness site?

Well Quine can fly in airplanes designed on pagan principles and I'll stick to those based on Newtonian mechanics.

Ooh, I missed this bit. I rather disagree here. I’m not going to claim that belief in God is 'invalid' but it’s totally different from belief in the existence of black holes. Belief in God is based on intuition, revelation, the word of authority, etc. Scientific beliefs are based on evidence and the ability to accurately predict the outcome of experiments.

I may have misunderstood your argument. I thought you were suggesting that the existance of inherent religiosity was an argument for the existance of God, which I don't believe it is. Sure. Aside from a few anti-religious polemicists (Dawkins for example*) I don't think many scientists would find anything wrong with this. Science can tell you how the world works but not why it works that way and not some other way. *Who lays it on a bit thick to get up the noses of creationists, I suspect.

Animals have souls too. Not essential to all arguments for vegetarianism, but the basis of some.

Natural selection. In this interview

No I'm not. Conflict is not inevitable. I am just saying that while it's possible to have a rational discussion about whether pork is nourishing, it is not possible to have a rational discussion about whether Catholics correctly interpret God's law by eating or whether Jews correctly interpret God's law by not eating, or whether God has some reason to permit this person to eat pork but not the next person. Most such disagreements needn't rise to the level of a dispute (as Steven rightly observes). Equally clearly, some are minefields. But you also said So you do seem to be saying that religious conflict is inevitable*. Why is it impossible for religions to agree to differ? *That might be true, but it seems equally true of secular belief systems.

You are assuming, incorrectly I believe, that religions are necessarily aggressively proselytizing and that therefore conflict is inevitable.

Absolutely. The human propensity for competition (sometimes violent competition) is encoded in the genes. The only reason that wars of the last century were secular rather than religions is because societies of the last century were secular rather than religious. I that seems to bleak. A propensity for cooperation and rationality is also in the genes.

I have noticed the spreading use of the word ‘ethereal’ on our own beloved eGullet. ‘Ethereal’ does mean ‘heavenly’, but primarily in the sense of ‘lacking substance’, and it therefore seems an odd word to use to describe food. g.johnson (English Language O Level, Grade 4)

A recent book Holy Cow by D.N. Jha apparently argues that the Hindu prohibition on eating beef is very recent. To quote from the Guardian review: Which supports Plotnicki’s idea that dietary laws are deliberately exclusionary (or at least can be).

But in the first century CE, when the decision to drop Jewish dietary law was made, Christianity was a religion of the poor. Forget Satan, the appeal was that suffering in this life would lead to reward in the next. Matthew 5:3-11:

What, Greek food? No great loss. Okay, but seriously, how do you explain the success of Islam? It has dietary laws that are roughly as restrictive as those of Judaism. Yet it seems to be roughly as successful as Christianity at expansion and conversion. Early converts to Islam were Arabs who shared the same food taboos, I think. I’m guessing that the spread of Islam elsewhere only occurred after establishment of a secure Arab/Islamic empire. Early Christians were in a much more tenuous situation, unable to convert many Jews (and persecuted by them) and forced to proselytize among pagans. Toby is correct: there are large chunks of Acts of the Apostles devoted to the question of whether pagan converts to Christianity should be obliged to accept Jewish law (diet, circumcision). The decision to drop those requirements was deliberate and the only satisfactory explanation that I can think of is that it was pragmatic.

Guinness has at least two breweries. St. James' Gate in Dublin and Park Royal in London. The latter seems to produce an inferior product.

What order are we doing that in again, please? Depends: Pape or Prod?

Yes: pork, beef and lobster taste good. But… Acts 10:9-16 The above is a post-facto justification for a pragmatic change in policy for a proselytizing religion in the Roman Empire. If you’re trying to convert Greeks it doesn’t help if you insist they no longer eat what they’re accustomed to (“Oh, yes, we’ll also have to snip you foreskin”.) That's my guess.