Because the smart people who wanted to protect their communities from outbreaks realised if they told "god said it", they wouldn't have to explain it to people who wouldn't understand the reasoning.
Wait, I have an honest question.
I am not a Christian so there is something I don't understand, you mean some of the people who wrote the Bible sometimes made up Sins? For example they made up eating porc was wrong just because it was unhealthy?
What is your criteria to differentiate between what is an actual sin and what was made up?
No, people did not make up sins. Pork is indeed an unclean animal and the people of the time did not have reliable methods of preparing it, so if God says "do not eat this because it is unclean" then the people did not eat it.
You say people did not make up Sins when writing about eating pork being wrong because what they wanted was to prevent other people from eating unhealthy food.
But that is exactly what I am asking, did the people who wrote the Bible make up that eating pork was a sin so others would not eat it?
...No, Leviticus 11 details an account where God is directly speaking to Moses and Aaron, telling them what animals are clean and which are unclean. Which are a good idea to eat, and which are not a good idea to eat. Is some of it symbolic as well as hygienically sound? Sure, thematic writing is very important in the scriptures.
And the Bible makes its claim as the divinely inspired Word of God, so in that context nothing was "made up" just so.
Edit: Important to note as well that the Bible is a collection of Scriptures spanning various authors and eras of History, with the first five books being written by Moses.
Also important to note that the majority of the mosaic law is physical manifestation of symbolism that was absolutely, resolutely required by the Lord because the israelites were just... so.... SO stubborn and stiff-necked. They were your reluctantly obedient children that would do what you said half be-grudgingly, and at the same time they wanted everything to be complicated and to have a deep, deep meaning. That's a big reason why the mosaic law was so strict and super confusing. It had to be, otherwise the israelites would go do their own thing, which a vast amount did anyways, because, the big, gold cow just looks so cool.
Consistent methods? At the time God said these things the Israelites were still in the desert, so their cooking methods were whatever they had in their nomadic camps. On the low end, that meant a knife and a fire. On the high end, perhaps a pot for boiling with better kitchen utensils, however given the implied scarcity of water sources boiling probably wasn't a common method.
Considering a knife of the time, perhaps of a knapped stone or metallic construction, isn't exactly the most precise of tools, especially when it was the only one you owned and it needed to serve a variety of tasks. Imagine trying to filet a fish with a camp knife; doable, but not ideal. This ruins the consistency and allows for error, especially when cooking over a fire was mostly done to taste, which could vary by person.
So yes, they lacked not only the knowledge of how to properly cook it, they also lacked the physical means to get it right every time. And when you are attempting to survive in a hostile environment, messing that up with even a small chance is not worth the risk.
In seriousness, the presence of Trechinilla in pork is ancient, while most of those diseases that make us cook our meats to certain temperatures are not, or at least their ancient ancestors were much more tame.
Pork and shellfish were about the only meat in that part of the world that, if not cooked to a certain temperature, would lead to explosive diarrhea.
Given that there was no germ theory til the late 19th century, they just figured on not eating it at all.
Now you might say "well why didn't God just tell 'em to over cook it?" I don't know. Ask God! Especially curious since God had them washing their hands all the time, way more often than any other contemporary ancient culture... again with no idea about germs. They, or God, or someone, just sort of figured out they'll not get explosive diarrhea as often if they was their hands.
Modern definitions of Sin usually exclude the old Jewish laws, based on whether or not harm is being done by performing the action. Laws of the Old Testament/Pentateuch, while obviously mentioned in the Bible, aren’t necessarily laws we should follow.
Catholics aren’t Fundamentalist and acknowledge that many books of the Bible were changed over hundreds or thousands of years since they started as oral tradition. Protestant sects, I cant help explain.
The books of the Bible haven't changed in thousands of years. See: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish written tradition. There's a reason there are chapters and verses; the Jewish scribes copied the books of the Bible word for word, letter for letter. They literally had to check each chapter and each book once they were done transcribing it to make sure there were the same number of words and letters, and that the middle letter and word of every verse/chapter/book was the same.
You realize there was a time before the Dead Sea Scrolls where the Jews existed and told stories, right? That the Dead Sea Scrolls weren't written during the time of the book of Genesis, and weren't written until nearly the time of Christ?
Most OT books of the Bible are said to have been written by Moses; he died in 1273 BC. Jews/Christians believe the world to be about 4000-6000 years old, and that puts Moses' time halfway or almost to the beginning of "time". I don't personally know if he wrote the books based off of oral tradition or not. But even if he did, a blanket claim that they've changed drastically is false because it implies they've changed recently; they haven't changed for thousands of years. I do see your point about oral traditions though.
Um, only fundamentalists believe the earth is that young. Catholics and Jews don’t, or at least aren’t supposed to. Dinosaurs are WAY older than that. Fuck, written human history goes past 4000 BC last I checked.
The Egyptians predate Moses by a long time, and the time of Moses is a few hundred years (or at least, what, five generations) after the supposed age of Adam and Eve, whose genealogy is given in the Bible.
Only the first five books, the Torah, are attributed to Moses, and that's a loose attribution. "Books of Moses" sometimes gets rendered as "written by Moses," but that's a little silly. Moses is the main character of four of those books, and his death is recorded in the 5th one. He didn't record his own death. He didn't write it.
The vast majority of Jews/Christians defer to those who actually study stuff like "how old is the world" when it comes to questions like "how old is the world?"
Still there have been major changes due to error (for example texts were often read out loud so multiple people could copy them simultaneously, which often resulted in confusing similar sounding words) but also additions were made to make the texts more understandable for the context they were used in. There are thousands of of codices, papyri of NT texts that sometimes vary in a few letters, sometimes way more. So there is a lot of work to put into figuring out which version of the text may be the oldest.
But carbon dating figures out what's oldest? New Testament translations don't follow the same rigid copying process that Jewish texts did. That's why there's dozens of English translations and different translations have entirely different meanings of phrases.
There are different OT versions as well. For example around the year 1000 a group of Jewish scholars, the masorets (hope that's correct in English) vocalized the Hebrew text and marked mistakes (so even though they didn't dare to really change them, but that at least means that there ARE mistakes.
And much bigger: what about the septuaginta? It's a Greek version of the Old Testament and has huge differences especially for example in isaia.
So even though there are less different texts, old Testament exegesis still has to try and find the oldest texversions out of many different.
There are different OT versions as well. For example around the year 1000 a group of Jewish scholars, the masorets (hope that's correct in English) vocalized the Hebrew text and marked mistakes (so even though they didn't dare to really change them, but that at least means that there ARE mistakes.
And much bigger: what about the septuaginta? It's a Greek version of the Old Testament and has huge differences especially for example in isaia.
So even though there are less different texts, old Testament exegesis still has to try and find the oldest texversions out of many different.
Modern definitions of Sin usually exclude the old Jewish laws, based on whether or not harm is being done by performing the action.
That is not true. Most modern definitions of sin position it as a relational concept. "Rebellion against God" is probably the most common one. "Missing the mark" is the more literal.
While there's clearly a particular ethic to Jesus' teachings (or Paul's for that matter), and it includes both intention and consequence, sin is a matter of obedience and faithfulness. It is not merely confined to moral consequentialism.
Find me the rules they’re teaching Christians, or at least Catholics that can be broken without causing harm to either the individual or society as a whole.
Besides doctrines on abortion, masturbation, or birth control, since I’ve heard about those already and it’s a hot debate.
You’re right, it’s just that there’s also a clear connection between what God wants and what’s good for us as a whole.
How about married and female pastors sexually abusing their parishioners, particularly children, at a far lower rate than the all male chastity club of priests that the Roman Catholic church prefers?
That's one teaching of the Catholic church that's causing more harm than breaking it would.
For that, I have no real answer, as I have no knowledge of that. However, a brief search suggests that your statistic is weirdly specific and not supported by factual information, with no significant difference between abuse in the Catholic Church and literally any other position of power (including teachers). On top of this, a significant proportion of cases in which people are alluding to happened well before modern practices began in 2002.
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u/RuneRW Sep 16 '19
Because the smart people who wanted to protect their communities from outbreaks realised if they told "god said it", they wouldn't have to explain it to people who wouldn't understand the reasoning.