"Could have Banned Slavery or Shellfish"

[The Holy Bottom Burp]

I appreciate your enthusiasm for your position. You seem focused on picking a fight rather than holding a conversation; I'm not confident that there has been much "exchange," here. Thank you for your comments and I look forward to hearing more about your world view in other discussions.

No, not looking for a fight pal, sorry if I came over a tad aggressive. I was frustrated by some of your "context" claims without demonstrating what difference it makes "in context" but we actually agree on the main thing; slavery is an abomination and should be opposed wherever it appears, owning other human beings is morally wrong.

As a Christian you were at least honest enough to admit that you do not know why your god didn't just ban it from the get go, rather than make some terribly stretched claim about slavery being the best option for society at that time etc. I think you are right though, our conversation wasn't going anywhere, sure we'll bump into each other again though.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

Serious? This isn't in the jokes section but perhaps it should be! Any wild animal can pick up disease, any flesh can be dangerous to consume if not treated in the right way.

Obviously the biblical authors never got food poisoning from eating a salad.

2. Slavery. As Brickjectivity notes, the institution was prevalent throughout the time of the Bible. Indeed, it persists today (see the cover article in the June 2017 edition of the Atlantic Monthly). The institution was mostly a different animal than the abomination seen in the U.S. (Watch the slaves in the HBO series Rome and then watch those in Roots...no comparison.)

But the tired "but it was culturally normal" excuse doesn't wash if you consider God is supposed to be telling us the right answers in the bible.

And Revelation 18:13 does come out and disparage the institution as part of the "immoral" trade of luxury goods.

The author also thinks it's not an issue if he calls human beings "luxury goods".

For the people who wrote them, a world without slavery was pretty much unimaginable.

But God supposedly dictated to the authors, though. Curious that God doesn't seem to know much more than they do.

Shellfish are banned by kosher laws because they are scavengers and considered the cockroaches of the sea. Everything that dies in the sea or dies and ends up in the seas are consumed by shrimp, lobster, scallops, crabs, oysters, and mussels. This specially designed fish also is charged with the duty to clean up contaminated waters.

Would they eat liver? Kidneys? Those are filters as well.

Tradition tells us that Moses authored Exodus. He was of an enslaved people, secreted among the family of the leadership of the time, and led an entire nation out of slavery and into freedom.

He was an Egyptian official who used Hebrews to start religious terrorism after getting in trouble for breaking Egyptian law.

It was never about leading people to the Promised Land, as it's only about a week's walk there from where he supposedly was and it took 40 years and many terroristic acts later.

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

I'm with the camp that states that it was chosen to have God/The Bible/Whoever "ban" shellfish because it made people sick with more frequency than ingesting other meats/foods. Ever eaten at one of those flat-top grill places? They request that you not mix shellfish and other meats due to the difference required in cook-time. They have to make sure that the shellfish is cooked extremely well. So, it came down to ignorance... not knowing how to cook their food properly they made themselves sick, and this happened so often with shellfish in particular that the people figured God was trying to tell them something... so they pretended He DID tell them something and wrote it down.

As for slavery - as others have said, it was an accepted practice, and the writers of The Bible probably believed that civilization had progressed as far as it was possible to progress and figured slavery would always be accepted, so they chose not to "rock the boat" too hard in that area in order not to drive away possible "adherents to the faith" (i.e. BUSINESS), only lightly admonishing slave drivers and telling people to take care of their slaves. Let's face it... people who owned slaves HAD MONEY. And so, the writes of The Bible kept the berating of slavery to a minimum, lest they drive away a big source of income for the church. This is the same reason that factory-farming agriculture gets away with doing whatever they want to behind their fences while the government passes anti-surveillance legislature FOR THEM. The meat-processing industry means big tax revenue for the government, so OF COURSE they help them out even though their practices involving the animals, from an ethical standpoint, would make most compassionate people puke.

 

[David1967]

View attachment 18306

Joking aside, why ban shellfish but not slavery?

Of course, I think the reason is the scriptures were written by humans without divine inspiration. But am I missing something? If so, what?

I think the explanation is much simpler. Moses had some food allergies.

 

[David1967]

Perhaps because in that era, shellfish, and the other forbidden foods were known to be carnivores and or scavengers, more easily able to pass on disease ... than herbivores.

You may be right. But it shows a symptom of the era (IMHO) ,that dietary religious laws were more important than human rights.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I'm with the camp that states that it was chosen to have God/The Bible/Whoever "ban" shellfish because it made people sick with more frequency than ingesting other meats/foods. Ever eaten at one of those flat-top grill places? They request that you not mix shellfish and other meats due to the difference required in cook-time. They have to make sure that the shellfish is cooked extremely well. So, it came down to ignorance... not knowing how to cook their food properly they made themselves sick, and this happened so often with shellfish in particular that the people figured God was trying to tell them something... so they pretended He DID tell them something and wrote it down... and this because they were fools.

If you have any support whatsoever for the idea that undercooked chicken is safer than undercooked shrimp, I'd love to see it.

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

If you have any support whatsoever for the idea that undercooked chicken is safer than undercooked shrimp, I'd love to see it.

From this link:

Should you really only eat shellfish when there's an 'R' in the month?

Highlights:

There are four different types of shellfish sickness.

1. diarrheal shellfish poisoning. It's the old-fashioned, one-day kind, and the preferred form among shellfish connoisseurs, and occurs about half an hour after eating bad shellfish
2. neurotoxic shellfish poisoning. Suddenly, an ice cube feels hot to you, and a candle flame ice cold. You'll feel a million tiny pinpricks on your skin, your muscles will ache and you'll become dizzy. You won't die, but interestingly, the toxin responsible for this form of poisoning can become aerosolized, meaning you can breathe it in and become sick while walking along the shoreline.
3. paralytic shellfish poisoning causes numbness and tingling in your mouth. Soon, the tingling will spread to your arms and legs and you'll feel like you're floating. This is the most serious form of shellfish poisoning -- it can paralyze your lungs and kill you in as little as two hours. The fatality rate is as high as 12 percent.
4. amnesic shellfish poisoning - The unfortunate consumer of the bad shellfish will first experience "normal" symptoms of seafood poisoning, but may soon become confused, disoriented and even comatose. The cognitive damage is permanent, affecting short-term memory and even causing dementia

Dinoflagellates reproduce in great numbers during the summer, and sometimes the population explosion produces so many of these tiny organisms that the water takes on a reddish tint. This is known as a red tide. People have long associated shellfish poisoning with red tides, even though researchers don't fully understand the connection between the two. Furthermore, toxic dinoflagellates can be present without the visual presence of a red tide, and there can be a visible red tide without the presence of toxic dinoflagellates, so it doesn't seem to be a reliable indicator.What does seem to matter is what the dinoflagellates themselves have been dining on. Dinoflagellates sometimes consume toxic alkaloids called saxitoxins. The type of saxitoxin the dinoflagellate consumes determines what type of shellfish poisoning you'll receive at your lofty position atop the food chain. The bad news is that once a shellfish becomes toxic, no amount of heat during cooking will destroy the toxin.

So even I was wrong to begin with and apparently you can't just cook the crap out of it to get rid of the poisoning! It's not a case of ignorance of cooking time/method, but just one of plain old danger being more probable. So yeah - if you know of any similar threats with chicken, I'd love to hear them. The worst I could find:

"You might suffer from severe diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea and possibly vomiting. Headaches, chills, fatigue and fever are also often associated with salmonellosis. If there is blood in your stool or vomit, inform your doctor immediately. He may request a stool sample to determine if your symptoms are related to salmonellosis or another condition."

Not neuro-toxicity, not dementia, not lung paralysis and not DEATH... diarrhea, abdominal cramps and possibly vomiting. That's it. One could probably die if their immune system was already weak, they didn't seek treatment fast enough or were dehydrated or similarly depleted, but that's a lot of ifs. And where shellfish's more tame diarrheal consequences crop up about only about a half an hour after ingestion, Salmonella poisoning doesn't appear until within 8 to 72 hours after consuming contaminated food or water. So... even the direct correlation of sickness to what was eaten would be clearer and much more obvious.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

So yeah - if you know of any similar threats with chicken, I'd love to hear them. The worst I could find:

"You might suffer from severe diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea and possibly vomiting. Headaches, chills, fatigue and fever are also often associated with salmonellosis. If there is blood in your stool or vomit, inform your doctor immediately. He may request a stool sample to determine if your symptoms are related to salmonellosis or another condition."

Not neuro-toxicity, not dementia, not lung paralysis and not DEATH... diarrhea, abdominal cramps and possibly vomiting. That's it.

That's it... usually, with modern antibiotics when necessary.

And even with modern medicine, salmonella still kills people:

CDC estimates that approximately 1.2 million illnesses and 450 deaths occur due to non-typhoidal Salmonella annually in the United States.

Information for Healthcare Professionals | Salmonella | CDC

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

That's it... usually, with modern antibiotics when necessary.

And even with modern medicine, salmonella still kills people:


Information for Healthcare Professionals | Salmonella | CDC

[450 deaths] / [1.2 MM total cases] = 0.04 % (and that's being liberal, rounding up from 0.0375%)

I think the deadly form of the shellfish toxins still wins out at 12%. Not sure on actual numbers there, as the statistics seem hard to come by. But in terms of likelihood of death from exposure, salmonella is a kitten. Although, admittedly, there are 4 separate varieties of toxin, and only the one is ultimately deadly... though permanent cognitive damage doesn't sound like much of a picnic either. So, the percentage of total shellfish consumed versus cases of death by that one form of toxin may be incredibly low in numbers also, I don't know.

However, back however many hundreds over thousands of years ago, before people knew to stay away from shellfish that lived around algal blooms and the like, it probably would have been a lot more common for people to eat shellfish that contained the toxins, and therefore a lot of the negative effects probably came with the territory there. The fact that you can't eliminate them via cooking and that even the mildest rears its head only tens of minutes after ingesting would have definitely put shellfish on the people's radar over chicken or any other meat.

 

[Brickjectivity]

Joking aside, why ban shellfish but not slavery?

Joking aside? Its internal Jewish information that they don't want to hear used by missionaries, so I will respect their wishes about it. They just don't eat shellfish except for the Reformed.

Of course, I think the reason is the scriptures were written by humans without divine inspiration. But am I missing something? If so, what?

Upon close inspection, the laws seem based in natural law; and the laws about slavery specify that an escaping slave shall be assisted in their escape. Its complicated. In modern terms it is more like work at will than slavery, except for prisoners captured in war.

 

[Father Heathen]

Some people are trying to claim that the slavery in the bible was excusable because it was a social norm, but that implies that human culture supersedes the will, justice, and mercy of god. As Sunstone pointed out, what this really suggests is that these ancient religions don't actually reflect the words or will of any actual god but in fact reflects only the culture and social norms from which these religions arose. It shouldn't be necessary to explain why slavery is unethical, immoral, and abhorrent, and despite what may have been penned under his name, no worthy and honorable god would abide it, either.

 

[Socratic Berean]

Obviously the biblical authors never got food poisoning from eating a salad.

Just for fun:

Majority Of Foodborne Illness Caused By Green Vegetables

But the tired "but it was culturally normal" excuse doesn't wash if you consider God is supposed to be telling us the right answers in the bible.

I think we would collectively benefit from an understanding that there's a difference between excusing something and explaining something. I may have missed an argument here somewhere to really try to excuse the practice of slavery, but I have seen (and supported) efforts to put the topic into historical context so that we are all having a conversation about the same thing. While all slavery is wrong, it is intellectually dishonest if we are trying to look at the institution in classical Greece, Imperial Rome, and among nomadic Semitic tribesmen through a lens cut for viewing modern human trafficking or slavery in post-colonial America. Such a sloppy approach just ensures that everyone will continue talking past each other.

The author also thinks it's not an issue if he calls human beings "luxury goods".

Using proper, widely accepted, academic terminology for discussion of a social institution doesn't reflect any special bias, if that is what you are trying to imply. Academic studies of the practice of slavery characterize the enslaved as a "luxury good." It is simply an economic term and is widely used in the literature...slaves were/are bought, sold, owned by the wealthy.

He was an Egyptian official who used Hebrews to start religious terrorism after getting in trouble for breaking Egyptian law.

It was never about leading people to the Promised Land, as it's only about a week's walk there from where he supposedly was and it took 40 years and many terroristic acts later.

That's an interesting interpretation of the Exodus saga, and probably would be an interesting topic of discussion in a new thread. Here, however, I only focused on the point that--according to tradition (true or not)--he led a nation out of slavery (for the sake of freedom or "terrorism" or whatever). Beyond the issues that your retort instead focused on (terrorism, promised land, etc.), are you trying to argue that he did not have a role in the freedom of the Jews (according to the tradition)?