Reply #45: Trichinosis? Food preservation techniques? Wiping one's ass?

[Nevernose]

Many of the rules laid forth by early Judeo-Christian religions obviously had something to do with an ignorance of bacteria and disease, and the Ignorants' attempts to explain them and protect against them with supernatural causation.

Maybe the reason that it's been a "modern attempt" is that it's been only in modern times that we understand disease at all (and STILL only imperfectly!). Perhaps, with the subsequent knowledge gained, we can understand them in some ways better than they understood themselves.

I'm an atheist, so I don't really have anything to gain from this argument. There's also no way to prove either of our hypotheses, other than to say, "mine sounds good to me." And, in many cases, I think our hypotheses aren't mutually exclusive -- for instance, the Levitical anti-homosexuality rule was clearly an attempt at excluding someone less powerful -- not to mention the rampant misogyny and xenophobia against essentially everyone who wasn't the author or in the author's immediate circle.