In our last episode, ,
the lovely and talented Wasteland broadcast on alt.atheism:


Consider the Bible’s coverage of another field: health and
sanitation. If an Israelite had a skin blemish suspected of being
leprosy, he was put in isolation. “All the days that the plague is in


There was something of a movement around the turn of the (20th)
century to try to find a scientific basis for many of the
religious rules including the dietary laws and c*rc*mc*sion.
Not-particularly-religious Jewish scientists and fundamentalist
Christians were in the forefront of the movement.

The mainstream of rabbinical thought rejects this notion (if I
am correctly informed). The theory there is: we don't do these
things because they make scientific sense, but because God says
so. The attempt to justify the law by science can only serve to
undermine the justification of the law by faith.

To skeptics, of course, it makes perfect sense that when this or
that bit of good advice was discovered, a religious people would
incorporate it into their religious law in order to preserve the
knowledge. But then that would mean that religious laws can be
and have been altered on the basis of human wisdom and worldly
human knowledge - which is anathem to the truly religious.

And really, only a few of the religious laws could be related to
science in a logical and consistent way. Take the prohibition
on pork, for example. Everyone knows that poorly prepared pork
can contain dangerous pathogens. But the logical implication of
that, especially for a people who would sometimes face scarcity,
would be "Thou shalt eat pork only if it is well done."
Prohibiting pork entirely might result in people starving - or
at least suffering malnutrition - when there was a food source
readily at hand, and in the long run, more people might suffer
ill effects from refusing to eat pork at all than from eating
pork which might sometimes be ill-prepared and contaminated.
In other words "Thou shalt not eat pork at all ever" is not
really the scientifically-correct advice.

In some cases, the attempt to justify religious law by science
led to bad science, as was the case with c*rc*mc*sion. This
sort of thing often happens when you come to science with some
nonscientific ax to grind.

But in most cases, of course, there simply is no even remotely
possible connection between ritual practices and science. The
assumptions of ritual practices a 1) there is a god, 2) that
god has a will for man, 3) the scribe who records the words got
the right words from the right god, and 4) the people who
interpret the words, knew exactly what the scribe meant when
wrote them and are interpreting them correctly. If you do not
accept each and every one of these assumptions then the ritual
practices are entirely arbitrary. If you accept all of the
assumptions then you may still think the ritual practices
are arbitrary, but you suppose God has a right to be arbitrary.

Smart religions have learned to butt out of science. The
Catholic church got its fingers burned on the geocentric thing.
Scientific theories can be proven wrong - and indeed the
possibility of being proven wrong is a good criterion for
determining if a statement is scientific. Religious leaders
think being proven wrong is a bad thing which is why, for them,
the best policy is to stick with spritual things in which the
chances of being proven wrong are greatly reduced.

--
Rev. Lars Eighner ULC Atheist #1965 http://www.larseighner.com/
War on Terrorism: Camp Follower
"I am ... a total sucker for the guys ... with all the ribbons on and stuff,
and they say it's true and I'm ready to believe it. -Cokie Roberts,_ABC_