AIBU to not understand why religious people won't eat pork

[CreamolaFoamless]

I love a bit of pork

I have looked into the whole pork v's religion thing but I still am at a lose?

Why is eating pork so bad?

Does anybody actually know?

This has been bugging me for sometime so would love hear other peoples thoughts on this

My dogs the same Dilys, Poor cat always looks disgusted.

Apparently it's like chocolate for dogs.

TBH I never shall never believe the whole "Humans taste like pork" stuff. The only people who know this for certain are cannibals. Who trusts a cannibal?

I was told - by the granddaughter of a real canibal (so she said) that her grandpa said that people taste like chicken.

Orthodox Jews won't even shake hands with women, just in case it's the wrong time of the month......

So it's not just the porcines who are non grata!

My friend worked for a jewish company. Some of the clients were very very very... Refusing to drink water if she had touched the glass (she was allowed to pull a stack from the water cooler all at once and present the client with the stack so he could select the most uncontaminated one from the centre), not holding doors open for her... Or refusing to talk to her or acknowledge her. Of course, they may have just been bloody rude.

Actually from a (Jewish) religious perspective, the practical reasons might be true but they aren't pertinent. Judaism has lots of rules (mitzvah) detailed in the Torah (Old Testament...sort of).

Some of these rules have obvious ethical reasons (eg don't kill people, don't commit incest, don't mistreat a widow, orphan or stranger). By obvious I mean both self evident to a modern mentality and obvious in the overarching ethical context of the Bible, which can be summarised as "ethical monotheism" - ie people are made in God's image and should therefore be protected against crimes against their humanity (think of it as ancient human rights).

Some of these rules are known as "chukim" - they do not have an obvious explanation. The restriction on pork is only one of these, others include "shatnez" - a restriction on wearing an item of clothing which is a mixed linen/wool weave. While various explanations can be given, the pertinent one from a religious perspective is that obeying it without obvious reason brings one closer to God through an appreciation of His divine awe and mystery. This hasn't stopped various writers and mystics etc imagining other reasons - eg these things are reserved for Paradise, that they may be appreciated the better.

Obviously, individual Jews and certain Jewish sects do not accept this, but in its traditional form, Judaism is a strongly Orthopractic religion, which is why great numbers of Jews chose to continue to follow these rules long after new conditions such as fridges made any purely pragmatic rationale irrelevent.

HTH OP.

frontpaw, careful on the conflation of anecdotal Jewish clients with prescribed religious practices or a wider religious/ethnic group (not saying you do conflate, it just comes close to). People from all religions and none choose to take certain prescriptions to illogical extremes and use religious/cultural background as a reason for bloody rudeness!

I watched a programe on pig tapeworms once (think they were tapeworms) and how they end up in the brain. The surgeon said he was seeing more and more cases of brain-worms because of undercooked pork on the BBQ. I had to leave the room to puke!
Maybe Moses saw one once?

has that killed the thread or are you all examining your pork chops?

Hence me saying they may have been rude regardless of religion (nad manners has no boundaries)! Another friend worked for another firm (foreign bank, and probably not from where you imagine) where women were treated quite rudely. Hang on, maybe this is a City thing...

Some West Indians, Rastafarians and Seventh Day Adventist also dont eat pork.

But do they also regard their womenfolk as unclean?

Well, it has to do with neo-nazi fairies and the bad kind of starlight. But it's really too complicated to go into without an abacus.

@Nickname - what the fuck (genuinely curious)?

@skittlesandpringles - is that not right? I'd be gutted to think I'd been wrong all these years.

It must be the pork worms. Getting into the brain.

@frontpaw - Shit. That might be it.

I think to most people who haven't ever eaten pork (like me), I find the smell of it disgusting and could never bring myself to taste it.
The smell of bacon frying is really vile to me although most other people will think its the best thing ever.

I'm vegetarian so its all a bit academic re brainworms etc

If you want to understand the dietary restrictions of particular reasons, the book to read is Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger. It's absolutely brilliant - one of the books that makes you look at the world in a new way.

Here's a copy-and-paste of a summary I've just found of what she says about food prohibitions:

Mary Douglas suggests that societies are likely to see things as "taboo" when they are anomalous, when they don't fit neatly into a society's classification of the world. She believes that things which exist at the borders of society, or on the boundaries between categories are perceived as possessing both power and danger -- for some purposes the power may be stressed, for others the danger. In both cases we may find a rule against contact with the marginal person or thing. In her most famous analysis, that of the prohibitions against pork and shellfish in the Book of Leviticus, in the Old Testament, she argues that pigs and shellfish are anomalous because they don't meet all the criteria of "normal" sea creature or farm animals. "Normal" farm animals, to the Ancient Hebrews, she argued were cattle, sheep and goats, which had cloven hooves and chewed their cud. Pigs have a cleft in their hooves, but they don't chew their cud. Similarly, "normal" sea creatures had fins and scales - shellfish lacked these things and were prohibited. Death, birth and pregnancy exist at the border between different stages of life, and are frequently surrounded by taboos: corpses may be seen as polluting, women may be isolated for a number of days after giving birth, the placenta may be especially dangerous, etc.

If you want to understand the dietary restrictions of particular religions, the book to read is Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger. It's absolutely brilliant - one of the books that makes you look at the world in a new way.

Here's a copy-and-paste of a summary I've just found of what she says about food prohibitions:

Mary Douglas suggests that societies are likely to see things as "taboo" when they are anomalous, when they don't fit neatly into a society's classification of the world. She believes that things which exist at the borders of society, or on the boundaries between categories are perceived as possessing both power and danger -- for some purposes the power may be stressed, for others the danger. In both cases we may find a rule against contact with the marginal person or thing. In her most famous analysis, that of the prohibitions against pork and shellfish in the Book of Leviticus, in the Old Testament, she argues that pigs and shellfish are anomalous because they don't meet all the criteria of "normal" sea creature or farm animals. "Normal" farm animals, to the Ancient Hebrews, she argued were cattle, sheep and goats, which had cloven hooves and chewed their cud. Pigs have a cleft in their hooves, but they don't chew their cud. Similarly, "normal" sea creatures had fins and scales - shellfish lacked these things and were prohibited. Death, birth and pregnancy exist at the border between different stages of life, and are frequently surrounded by taboos: corpses may be seen as polluting, women may be isolated for a number of days after giving birth, the placenta may be especially dangerous, etc.

That sounds really interesting hackmum, I will certainly have a look. It seems as good an idea as any to explain it.

FWIW, Christians eating fish on Friday (or no meat at all during Lent and no meat, fish or dairy on Fridays in Lent, which it is today), is a fasting custom still practiced by quite a lot of Christians around the world. I don't do it myself but DH does. People I know who still observe religious dietary rules have almost all said the same thing (no matter what religion), which is that those rules just help give them a reminder to think a little bit more about religion and how it impacts practically on their lives, which seems quite a sensible way to treat it in a modern world where some of the other interpretations of those rules don't apply any more.

Pork tastes like human flesh.......apparently

When I was at school in a biology lesson, we were told that tapeworms lived in pigs so that might be a reason.

I love pork and crackling.

Humans do taste like pork, that's why they were called Long Pigs, oh I loved that band.