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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Why would a religion dictate how you should kill animals, and why do people believe this is a religious matter rather than an animal-rights matter? I just can't understand people sometimes.

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Religion means different things to different people.

For example, religion to a modern protestant-descended American means something very different to a Salafi Muslim. To one, religion is law. To the other, it's superficial pomp.

If your ancestral law (Salafi religion) dictates that you will slaughter animals a certain way lest the wrath of God and your kin and your ancestors strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, that to violate such a tenet is to violate the law, then by God you will do it.

A rationalist (protestant religion) might divine the religious practice has roots as a hygienic practice that was useful for stone age peoples in a desert climate, but today has no practical use, and he might be right, but that doesn't matter to the Salafist. The Salafist's "why" for doing things is very different and much more personally compelling than the protestant's "why".

The protestant would be well-served in realizing that, although he distinguishes religion from state or law, many others in this world do not.

There are plenty of religious diktats in the Bible and other books that nobody follows.

For instance, if you curse at your parents, the Old Testament calls for you to be stoned to death. This one is conveniently overlooked though

It actually isn't. Orthodox Jews, who are the most literal devotees of the Old Testament (as interpreted by the Talmud), do consider this a capital offence. For technical reasons the death penalty is not administered today (and even when it was, the conditions that needed to be met meant that it hardly ever happened in practice). But this doesn't take away from the severity of the offence.

I'm saying that the vast majority of people who live by a book will only follow the parts of said book that they like or find appropriate.

How many Christians have you ever seen laying hands on bodies at funerals, trying to resurrect the dead?

There's a lot written about this in other places, but the gist of it: many ancient "rituals" are based around pre-medicine hygiene practices. In this specific case, live slaughter was the norm because of the health risks of eating carrion: if you haven't seen the animal alive, you don't know how long the meat has been dead before consumption.

Well this does at least demonstrate why it was so necessary for Jesus to come along and say "look, you're following these old laws slavishly, just try to love each other and you'll probably be fine".

Maybe you could study religion some more, why and when it emerged as it did, etc.

There is plenty of common sense in the holy books.

GP asked a fairly direct question. Can you cite any of the “common sense” you mentioned as a response instead of dismissing the question outright?

Probably hygiene. A lot of the common sense was about keeping the community alive.

Maybe you should consider that we no longer live in the period in which those books were written? How religion emerged has nothing to do with how things should be in secular societies today.

It could not matter less that the advice given in these books used to make sense at some point.

And maybe you should consider the power of religion, the sense of belonging and origin it gives you, and the good it is doing to this world today (despite many missteps as well), before being so judgemental. I am saying this as someone not religious but grown up with religion.

Some religions evolve faster than others. I would hope the different faiths can come up with iterative improvements to their standard operating procedures that still meets the requirements. I believe the Jewish religion even has a concept about creatively outsmarting the religious rules as being a virtuous thing (eg women wearing wigs).

You bring up a good point about religion, it does make millions of people feel better by belonging to a group they see as being benign.

But my question still stands, specially on the light of such view of religion: if religion is, these days, meant to give people internal piece, does it need to dictate such practical things as how you should kill animals?! How do you reconcile that with your view on religion?

> How religion emerged has nothing to do with how things should be in secular societies today.

This assumes literally everything is different today. Which of course is nonsense.

Why would it mean that? Slight differences in one thing can result in dramatic changes elsewhere.

How could you use "hygiene" to justify the unnecessary torture of animals with outdated butchery techniques? 2000 years ago there probably were great health reasons for doing so. We're in 2021, there's simply no excuse.

Chesterton's fence probably applies here.

Quite. No scholar on this matter but they presumably began at least in part as a welfare measure.

my guess is hygiene

Yep, agree. That too.

Yes, trichinosis was probably the reason for not eating pork. Similarly this method of slaughter probably had hygienic benefits in the desert countries where it was instituted.

Circumcision probably had hygienic benefits back then, too.

But we no longer live in these circumstances.

"Chesterton's fence" doesn't mean that you should never change or abandon an existing tradition. It means that you shouldn't do that until you understand why the "fence" was put up in the first place.

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