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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

This has been my understanding too. The cultural reasons arose because until recently pigs gave humans parasites.

All of the weird rules in the bible suddenly start to make sense in the context of an early human civilization "survival guide." Don't make clothes out of two different fabrics because one will wear faster than the other and it causes waste. Monogamy / rules about adultery are for stopping the spread of STDs. Don't mix crops on the same field because it makes it harder to tend to the plant's individual needs. Not boiling a calf in its mother's milk was probably less about the literal act and more about it being sub-optimal to slaughter calves when you have a mature animal available.

I think this analysis could be theologically consistent as well because that's a pretty smart play by a God who's trying to get us to be successful, but who also has to make compromises for early humans who need clear simple rules and who aren't yet advanced enough to understand the why/nuance behind a lot of them. It also provides a theological basis for the fact that "Cafeteria Catholics" are the norm because we've outgrown / understand better the basis for those rules.

This would be a cute idea, if it weren't for the fact that all the other people in the region, and outside, who didn't follow any of these practices (and instead had their own specific taboos), lived just as much and created just as powerful kingdoms as those that did.

The clear reality is that most of these rules are just various cultural taboos enshrined as religious rites, some of which are beneficial, many of which are not.

There may well be multiple local minimums that get reinforced through habituation.

The adjective cafeteria connotes "choosing". Note that the word heresy derives from Greek haíresis (αἵρεσις) meaning "choice" or "option". With respect to Christianity, heresy-choosing has been around a long time, there's been no outgrowing of any kind. It's just that heresy is more prevalent in some centuries than in others. Arianism, for example, was rampant for several centuries. In our own time, the choosing (against) is mainly focused on teachings related to sexuality and marriage.

I wouldn't exactly say that those are the only two things Catholics in the modern age maintain at odds with church doctrine. Heresy, a lot of heresy, is the norm even among regular attendees at mass. Catholics have mellowed significantly in the west to where it's probably more accurate for a given Catholic to say that they have a personal moral code informed by church doctrine than actually following it because it's doctrine.

I think we’re mostly on the same page. An extended discussion on particulars is out of scope here, but I’ll try to clarify what I meant:

In the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed relatively little open dissent, public or private, by persons who profess to be Catholic, regarding christology and other beliefs expressed in the Nicene creed, recited during every Sunday Mass. Sure, there is some, if you have particular conversations. But I’ve never witnessed any fuming on those matters in the local or inter/national news. A huge number of folks in the pews who grew up post 1960s are very poorly catechized thanks to the multi-decade Silly Season that left many of a couple of generations of Catholics (up to today) confused at best. So in many cases, regarding christology, the sacraments, etc., people aren’t sure what a lot of it means, so they’re not in much of a position to dissent on those points (to be heretics re: those teachings), they’re just clueless.

That is in contrast to the open specific informed dissent, even rancor, public and private, around topics such as marriage and premarital sex, artificial contraception, homosexuality, abortion, IVF, and related. And that’s been going on for ~50 years now, so I assert the rampant heresies of our time are clustered around Church teaching on those matters.

> Monogamy / rules about adultery are for stopping the spread of STDs.

And preventing unwanted pregnancies, and partly to stop a few men from monopolising all the women.

> early humans who need clear simple rules and who aren't yet advanced enough to understand the why/nuance behind a lot of them

I don't think this has changed.

Monogamy and rules about adultery is just about keeping a lineage clearly identifiable and unambiguous, mostly for property / inheritance reasons.

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