🚀 go-pugleaf

David S Chesler wrote:
> 
> In article <erRMVfoster-2811981554340001@192.168.1.1>,
> Ed Foster <erRMVfoster@mediaone.net> wrote:
> >In article <v6iug0v9d1.fsf@tick.dev.ampersand.com>, Mark Atwood
> ><zot@ampersand.com> wrote:
> >> Why? No "real" reason, it's a ceremonial commandment, kinda like the
> >> Orthodox Jewish dietary laws.
> >
> >Abstaining from nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine provides some pretty
> >substantial health benefits, so I think it's more than a ceremonial
> >commandment.
> 
>  Consuming red wine (in moderation) has apparent health benefits,
> but that sacrament is not, AFAIK, historically or doctrinally
> health-related.
> 
>  As for the health benefits of kashruth (not to be confused
> with short-term restrictions, like the Passover rules against
> leavened grain, also not to be confused with the eating
> habits of one class of Central European immigrants) one way
> to look at it is that the tribe which, 4000 years ago, wasted
> its farmland with pigs, which ate bottom-feeders and carrion-eaters,
> etc., is not around any more to tell us why that diet is sacred.

Heh heh. I thought I was probably the only person who remembered this. 

Um, BTW, you are talking, are you not, about the discoveries by orbital
synthetic-aperture RADAR ("deep radar") some five years ago of an immense
river system beneath the Sahara, which evidently is now desert solely because
of goatherding. Goats and sheep have extremely good conversions of vegetation
to protein, especially their high-quality milk and their wool, however they
eat down to and beyond the roots, and denude the land to where all of the
topsoil blows away and the remaining sands silt over any river system... even
where it is, as is the buried riverene beneath the Sahara, of twice the flow
and drainage of the Congo and Mississippi combined.

>  Doctrinally kashruth is orthogonal to the obligation to
> maintain health.
> --
> David Chesler   (chesler@post.harvard.edu, etc.)
> http://hail.icestorm.com/chesler  (/riverbay.html or /paddleball.html)
> 
> Birth announcement: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2955/kevin.html

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