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Comment by hoseyor | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy to think that a religious dictate of Islam and Judaism may have its origins in not cooking meat thoroughly or good practices during dressing and butchering.

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What's crazy about that? Religion used to be long term knowledge encoding (multigenerational). Evolved knowledge, the group that stumbled into a pig taboo just happened to be more successful than the group without. In an area where pigs are better not eaten, either the former would eventually replace the latter or the advantageous knowledge spreads. I'd consider it crazy to think of (the roots of) religion to be anything else.

> Evolved knowledge, the group that stumbled into a pig taboo just happened to be more successful than the group without

This doesn't really track though. Because by this logic, polygamous religions would have overtaken monogamous ones. Or religions like Jainism and Buddhism would have not lasted as long as they did. Religions are not solely evolutionary, nor are the customs and traditions of cultures over time. They aren't genetic traits that evolutionary theory applies to them.

Also consider, nothing about Judaism is disadvantageous by your logic but it has become a small minority religion largely as a result of persecution over the ages. There's not an evolutionary aspect there.

> Because by this logic, polygamous religions would have overtaken monogamous ones

Would they? Are societies where children are hardly more than a number to their fathers necessarily more successful, more stable?

Unlike genetic traits, religions and other cultural traits are software, not hardware. (yes, genetic traits are information, but so is VHDL). Individuals can change their mind, adapt the ways of a different group, not possible with genes.

You point out Judaism, that one's quite an outlier because it's so unaccepting of would be believers who weren't born into it. Turns out forks that do away with that part spread quite far.

Of course. Polygamous societies can afford to lose men in wars and riskier adventures that cause the society and culture to expand (by your logic).

Again I don't accept the religions spread solely because of their features that beat out other religions in adaptation. It ignores that people may be convinced about the content of the religion, which people back then would have cared about more, rather than the features of the religion, which we modern people care about nowadays more.

Many religions are unaccepting of people born outside. Hinduism is an example. Even only one section of Hindus was actually allowed to even study the religion at all.

Like I mentioned, and which you ignored, religions like Jainism and Buddhism would have died out. What about Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, etc. caused them to die out vs something like Jainism.

Many religious dictates of the two religions with a standing religious law and polity had a usefulness in the past and a second, slightly different usefulness in the modern era of loneliness, alienation, lack of identity, etc.

Not at all.

They had identified a global health issue and a potential source without necessarily knowing all the details. Banning pork seemed reasonnable if they couldn't make sure people don't get sick after eating it.

Those religious dictates were well before germ theory.

That's kind of the point.

Man eats pork. Man gets sick. Man believes God made him sick for eating pork.

Not really the point. The modern "practices during dressing and butchering" highlighted by the GGP were based on the understanding of the germ theory of disease.

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