A Muslim and atheist start a conversation on twitter. No, it’s not a bad joke, it started with an honest question… why not eat pigs?
The response was “god said so” and “health reasons”. Of the two, I obviously consider health reasons to be more telling. That’s a legitimate concern. There are several parasites that host in pigs and undercooked pork can contain live parasites. Of course, cooking pretty much removes that issue.
So the question became, “if health reasons were eliminated, then would you eat pig?”
The response was quite interesting.
“If you can change the DNA structure of a pig, it would no longer be a pig. Then we’ll chat.”
That doesn’t answer the question. To me, this heavily hints that “because god said so” is a more important reason than anything else to this person.
But the answer is also very curious. What he’s saying, in effect, is that if a pig wasn’t a pig, then he could eat it. That makes sense. He won’t eat pigs, so if it’s not a pig, then he’ll eat it.
So, this really has nothing to do with health concerns (which are non-issues anyway), but only because “god said so”. In effect, a person who claims to be the prophet of god said that pigs aren’t clean (and admittedly at the time, they weren’t) and thus an entire group of people currently exist who do something for no reason.
This leads me to another question though. How much would the DNA have to change for a Muslim to non-longer consider an animal a “pig” and thus be able to eat it? Last I checked, bearded pigs were in the same religious category as domestic pigs. In fact, there are ten species in the genus Sus. Is it just domestic pigs (a sub-species of wild boar), or all members of Sus?
If it’s all member of Sus, then there’s a lot of work to be done to change the DNA of a pig to something non-Sus. This guy is expecting to change between genera. That’s not even possible in a human timeframe.
Bit if it’s not all members of Sus, why domestic pigs and not other pigs. They are pretty similar right?
Obviously, this was never intended to be a legitimate discussion. Just a rationalization of one’s beliefs. I just don’t get these guys. I really don’t.
