https://www.amazon.com/None-These-Diseases-S-McMillen/dp/0800752333

These days it tends to be the atheist ideologies that strike me as the most hostile to other ways of thinking. Maybe this is a phase as well.

It would be nice to strike a balance, but it seems humanity tends to go to extremes, and the only change is oscillating from one extreme to another. Some ex-Catholics I have known get into neopaganism and sex orgies. From neurotic, uptight purity to swinish incontinence without any intermediate stops.

Then there are those raised in Christian households who rebel and go full militant atheist. They don’t even consider a humble and tolerant agnosticism. And I think horseshoe theory might apply here. They just jumped the gap.

Fundamentalists strike me as extremely uptight. They fear sin like some people fear germs.

Mmmm… I’ll give you that one. It is a similarity that I’d not considered. The Japanese and Jews both love them some ritual and tradition…

The inclusivity that I’m referring to isn’t that for outsiders, but for outside belief systems. The Japanese are particularly prone to this, in that they’ve incorporated Buddhism and a fair amount of Confucianism into what we think of as their traditional animistic religion, Shinto. Christianity is on its way to being incorporated, too. Islam? Not so much. Judaism is getting in there, too, due to their fascination with the Talmud as a guide to “getting ahead”.

The Japanese are a strange bunch, when you start getting into their religious views–They have zero problem just glomming onto things and taking them in, regardless of source. “Oh, these Westerners have this sacrificed god, and do a celebration of his birthday at mid-winter? Oh, cool… Let’s get in on that…”. Next thing you know, you’re selling KFC on Christmas, and it’s all good. In a few more generations, the Japanese will likely forget that they “borrowed” the idea, and it’ll be fully integrated into “Japanese Tradition”.

Japanese guy I met once seemingly had no problem reconciling Shinto, Buddhism, the Tao, and still called himself a Christian. His was a very mix-and-match theology, and he was confused as to why I’d even find that odd. Very much the opposite of Judaism… More Roman-like, when I think about it–Take what you like, leave the rest, a buffet of religious belief systems.

Also, for a long time Japan persecuted Christians. So did the Roman Empire. Christians were regarded as smelly hippies or dangerous immigrants. And the Aztecs mostly ripped out the hearts of non-Aztecs. Not what I’d call tolerant or inclusive. Outsiders and nonconformists have cooties.

Correlation doesn’t prove a particular direction of causality, but it doesn’t just happen by itself either. Something’s up.

A culture or subculture with mediocre hygiene can survive a long time, and many have done so. It’s just a matter of compensating for a high death rate with a high birth rate. A fertility cult will do in lieu of a purity cult so long as individual life is regarded as cheap. The culture survives, it’s just people — replaceable people — who die. Make it up on volume.

Breed like rabbits. By the way, rabbits have filthy habits.

I think cleanliness and social virtue aren’t necessarily connected to religion. The Japanese are extremely fastidious, and have a very inclusive attitude towards the beliefs they take up. The Jews? Fastidious, and very much not inclusive. Ancient Rome? Best hygiene in the world, in those days. Very inclusive, almost predatory religious practices. Aztecs? Packed more people into less space hygienically than anyone else in the world at that time, and were also hacking people’s hearts out of their chests.

Overall, I think this thesis is probably an error of correlation vs. actual causality. There is also the fact that a culture which did not possess good hygiene isn’t going to survive very long, and the fact is, if a culture survives… It almost has to have good hygiene, or it’s gonna have collapsed into a mire of filth and debauchery before it gained a reputation for success and longevity.

I’m really not seeing the connection between good public sanitation and religion, here.

Good habits always seem to get conflated with religion. Morality is connected with disgust at “filthy” sin. Maybe that’s just how the human mind works. Perhaps religion is an emergent phenomenon of evolutionary ethics?

I have a low opinion of organized religion, because it seems to promise much more than it can deliver on the spiritual front – and the spiritual is precisely what it claims to be all about. But I’ll concede that it’s good so long as it sticks to what it does best: inculcating and propagating healthy values.

Judaism from the beginning was much more about this world than the next. Jehovah brought a degree of sacredness to this grubby physical life. Christianity is a much more ambitious project, and to try to save souls may be an overreach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/613_commandments

However, any successful agricultural society, with the usual high population densities, must have come with practical rules to control disease, even if how and why the rules worked was unknown. The ones that didn’t disappeared quickly.

There is a lot more interesting stuff in the Old Testament besides dietary and sanitary rules. The Exodus itself reads like a story of the Sea Peoples and the end of the Bronze Age.

What is more interesting is that the writers of the books compiled and edited by Ezra had no clue or memory about the Bronze Age. Everything in the Bible is Iron Age stories.