[Buddha-l] Insight into Anti-Muslim Violence in Sri Lanka

[Jo]

On Behalf Of Richard Hayes
Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 6:56 AM

On Aug 19, 2013, at 20:20, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> kashrut laws require painless, instant death. If the animals suffer, the
meat will not be kosher.

Is death ever painless and instant? I suppose being vaporized in a nuclear
explosion might come close, but the result of that is not kosher meat but no
meat at all.

That said, where I live now I find myself surrounded by people who hunt for
much of their food. My neighbor hunts elk with a bow and arrow, and he
swears when an elk or deer is shot in just the right place, it dies
immediately and suffers little. He prays for the animals he harvests (his
verb) and is convinced his prayers minimize the animal's suffering. To a
non-hunter this sounds superstitious. To a non-participant in Judaism and
Islam, kosher and halal sound equally superstitious.

> Conversely, however, halal meat is NOT considered kosher, because the
killing and preparations do not meet the kosher standards.

Isn't there another factor, namely, that any food to be kosher must be
blessed by a qualified rabbi? I worked once in a plant that processed
cooking oil. One line of oil we made was kosher. Every month or so a rabbi
came out to the plant and said some prayers over some vats of oil, thereby
turning the canola oil (then known as rape seed oil) kosher. That was not so
much a matter of purity as of ritual; the kosherized oil was in every other
respect identical to the non-kosher oil.

Richard
_______________________________________________

I agree---superstition, i.e. magical transformation of something,  is of the
essence of food pre-proscriptions. They are not intended to produce painless
deaths. The intentions are 'ritual purity', another superstition. Same with
the transubstantiation of the body and blood of Jesus in Christian ritual.
More superstition.  Humans with their fearful deluded minds invented magic,
the animals didn't invent it.

Joanna