I was recently asked an interesting question – why do Christians today seem more secular than other major religions?
It is very clear that from a visual point of view, Christians dress and wear hats are usually secular, in addition to specialized priests, nuns or bishops, patriarchs, ordinary Christians, whether they believe in Catholicism or Protestantism or Orthodoxy, their dress, hairstyle, are ordinary people, do not wrap their heads, wear small hats or shave their heads, keep long hair and pull a hairpin, and do not wear robes or conservative burqas (female burqas) and turbans.
The Orthodox Church requires women to wear a headscarf (no problem with exposing their hair) when they enter church, and not to wear revealing clothing. The rest of the daily life, food, clothing, shelter and transportation, without excessive precepts
In addition, the religious festivals and rituals they observe are relatively low-key, there is no need to eat vegetarian food, do not kill, do not marry, or fast some common animal products, strict fasting, and so on.
The most typical is that in our impression, when it comes to Muslims, the first concept that everyone often thinks of is the taboo against eating pork.
In fact, like Islam, pork is fasted, and its mother, Judaism.
And, in addition to not eating pork, there are also many similarities in the diet and daily customs of believers in Judaism and Islam.
For example, they pray to the West many times a day, have a "Sunday" every seven days, pay attention to fasting, circumcision, fasting on pork, blood shellfish, chanting before slaughtering livestock, picking tendons after slaughter, women must wear turbans when praying, and men must wear round hats to show their "fear" of God.
Like the Jews who fled to Henan, China in ancient times, after settling down, they were always regarded as Hui by the local Han people, who called Muslims "White Hat Hui Hui" and Jews "Blue Hat Hui Hui".
Obviously, whether it is Judaism or Islam, their rejection of the "second master brother", although it is said in the tone of "God", but the source is inseparable from the needs of their ancestors' survival and development and the consideration of maximizing benefits.
When the ancient Jews were in the Middle East, they were also dressed in robes and turbans, which was somewhat similar to today's Arabs
Archaeology has proved that the ancient Egyptians thousands of years ago, the ancient Babylonians in the two river basins of the Middle East, there were not many taboos in eating, especially pigs, which also belonged to an important member of their captive livestock, which was the main animal product that people ate daily at that time.
For example, in the pyramids and the murals of the Valley of the Kings, the ancient Egyptians left behind the daily life of raising pigs, killing pigs and eating pork, and roast pork chops were a very decent dish for the upper class to entertain guests at this time.
The image of the "pig keeper" on the ancient Egyptian murals, their pigs, look more "chai" and not fat enough
About 30 per cent of the captive animal bones excavated from the ancient Babylon site in present-day Iraq are pig bones.
It can be said that thousands of years ago, the ancestors of the Middle East all ate pork.
However, around 1000 BC, Islam was far from existing, but the ancient people of the Middle East collectively stopped eating pork.
Around the same time, desertification in the Middle East began to worsen, with precipitation and forest cover declining, and large areas of forest being replaced by sparse grasslands or barren Gobi. Various tribes have shifted from farming to nomadic herding.
So, looking back, what kind of conditions are needed for pig raising?
First of all, from the perspective of energy conversion rate, raising pigs in grasslands and desert areas is not cost-effective.
If you want to make the pigs grow fat, you need a lot of grain as feed, before the popularization of scientific breeding, you have to feed about three pounds of grain, the pig can grow a pound of meat. However, since the beginning of large-scale desertification, food production in the Middle East has been relatively tense, and pigs, animals, are obviously competing with humans for rations.
Therefore, at this time, in West Asia and North Africa, pig farming became a burden.
In addition, pigs are omnivores, there are a large number of parasites with humans, if eaten, must be thoroughly cooked to avoid infection, and the sparse vegetation of grasslands and deserts generally lack firewood, the cost of cooking pork is too high.
In contrast, beef and mutton can be eaten while fresh and half-alive, and the risk of food safety is relatively low.
What's more, the large cattle, sheep and camels can not only provide meat sources, but also produce fur and dairy products, which are indeed more economical than simply raising pigs to eat meat.
Considering again, in the nomadic civilizations in the Middle East, migration and transition activities are also necessary, but pigs have stomachs close to the ground, short legs, poor athletic ability, poor gregariousness, and poor management (it is said that it is because they are too cunning and cunning), while cattle and sheep are ideal social animals and have a relatively docile personality.
After all, you can walk dozens of kilometers with a cow and a horse, you lead the pig to go, try it.
Moreover, the pig can not be too hungry, if hungry, it will produce a certain aggressiveness, or quite fierce.
Obviously, in the desertification of the Middle East, raising pigs is risky and not cost-effective, so gradually, pigs have become a disliked animal.
Okay, let's go back to religion.
In fact, any ideology, including religion, at the beginning of its rise, belonged to a theory and ideology that helped the lives of believers - only in this way can it be widely accepted and disseminated.
The taboos of Judaism and Islam in the Middle East, such as not eating blood, pork, self-destructing animals, shellfish, etc., are largely intended to adapt to the objective limitations of the local natural environment.
For example, the earliest Judaism, through the mouth of God, solemnly admonished the ancients that pigs belong to "unclean things" despised by God, let alone eating their flesh, even touching pigs, and even seeing pigs, are unlucky.
By the time of the rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century AD, this old custom was further perpetuated, stipulating in the name of Allah that Muslims should not eat pork – Chapter VI of the Qur'an:
"Inedible for blood, pork, self-death, and animals that have not been slaughtered in the name of Allah"
However, Christianity, which also originated in the Middle East, except for the Maronites, most Christians are mainly distributed in the relatively humid and lush vegetation of Europe, so there is no rejection of pigs and pork products, and pork has become one of their most common sources of energy.
Religious dietary taboos due to objective environmental constraints, as well as cattle in Hinduism.
Unlike the above two religions, which describe the object of fasting as a "filth", the "tumor cow" in Hinduism belongs to the mount of the gods, so it is also divided into the series of gods and cannot be offended at will.
The reason why the cattle have risen to the level of fasting in the name of "religion" is, in the final analysis, the economic account.
The energy conversion rate of cattle is very high, it eats grass, and milk is milk.
Well, the nutrition you get from eating a cow as food is very limited, but if you raise it to produce milk and drink, or as an important tool of production to do farm work, you will have much more income than eating it directly.
In addition, in ancient India, where farming was the main source of income, cattle, ploughing animals and milk producers, fed the growing population with hard work and resentment, and were still very valuable tools of labor.
A similar situation occurred in China in the era of farming – successive dynasties and dynasties had very strict restrictions on "eating cattle". In many dynasties, it is illegal to slaughter cattle (including their own cattle) without permission, and even affect the health of cattle, and even sometimes people have to "pay for their lives" for cattle.
However, compared with the Indians, the taboo of "eating cattle" in China has not developed to the step of blessing with religion, at most, it has been popular such as "the next life of the cattle to become a cow, eat a lifetime of suffering" and other such reincarnation concepts.
It is also true that after entering the industrial society, for Chinese, as long as there are conditions and like to eat beef, they will eat well, and there is no psychological obstacle.
Another very controversial topic is the understanding of "eating dog meat".
If you have stayed in Europe and the United States, you may have experienced being asked about "Chinese eat dogs", even if most of us Chinese today, and have never been exposed to dog meat-related foods.
The understanding of "eating dogs", in the final analysis, actually stems from the living needs of the old ancestors in different natural environments.
As we all know, the mainstream ideology of Western culture is represented by Anglo-Saxon culture, deeply influenced by the Vikings and Germans.
And these two ethnic groups, one is from the northern pirates, the other is from the jungle hunters.
Obviously, in the long years of underdeveloped productivity, dogs can pull carts and climb plows, hunt and hunt, shepherd and guard, and properly important production tools, comparable to the old cattle in ancient China, belong to the "just needs" of human production and life.
Therefore, they are generally repulsive to killing dogs and eating dog meat from a cultural perspective.
Instead, in farming culture, dogs have a relatively low status — they can't be used directly as a tool of production.
Thus, in the eyes of East Asians, the sin of eating dogs is much smaller than that of cattle. Except, of course, for dogs that have already established a deep relationship with their owners.
However, dogs are different from pigs, the meat production rate is low, often eat, it is not cost-effective, coupled with the concept of "dogs are loyal friends of humans", so whether it is ancient or modern China, eating dogs is not a mainstream diet. The concept of the widespread cruelty of eating dogs Chinese widely spread in the West is more like relying on the moral superiority that arises out of thin air, consciously or unconsciously "demonizing" Chinese.
Having said all this, everyone should also be clear that behind the history of the "Second Master Brother" being rejected by people is a series of "deified" doctrines and rules formulated by religions in order to adapt to the natural environment. In addition to pork, the different attitudes of human beings to the consumption of animals such as cattle and dogs are also inseparable from the restrictions brought about by the objective environment faced by the survival and development of their ancestors.
However, after the conditions have improved, without flexibility, and even more strictly controlling various "precepts", if you really encounter special circumstances, it is indeed very delayed.
For example, during world war I, the Ottoman artillery made a series of mistakes, and the reason was even traced back to the "pig".
It turned out that the pig, as an "unclean thing", in the Theocratic Ottoman Turkey at that time, not only was its flesh considered very dirty, but even its peripheral products became things that could not be touched.
However, there is one product of the pig, but it belongs to the necessary material of war - pig bristles.
To clean the gun bore, it is necessary to use a brush made of pig bristles (especially the best quality made in China), which is clean and does not damage the cannon, so the great powers participating in the war gladly use the bristle brush.
In Turkey, however, in order to circumvent religious "taboos", alternatives such as horsehair were used. As a result, the accuracy and accuracy of weapons were seriously affected, and with the successive defeats of the war, the Ottoman Army was pressed to the ground by the Allies, and after the end of the First World War, it soon fell apart.
Objectively speaking, the fasting rules of a certain religion are not directly equivalent to the taboos of a certain nation as a whole.
Although some ethnic groups are deeply influenced by a certain religion, such as the overlap between religious habits and ethnic habits, the proportion of people who believe in a certain religion, etc., you still can't say that a certain ethnic group = a certain religion, and a certain ethnic group "naturally" believes in a certain religion.
To be honest, many peoples have been influenced by different religions at different times in their history, and the one that is currently influential and commonly believed in is only one of them. In the case of the Uyghurs, shamanism, Buddhism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism have all had an important impact on them historically. For example, the custom of crossing a brazier at a Uyghur wedding is a shamanistic legacy.
A Uighur wedding scene. The ethnic minorities in northwest China have always lived a secular life, are good at singing and dancing, and do not have the custom of wearing a burqa and masking
What's more, according to the Constitution and other laws of our country, citizens have freedom of religious belief. Non-belief in religion and change of religious belief are also manifestations of freedom of religious belief.
Therefore, even if certain ethnic groups are more deeply influenced by religion, individuals of that ethnic group still have the right to freely choose their beliefs and ways of life - the division between religion and ethnicity is by no means a concept and cannot be confused. Religion is not the whole of a nation, nor can it cover the traditional customs and characteristic culture of a nation, let alone as a stereotype of a nation or a certain "taboo".