Fistful,
Yes, absolutely, telling people "don't do that because there are known bad consequences associated with doing it" is a good thing.
I think that the point that people were making in this thread is that when the "known bad consequences" are things that we can physically test and prove, it's called "science" or "medicine", but when the "known bad consequences" are a matter of believing what some holy teacher says will happen after we die, then it's religion.
So to those outside the religion, some of the "don'ts" look unjustified and capricious.
Take the pork example: If (hypothetically -- I'm not trying to attack anyone's faith here) the reason for the Old Testament prohibition on eating pork is purely the descendant of that meat's tendancy to carry disease (as Werewolf described), then there's no intrinsic reason that God might have for banning its consumption now. It wasn't spiritually unclean; it was physically unclean, and people did not have the means to make it safe, so it became a law, enforced through fear of divine retribution, that pork must not be consumed.
Now that we know the reasons that pork can cause disease, and we know how to ensure that it does not, there's no physical reason not to eat it, and yet the religious prohibition remains. To those who do not follow Talmudic law, there's no reason, and the idea that "if you eat pork, God's gonna be awful angry" seems, well, not particularly compelling.
Religions attempt to control behavior through divine consequence. Some of that behavior is intrinsically harmful ("Thou shalt not murder", for instance). But some of the behavior that religions try to prohibit is the moral equivalent of malum prohibitum: e.g., eating pork, or doing work on the Sabbath; it's not physically harmful, but according to the belief system, it's spiritually harmful.
I think that's the distinction that some are trying to draw here.
Wow. Sorry. That was longer than I meant it to be.
-BP
