Objective Standards in Morality
In response to http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=15645556
The Hebrews knew nothing about microbacterial disease, etc. They knew that certain things killed them. That is the what not the Why. Long term pathology isn’t a necessary piece of information all that needs to be known is those of us who live long lives don’t eat pork. If everyone already eats pork that is hard to discover but, if most people don’t because their father who never ate pork, never fed it to them it becomes easier.
If memes have any validity, then it becomes clear that any meme in support of any action that is largely fatal will be at a disadvantage to a contradictory meme that saves a life. Eat pork vs don’t eat pork. Over a sufficient period of time the successful and unsuccessful strategies would sort themselves out.
I am not a scholar of ancient times but I think there are some premises you are assuming that I do not accept. I consider the Old Testament the writing down of two things. There are the word of mouth stories that almost all have their origin before the old testament. And they’re writing down the practical laws. Since last I heard the old testament was written over something on the order of 900 years I have no issue discounting what Moses “said.”
As for the argument that if everyone knew them they wouldn’t have to be written down, I’ll direct you to the basic moral laws embodied in don’t steal and don’t kill. I think a reasonable intelligent person could have derived that there would be consequences in the form of retribution and vengeance for those actions. They did not need to be written down, but they were anyway. They were written down because they were key to the survival of the society, as the dietary laws were written down because they are important to the survival of the individual.
Like I said I’m not a scholar but I’d be surprised if agrarian societies did not know that information it would have been key to their survival. I think that there was a lot of information that was lost to a number of sources over the years. Among them were the book burners who destroyed Plato and Socrates in Europe, they was re-imported from the Arabs, other books may not have been so lucky. There was also the scientific elites who believed folk remedies and wisdom was beneath them.
I find is surprising that there are no other texts covering most of the material, but I can neither confirm or deny the truth of that assertion. I would suspect most of information was passed on word of mouth and where it was written down it would have been in books that someone considered of an occult nature not medical.
I’ll leave it to those of more schooled in ancient history support or deny my assertions.
–Zafkiel