I've always been fascinated by how some people are able to convince you about just about anything. If it's credibility, persuasiveness or maybe just gullibility on behalf of the audience, I don't know, but some people can sell ice cubes in Greenland.

Now, I mentioned this German Muslim giving us the tour of the mosque in Bahrain. He's one of those people (which I guess is why he's giving the tours) and as Karina tells in her latest entry (yes, in the most recent quarterly post ;o), he was very convincing in his pointing out inconsistencies and just funny business about Christianity in general. But given some time to think about it, a lot of the stuff he said was maybe a little "tainted". I'm sure you could find similar stuff in the Qu'ran.

After the tour, I found some leaflets about Islam, one of them entitled "Why Pork is Prohibited in Islam". It's about 30 pages written by some Muslim scholar, Haji Ibrahim Tien-Ying Ma. Here are two excerpts that made me decide against reading the whole thing:

The abstention from eating pork is one of the steps taken by Islam to practice hygiene and to attain "purity of human nature"

Nature of a Pig

The pig is naturally lazy and indulgent in sex. It dislikes sunlight and lacks the spirit and will to 'fight'. The older it gets, the lazier it gets. It eats almost anything, be it faeces or anything dirty. It prefers dirty places to clean ones. It eats and sleeps only and hates moving around .. (etc.)

... And any comparison to the male part of the population will be frowned upon...

Basically he states that it's a natural advance in civilization to stay away from animals that are "gross" in some manner of way. In particular you shouldn't eat pork because its an unworthy animal. So are rats, goats, worms, snakes and the like. Wonder what Muslims say to the French cuisine with frogs' legs and escargot :o) At any rate I have to disagree with the notion, that the nature of an animal should affect the nature of it's eater. (Yes, mr. Ma argues that it's a blood thing)

Now, I get the part about food you probably shouldn't touch: I was once on a field trip to a Fish-sticks factory - haven't eaten the stuff since. But I think that's more a matter of choice of quality rather than species. Of course you wouldn't eat a pig that dropped dead on a heap of dung a week ago. A nice anti-biotic-laden pork chop on the other hand never killed anybody ... yet.