If you were starving to death, would you eat the forbidden food of your religion?

God gave us good dietary advice. If the circumstances were such as starvation, I would eat pork, or shellfish. God, I know, would understand. He asked us not to eat unclean foods, for our well being, but he did not say starve yourself.

What a load of bollocks

Not being religious, of course I find it easy to say I'd eat the forbidden donuts.

If there is a God, I would tend to assume He would understand. But, there is no God and bacon is delicious.

Having no religion, I can't imagine being in this situation. But for the best part, my stomach can overcome any physical, mental or emotional barrier put in front of it when it comes to food. God I'm hungry. You've woken the beast now!

> What a load of bollocks

Do you have anything nice to say? Every survey comment of yours I've read so far has been negative in some way. Having a bad day?

I don't believe in a deity or follow the laws of a specific religion, so this wouldn't be a problem for me. There's pretty much no food I wouldn't eat in order to save my life. And in Judaism, you are allowed (even required, if it is necessary) to break a law in order to save a life, so I don't think eating pork in order to save your own life would really be a problem.

No, most likely not. If I was that hung up on religious protocol I would not sin, because I would have to live the rest of my miserable life knowing I sinned and will go to hell because I was too lazy or afraid to forage elsewhere for food..
If I was that hungry and all there was was the food my God told me not to eat, I would not eat it.
wtf? I'm sure anyone could justify enough to themselves and anyone whom else wants to hear, why it was ok to eat the pig. If you want to eat it, than eat it.Just don't hate yourself when you do it.
Personally, imagining that this scenario contained me and my life, I highly doubt that my God would let me not find something else to eat. It seems silly.

I wnat to edit my answer to read "what Enheduanna said"

Actually according to the Talmud any of the Mosaic laws except those dealing with murder, idolatry and incest can be suspended in order to save a life. Judaism does make accommodation for such emergencies. I'm not sure, but I think Islam makes the same sort of accommodation. In the early years of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha permitted his followers, who lived only on alms, to eat meat provided the meat was given to them as alms and was not specifically slaughtered for their benefit.

I still would not eat the pig, I don't care how fudging hungry I am.

Assuming I HAD such a religion, and I do not, I would assume my god would understand.

I don't see why god would understand, as he probably has planned for me to be in this situation and it's a test of my faith. So when I starve to death, I go to heaven.

Of course, this is not true for me, and I don't know how I would think if I'm light headed with hunger, but I hope I would eat.

I'm an atheist, so I don't have these issues. However, I think you're doomed to spend eternity in hell if you eat a forbidden food and your god does exist. See you in hell!

I don't believe in that religious crap about not eating certain things. It's man-made control thing.

Well, I doubt I would. I think a Muslim would just as soon die.
I'm not Muslim by the way..but Christians don't have forbidden food. Jesus kind of took care of that.

I am very sure that G-d is far more understanding and has perfected wisdom to see past our petty hangups and honest shortcommings. If more people thought this way world peace would be a real possibility as most wars are fought over religions and ancient texts that have likely been revised and edited so many times thru history that the original bears scant resembelence to what we have to work with today.

No, I wouldn't eat the forbidden food of my religion, even if I were starving.

I would change my religion to one that says its ok on the spot, and then eat the food.

> I still would not eat the pig, I don't care how fudging hungry I am.

Back around 1982 or so, there were several IRA prisoners in England who went on a hunger strike. The newspapers in San Francisco took this opportunity to print a lengthy article on the process of starvation in human beings. One of the first things to happen when you stop eating is a drop of one degree (Celsius, I believe) in your body temperature, to conserve energy. Then you burn off the sugar reserves in your liver (glycogen). Then the fat reserves throughout your body. When all this is used up, your body starts breaking down the protein in your muscle tissue for energy to keep your heart, brain and lungs functioning. One of the last things to happen on the brink of starving to death is the blood supply to your cerebral cortex is cut off. The cerebral cortex is where our reasoning processes are stored, our moral codes and higher emotions. At this point, what you are left with is sometimes called "the reptilian brain", where our basest, most primitive emotions live. Lust rather than love, fear rather than discretion and aggression rather than valor.

It is at this point that you will eat anything. This is the point at which cannibalism is inevitable in humans.

> |> I still would not eat the pig, I don't care
> how fudging hungry I am.
>
> The cerebral cortex is where our reasoning
> processes are stored, our moral codes and higher
> emotions. At this point, what you are left with
> is sometimes called "the reptilian brain", where
> our basest, most primitive emotions live. Lust
> rather than love, fear rather than discretion
> and aggression rather than valor.
>
> It is at this point that you will eat anything.
> This is the point at which cannibalism is inevitable
> in humans.
>
I'm sure that is all written and true scientifically, but and I do mean but this left out the a spiritual aspect. I have enough faith and trust in the Universal Laws that I will always have a choice, and if starving to death is one of them, than that's what happens. The reptilian brain, the cro magnon brain, the wife beater brain...are stages in a life. The most spiritually faithful, that follow the laws of their faith, and tuly bleieve those laws, will also recieve "miracles". I guess to be fair, the question is biased towards those that would even question their faith. I have spiritual beliefs I am very much in tune with, and eating pig...I don't care how fudging hungry I am. The rest of everything I can be open minded about.
How many people do convert to cannabalism? I'd say not that many would really do it.

> |> I still would not eat the pig, I don't care
> how fudging hungry I am.
>
> Back around 1982 or so, there were several IRA
> prisoners in England who went on a hunger strike.

>
> It is at this point that you will eat anything.
> This is the point at which cannibalism is inevitable
> in humans.
>
>

But you know the prisoners chose to not eat. The newspaper kinda dropped the ball on this one. Kinda makes the prisoners sound like a barbaric and mean group.

> But you know the prisoners chose to not eat. The newspaper kinda
> dropped the ball on this one. Kinda makes the prisoners sound like
> a barbaric and mean group.

Well, they were accused of terrorist acts, blowing up buildings and killing people and such. I don't really recall how the prison situation ended. I believe a couple of them ended up dying in the prison infirmary being fed intravenously.

I can't imagine myself in such a situation...because I'm not bound by religious rules.

I would never allow a religion to control me so completely that I would have to choose death over defiance.

This seems a little silly.

It's difficult for me to imagine myself in such a situation, being entirely non-religious. The closest I can come to it, is imagining whether I would eat human flesh in a survival situation. I'm almost certain that I would (assuming they were dead already).

> How many people do convert to cannabalism? I'd say not that many would
> really do it.
>


This is not a "conversion" I am talking about here. When the blood supply to your cerebral cortex is cut off and that portion of your brain dies, you no longer have the ability to reason. You do not make choices. You are simply driven by the one thing that the "reptilian brain" knows and that is: Survive!

Not, you understand, "Survive at any cost", this is too sophisticated and abstract a concept for that portion of your brain. The reptilian brain does not understand "cost" or "price" or anything that reaches beyond that one single imperative: Survive!

In fact, most cases of cannibalism in humans in drastic survival circumstances, occur well before this degree of starvation sets in. These people have made a choice, and that choice was survival "at any cost", for them. Once a human being has reached the degree of starvation I was discussing earlier, there is really nothing "human" left of them. Fortunately, most victims of starvation usually succumb to some infectious disease because of a weakened immune system before they have reached this final extremity.

If you're interested in the subject, Wikipedia has an article on cannibalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism

I don't agree that this is what happens all the time, to everyone. I just do not agree that mankind is still that much reptilian or neanderthal or barbarics. I do believe that most of us have filtered that gene pool enough to rise aboue the animal instincts. There are angels on earth, and I doubt very much they would eat each other to survive. People who vibrate to a higher frequency, to say that their life's goals priorities are set different, do not have to survive, they already know they are in a higher place. If I was that freaked out starved, I believe my brain would have prepared itself for death, as the life I was living wasn't working out for me anyway.

> I don't agree that this is what happens all the time, to everyone.

No, not everyone. Bear in mind though that it does happen. Was it 15 or 20 years ago now, that athletic team that crashed into the Andes in South America? It happened to them. It will happen to others in the future.

> I just do not agree that mankind is still that much reptilian or neanderthal
> or barbarics. I do believe that most of us have filtered that gene
> pool enough to rise aboue the animal instincts.

I hope not. I want the human race to survive a long, long time. If our gene pool has been that much filtered, our chances of surviving a possible future collapse of civilization go way, way down.

> There are angels on
> earth, and I doubt very much they would eat each other to survive.
> People who vibrate to a higher frequency, to say that their life's
> goals priorities are set different, do not have to survive, they already
> know they are in a higher place.

I, on the other hand, have no such knowledge. I might feel differently if I did, but that is also something I cannot know.

> If I was that freaked out starved,
> I believe my brain would have prepared itself for death, as the life
> I was living wasn't working out for me anyway.

In 1976, shortly after I was discharged from the Navy, my closest friend decided he was going to desert from the Navy. We packed our stuff and hit the road, stuck out our thumbs and headed for Canada. We didn't make it. We got to New England and got stuck in a blizzard. We weren't expecting this, because the first couple weeks of February here in VA were absolutely balmy. The trees were already putting our buds here, which is something we had never seen happen that early.

Anyway, we were stuck late at night on a back road in the middle of nowhere with at least 2 feet of snow on the ground snow falling like gangbusters. We trekked a little way up a forested hill and found a deer blind and tried to make a small camp there. We couldn't start a fire because all the wood was covered in wet snow. After failing to start a fire, we hunkered down in the deer blind for a while. As we started drowsing, we realized we weren't going to wake up in the morning if we nodded off out there. We ended up breaking into what appeared to be an empty ski lodge and spent the night in there. The power was working, the heat was working and there was food in the fridge, so it was not as empty as we had thought. We fully expected to wake up in the morning staring down the barrel of a gun being wielded by the local sheriff, but at least we expected to wake, which we weren't expecting earlier. Well, nothing like that happened. The morning came, we skedaddled and headed back south to a Virginia also blanketed in snow by then. That was one strange winter here.

I am not a burglar, I am not a thief. I have never made a habit of breaking and entering or stealing. Just that once. The point here is that, in that situation, I did something that was directly opposed to my moral code. However, permitting myself to die when there is a clear chance at surviving is also opposed to my moral code. Call it selfish if you will, but there it is.

No need to lecture me either about how that situation was the result of a foolish decision on my part, I well know it. Such a lecture would be pointless.

Now, the situation I just described is not as extreme as the starvation situation we were discussing. But it is as close to death as I have come and is the most extreme survival situation I have ever faced. I'm willing to wager it is more extreme than most people here have faced. I relate it now so you will believe that I have first hand knowledge of what people will do when faced with a drastic situation. Do you have any such first hand knowledge of what you would do?

I have been near death on more than a few occasions. I do not recall what I did to recover from the crises as it was not that dramatic to me.

Some people have the animal instincts under control more than others. For some, it takes a whole lot less than near starvation for SURVIVE to kick in. I guess that's what fear does.

Very well put. Fear of many things.

I'd do what I had to in order to survive, I suppose.

I don't think I can play this game.

First, I'd have to be able to imagine myself so committed to a fairytale that I might be willing to starve to death for it.

Having a little trouble with that.

What kind of a god would forbid me from eating certain types of food anyway?

My religion, Born Again BUD-ist (as in the beer) allows everything.

I would assume my god would understand, and eat the pork .,...........though I am not overly religious in anyway shape or form

> My religion, Born Again BUD-ist (as in the beer) allows everything.

Everything? So then where does your god stand on Miller Lite, Heineken, Samual Adams.

I don't believe in a gOD.

The brew master says anything goes... as long as it's beer. We're very progressive.

Jewish law says that you can violate kosher rules if it's necessary for health or life.

If I was starving to death, I would eat the forbidden religion!

If stuck in The Andes with Jesus Christ, would you eat him to survive?

He would probably taste like bread with a tinge of wine

Oh, I've eaten him many times, when I was a young Catholic boy. Very dry and wafer-like.

I have no beliefs of that sort... but if I did I would not partake, because I am a very spiritual person.

I'd eat it.