re: #12 Destro

Over time religion became a way to organize society (circumcisions used to tamp down sex urges for example).

um… circumcisions don’t tamp down sex urges. At all.

It’s about preventing hideously painful infections. Remember that these rules were first written for nomadic desert people, they don’t get to bathe very often. (most of the kosher rules are also health oriented — when there was no refrigeration or pasteurization or microscopes or antibiotics or disinfectants, people who kept kosher still managed to avoid salmonella and e coli and trichonosis and a whole long list of problems that non-kosher people suffered from.)