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2019-08-24 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
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Newsweek: Time to Rethink Taboo on Cannibalism?
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 [BREITBART] Since cannibalism is found throughout the animal kingdom and therefore is something natural, perhaps it is time for humans to rethink the "ultimate taboo" against eating human flesh, Newsweek proposes in an article Wednesday.
Note that cannibalism isn't even included among the Seven Deadly Sins. It's too horrible.
There is nothing necessarily unethical or unreasonable about eating human flesh, declare psychologists Jared Piazza and Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University, but careful reasoning over the merits of cannibalism is often "overridden by our feelings of repulsion and disgust."
Lemme see here... Practical reasons not to eat Grandmaw when she keels over?... Most humans die from disease, rather than accident or murder. This was even more true back when we were living in caves or lean-to's. If Mr. Ugh pegged out from plague and you ate him, guess what you got? Betcha this one was discovered shortly after humans branched off from the chimps--it didn't take an awful lot of brain power to associate cause with effect..
 While not going so far as to recommend cannibalism, saying "there is no need to overcome our repulsion for the foreseeable future," the two authors suggest that humans could master their aversion for human flesh if they needed to.
Ask any survivor of the Donner Group.
"Many people develop disgust for all kinds of meat, while morticians and surgeons quickly adapt to the initially difficult experience of handling dead bodies," they note. "Our ongoing research with butchers in England suggests that they easily adapt to working with animal parts that the average consumer finds quite disgusting."
Morticians and butchers are two entirely different professions.
Moreover, the psychological revulsion experienced over the prospect of consuming human flesh is not the product of reason and may even contradict reason, they argue in Wednesday’s article, which originally appeared last week in The Conversation.
Gnawing on a dead guy does bring with it a certain amount of psychological revulsion. It's not the product of reason, and I think I'd go with instinct in this case.
"Survivors of the famous 1972 Andes plane crash waited until near starvation before succumbing to reason and eating those who had already died," they propose.
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
All sorts of animals eat members of their own species, from spadefoot tadpoles and Australian redback spiders to gulls and pelicans, they state.
Guppies do, too, but no humans but politicians eat their own.
And cannibalism can even be found among mammals, they add, such as with many rodents as well as bears, lions, and chimpanzees.
A dead mouse or rat can lie in a cage with the live ones, and as long as the live ones are properly fed, they'll leave the corpse alone.
Yet humans seem entrenched in their conviction that anthropophagy is simply wrong, no matter how many conditions are placed on hypothetical scenarios.
Possibly because it's objectively wrong?
Human revulsion toward cannibalism stems from our tendency to associate "personhood and flesh," the authors propose, even when the flesh in question is no longer living.
Going back to Granny being dead, she rocked you when you were young, fed you snacks, and indulged you. So you're gonna eat her? Mom's looking a little rickety, too. Where's the hatchet?
Even if we can bring ourselves to deem cannibalism morally acceptable, they contend, "we can’t silence our thoughts about the person it came from" and so our "bias" against eating human flesh persists.
If I had any religious standing at all, I'd tell these guys that what they're talking about is a sin by definition, and a lot more of a sin than mere murder. Corpse abuse of any sort brings revulsion under most circumstances (and I realize there are those when it doesn't, but I think even those bring it in retrospect.)
"The way we interact with animals shapes the way we categorize them. Research shows that the more we think of animals as having human properties‐that is, as being ’like us"’‐the more we tend to think they’re gross to eat," they note.
It would be easy enough to raise monkeys for meat. I haven't heard of anyone doing that. Gorillas and chimps are sometimes hunted, but it's pretty rare.
While noting in passing that "philosophers have argued that burying the dead could be wasteful in the context of the fight against world hunger," the authors ultimately do not propose breaking this taboo "for now," saying that "we’re as happy as you are to continue accepting the ’wisdom of repugnance.’"
Instinct is a pretty good guide. Don't eat Granny, don't jump your sister, and stay away from bears. Violate those simple rules and something bad happens. Granny might not have plague, your sister might be on birth control, and the bear might be caged, but the primitive side of your brain will still tell you not to.
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Posted by Fred 2019-08-24 00:00||
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