Hamming It Up
In Hitchens’ chapter “A Short Digression on the Pig,” he attempts to discuss why heaven hates ham. What was the point of this chapter? Simply to poke fun at religion. Since Judaism and Islam share the ban on pork, he gets jabs at two religions. I think Hitchens was just looking for a way to show off his wit. There certainly is no scholarship here. Hitchens focuses on pigs, even though they are only the most famous of whole list of animals that were not be eaten. Hitchens attempts to use this as evidence for putting forth the whole idea of God as laughable.
The truth is that in the Old Testament, food regulations were very important and useful. It was not about having a God who enjoyed making arbitrary laws. The point was for there to be some firm identity markers that would keep the people separate. And guess what? It worked! There is not a lot of talk about the Amorite, Edomite or Moabite issues. But the Jews are still around as an identifiable people, partially because they had customs that prevented them from being assimilated into other peoples.
