Posted by BE on 12/30/2001, 4:44 pm
Message modified by board administrator 4/16/2006, 6:43 am

...And Gordy Posted by Bill Engle on 11/13/2001, 5:20 pm , in reply to "Thanks for the input, Lanny" Thanks for the input, Gordy. You said “I can hardly breathe when raw mushrooms are being cut up in my presence.... I have the symptoms of an asthma attack by just getting a whiff of those foul disgusting things.” If that’s what happens, then I find your opinion of mushrooms understandable. If they had that effect on me, I think I would have the same opinion of them too. It’s interesting, there’s something in mushrooms that they emit into the air, some substance, that affects some people and not others. With one kind of mushroom Mark had at his apartment, the bunch of them all together in the bag was enough to knock a fly out of the air and kill it. Peanuts also have an effect like that on some people and not on others. Some people can die from eating peanuts—and ALMOST die just from having them held in front of their faces. “To me, just my opinion, anything that can grow without sunlight and smells as bad as mushrooms do can't be fit for human consumption.” I won’t dispute that this may be a good point. Never mind the part about what they smell like, that’s an opinion, a human taste that is different between different people. But your first point, about their ability to grow without sunlight, could possibly be construed as an absolute criterion that may even have some bearing on the issue of their edibility. Only one problem though. As with many good points people make about many issues, sometimes there’s a counterpoint that neutralizes it. Originally the same thought could have been expressed about the idea of eating animals. God first designed only fruits and vegetables for human consumption. There’s no question that God originally intended for man to be vegetarian. But before somebody goes and says that that fact makes vegetarianism a law binding on us today, we can point out that the Word of God clearly permits the consumption of some kinds of animals. Imagine, back in the days of Adam and Eve—this would have to be after the fall so they would be able to conceive of the idea of something being unpleasant, but when they were still two very wholesome-minded, innocent people, even though after the fall—somebody from today going back in time and trying to introduce them to the idea of eating meat. He tells them, “Now see this beautiful innocent deer (or antelope or gazelle or something), with the big brown eyes, with the cloven hooves, that chews its cud, the animal you pet and caress because he’s so sweet and nice and cuddly? "Now we hold him like this, we take this knife and we STAB it in his heart like this.... Blood comes squirting out and, oooh, watch the poor thing writhe in pain and suffer and die. Now wipe away the tears from your eyes a moment so you can keep watching clearly here. "Now we string him up on this tree branch, slit his throat like this and let all the blood go splurting out all over the ground.... We don’t need his head anymore, so we take this big blade and chop it off like this... THWACK... and throw it away on the ground over there... BONK.... See it go rolling along, splattering blood all over the grass? "Now for the rest of his body, we cut the rope and let it drop on the ground and go falling head over rump like this (oh, I guess the head was off; okay then, frayed neck over rump....) "Now next we take the knife and cut all his skin off like this.... Now when we’ve got the skin all off, we don’t need the guts anymore either, so we grab them with our hands and fling them all over there with his head, all in a big pile on the ground.... "Now see this red meat here with some of the blood still oozing out of it? Now we cut out some big pieces of it, we take it over here to the fire and barbecue it on the grill.... Mmmm, delicious! Cooked to medium, just the way we love it! A little salt and garlic and spices.... Here. Now try some. It’s delicious!” What do you think they would have thought? I think their reaction would have been, “Yuck!” And maybe something along the lines of “Anything that was made to be a living thing—and besides that, smells like that when you cut all its skin off the way you did—can't be fit for human consumption.” But the Scriptures say some animals are, in fact, fit for human consumption. It’s not that their feelings about eating animals and your feelings about eating mushrooms are wrong feelings; they’re not. It’s just that in this fallen age of man when we’re able to know good and evil instead of only good the way things were before the fall—which according to Rotherham also means knowing “blessing and misfortune” instead of only blessing (or “pleasure and pain” instead of only pleasure, or “esthetic enjoyment and repugnance” instead of only esthetic enjoyment, etc.)—sometimes in this fallen world man’s ideas of what is pleasant and what is repugnant get switched around. What God originally intended or the way man originally would have felt about something is not always what has ended up being God’s commandment for us. “I can hardly imagine who would have originally looked at one of the things growing and even considered trying to eat it.” Well, I can imagine who would have and why. The same way many things were first eaten or drunk. “They must have been blind with no sense of smell, or any other kind of sense for that matter!!!!!” No, not blind, I say, not lacking a sense of smell—just hungry. Famines have happened on this earth, times when people didn’t have the conventional foods they normally would have eaten, and it has been during those times when people have been left with no choice but to start experimenting with eating things they otherwise would never have considered eating. Sometimes they ended up liking some of the things they discovered, and kept on eating them even when they had their old foods back again. You can just see how that was the way tea must have been discovered. It must have been during a time when people in China were starving for something to eat, so they started boiling water to make whatever kind of soup they could throw together, but couldnÂ’t find anything to put in it except the leaves on the trees and plants. (Never mind the Chinese legend about the emperor who was boiling his water for health reasons and some leaves fell into it, and voilà! Tea.) Some kinds of cheese must have been discovered by noticing that the milk in a calf’s stomach had curdled into little globules. (To make cheese today—to the chagrin of many vegetarians when they first find out about it—they extract rennet from the lining of a calf’s stomach, put it in milk till it curdles, then take all the little solid pieces and press them together into a block.) I like cheese now, but if I had been there those thousands of years ago and had seen that stuff in the lining of the calf’s stomach, I tell you, I wouldn’t have wanted to eat it! Bill