Two or three years ago I got sensitized to the fact that we are living in a fallen world, we are fallen human beings living in a fallen world. I already knew that of course, it's standark Christian theology, but it hit me hard because of somje spiritual experiences I was going through mysef and I came away from those with a heightened sense of the fallenness of this world and of our own bodies.
hrough the problems of the creation-evolution debate that the fact that we die which is the nimber one symbpto of fallenness is what people take for granted in the theory of evolution. Death is just part of life, just a normal thing as people think of it who have no belief in fallenness or even anya awareness of the concept. Bu in the biblical creatinist context death is unnatural, it's the producet of disobedience to god: The wages of sin is death says the scirpture. We die because we disobey God, which is what he told Adam and Eve would happen when they were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They disobeyed and began to die ritght away, starting with their spiritual connection to god Himself.
Every kind of disease is part of the deathk and every kind of calamity too. It's all the result of sin whether direct or indirect, immediately related to our own actions or remotely conntected to somnething in the distant past we know nothing about. We inherit our ancestors sins too.
DNA would of course also be affected by the Fall. It provides a different basis for explanation of how genetics works of course, for instance mutationjs make sense as the mistakes we know them to be when we aren't tryint to force them to be the cause of evolution itself. They are concequences of the Fall, part of the deterioration process the world is undergoing as a result. They may not do immediate damage but over time and especially if they accumulate in one place they are no doubt the cause of genetic diseases of all kinds. I think they are also the caue of junk DNA. I think the fall has killed that much of our genetic system, which originally would have been designed to provide protections and sttrengths to our bodies to make life easier in the physical world. So much has been lost if this is the explanation that it would seem we were once of superhujan streth to compare us with what we have left to protect us inj this world.
Lately I've been thinking about this carnivore diet, and in fact all the different diets we've heard about over the last few decades. The standard diet is treated as poisoous, we need to cut out this or that to be healthy they dsay. We know sugar is a problem and we eat too much of it, and then they pointed the inger at fat, and then at red meat, told us to eat whole grains and fuits and vegetables. then we got variations on regional diets that emphasize different sorts of fats and plant footds. Then we got Atkins and the ketogenic diets, meat is good after all, it's carbs that are bad, particularly the powderingy floury kind, sugards of course but also flour , rice, potatoes, bread, antyhign starchy. that sort of faded away for a while but now we're hearing about this carnivore diet which seems like a ketogenic diet on steroids. Only it isn't particularly promjoted for weight loss, it's been disocvered in many cases as a healer for various diseases. So now meat is good for us, even the despised red meat.
Through the dietary changes I kept reminding myself that the bible has people eatig every kind of food. Mildk and honey is how the Promised land was described, the land of milk and honey, so dairy which is often made a villain in toda's regimens, is OK in the Bible, and honey which is of course sugar. God told Noah to eat meat after the flood so meat is good too, red meat, the meat of lambs and cattle particularly . butter is good. Abraham served his angelic guests butter along with their meat. Some sort of meal or flour and oil seems to have been a stabple in blibcla times. The women in the Elijah story of the nevernednging supply of those ingrediencets is a case in point. No meat in that sortory. She was gpoor. But Elijah himself had been fed a "cake" with water when he was camped by the brook as the famine got underway. This "cake" made with oil is mentioned many times. And then Ezekiel has a meal of a mixture of grains and beans. lentiles are eaten. then we hear about the "dainties" served at the tables of the pagan kings such as Nebuchadnezzar though they aren't described beyond that. Daniel and his friends rejected them and asked for "pulse" instead, p[romiseing ti twuld keep them healthy. Vegetables ofsome sort we assume. And it did keep them helathy as they trust God to protect them when they rejected the no doubt idolatrous meats of the king, meat sacrificed to idols that is which they wouldted to avoid.
In Jesus' time it seems to have been a lot of bread and fish, at least among the disciples. In any case the range of foods presented as normal food is pretty broad. Why should we think of any of it being bad for us now?
Probably, I would guess, becaue the Fall is a progresive thing. It gets worse as time goes on. Sins accumulate and their consequences accumulate. More genes are destroyed by mutations for instance so the bodies' natural protections keep diminsihing.
That alone woudl explain why some foods may not be good for us, or not good for some of us. People with particular diseases through genetic mutations would have to avoid foods that tohers wouldh't who don't have those genetic problems. Gluten is a problem for sonme now. It's a perfectly good fod, wheeat that is, but somme people lack the ability to tolerate it. Dairy is a perfectly good food but same thing, some of us can't tolerate it well enough.
Animal meat no doubt contains mor nutriesnts than plant fopods being made of the same stuff as our own bodies, so it may be that it's an all purpose solution for people who have specific problems with other foods.
Anyway. these are the lines I tend to think aloeg these days when \\\\concerning diet. I thik it would be a more productive directio for science to take in understnading how we need to eat for health, different people needing different kinds of foods and so on, but o course nobody thinks in terms of the Fall, we are sddlesd with this ridiculous evolutionary system intead.
NThe world is deteriorating too of course, and that means foods may also be deteriorating, but science can find ways of dealing with these problems if we focus on them in the right way.
ot to leve us with no hope here: we have God who still rpvodes what we need and we can ask Him for help with all of it.
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