jOhN from Hull asked why religion could not be updated, and told us that he understood the no-riding on the Sabbath was originally to give the animals a rest.   Interesting.

I once was talking with some Orthodox Jewish friends about the kashrut food laws, and I made the comment that I thought they were originally because of (in the case of not eating pork) avoiding trichinosis, and (in the case of the milk/meat divide, "not seething the calf's meat in its mother's milk") humanitarian reasons.

His reply was emphatic: "NO! We observe these rules because God said so!

The point is that the believers will deny your rationale, jOhN, however right or wrong you are. And of course your rationale, while possible or even persuasive, can't be proved, any more than the doctrine, "because God so commanded" can.

And even supposing that the Sabbath no-riding rule was humanitarian in origin (which we don't know), or the no-pork rule was health oriented (which we don't know), these rules now serve what I'll call "a liturgical purpose" (maybe wrong language, but it will serve for this purpose) for observant Jews, and besides that they serve as a means of maintaining community identity, a sense of "us" versus "them". Jews have maintained their cohesiveness, their sense of who they are, for thousands of years while scattered into many foreign cultures, many foreign lands, in part by such practices, and one cannot expect their attachment to these rules to go away even if you were to prove a historical health or humanitarian or other non-religious origin.

Dave Oesterreich