okay, so the title of the thread is a joke. if anyone (myself included) truly believes lent involves a fishermen’s conspiracy, one should read a book. any book.
but in seriousness, i’ve been reading. from what i’ve read, according to jewish tradition, blood is the seat of life, and as such reserved for God. i suppose that this is why kosher slaughter drains all the blood from an animal.
anyway, does this have anything to do with no meat on lenten fridays, but fish are all cool?
i don’t know enough to really form an opinion, but if someone had a gun to my head, i would assert strongly that since seafood blood looks really nothing like our blood, that fish were not considered repositors of the seat of life (much like plants).
am i right? way off?
are there any other Christian or Judaic traditions that deal with fish not being ‘meat’?
jb
We don’t really have firm documentation or commentary on why rules of abstinence were written for mammals and birds but not for other animals. We do know that the first mention of abstinence occurs in the second century (long before any fisherman cabal could have leaned on the church for a little support) and that the foods described were “flesh meat.”
As it happens, the meats that were forbidden under the rules of abstinence were pretty much what we would now describe as warm-blooded animals, so your theory makes sense. (Mammals and birds are forbidden, but, along with fish, frogs, turtles, and several other cold-blooded reptiles and amphibians are not generally included in the foods from which one should abstain–although there have been variations in the codes at different times and different places.)
When the gun goes to the head, you always have a choice. Just sometimes it sucks.