Switching To A Kosher Diet

For someone adjusted to a lifetime of eating foods like pork, crab, crawfish, or the meat of other non-kosher animals, giving up certain habits might be challenging.  As much as some Christians might want to be perceived as righteous or at least feel like they are trying to strive for the perfection within everyone's grasp, almost none of them would ever go beyond making assumptions about the dietary commands of the Bible.  Do they know which foods are prohibited?  Probably not.  Do they remember which verses in the New Testament supposedly override them?  Again, this is not likely.  Other than the general stupidity of assumptions and the relative ease of philosophical laziness, there is also in all likelihood a lack of desire to to ever change something like diet even if they should.

No, Matthew 15 and Acts 11 in no way contradict the idea that the dietary restrictions are universal obligations, the former pointing out the legalistic fallacy of treating washing hands before meals as morally right and the latter focusing on how Gentiles are not excluded from God's salvation.  Plenty of Christians are not rationalists and will believe in assumptions or contradictions, though.  A significant motivation behind assumptions in this case sometimes appears to be the real but potentially assumed difficulty of making permanent diet alterations even late in life.  This is not logically impossible, as it does not follow from eating one thing for one's entire life that one cannot transition to a somewhat more limited diet.

It is not as if all sorts of popular meats and other foods are not still fully permitted under Mosaic Law anyway.  Evangelicals love to talk about making sacrifices for God or prioritizing truth (which is grounded in reason) and righteousness, and still they would almost never even entertain the logical possibility of the dietary laws still being binding, even when they do not even know where any relevant passages are or have actual familiarity with them free of assumptions.  The allure of conformity to the traditions they are comfortable with and the seeming difficulties of life changes, some of these perceptions exaggerated by a yielding subjective feelings, would deter them.

They have not focused on the fact that difficulty is not impossibility and that moral obligation does not depend on willingness or the ease of fulfilling them.  If they truly cared about reason, truth, God, and morality as they selectively claim, evangelicals would be eager to make whatever changes in their lives necessary to submit to these things, even something more practical or day-to-day as the consumption of food.  It is not as if no meat or general food is permitted except for a single representative from a single category.

It is possible for a perfectly rationalistic person to mean to visit the dietary passages much later than they analyze the far more important moral issues, like murder, kidnapping, classism, and so on, but no rationalist would ever read Matthew 15 and think Jesus is saying the dietary laws are repealed, or read Acts 11 and think Peter's vision is about food and not accepting Gentiles as fellow humans alongside the Jews.  Such a person, if they are aware of the immense evidence that Christianity is true, might realize that they need to alter their diet in order to live according to probabilistic likelihoods, and they could also realize this change is absolutely doable.