I realize this is dragging up an old thread ~ but I am a new member so I am backtracking:
Clive wrote:What do the monotheistic gods eat? Are sacrifices the gods eating?
The sacrificing was done to show people how to eat, as in the sacrificial rituals told the people to gut the animal and to burn the fat and to cook the meat.
Otherwise the barbaric people would eat animal flesh raw and unclean.
Making cooking into a religious ritual of a sacrifice improved the quality of life and advanced humans into a more civilized culture.
Eating of animals is still barbaric, but cooking the flesh makes it a little less barbaric.
Clive wrote:
When, according to the Jewish stories, did humans first eat?
The old Hebrew stories are not really Jewish stories (see Titus 1:14).
So according to the Bible in Genesis 3:21, God gave Adam and Eve "coats of skins" which means he gave them a physical body of flesh, and so at that point after they sinned then they started to physically eat, including that sinners eat animal meat.
Eating from the trees of knowledge were spiritual foods.
That story is intended to be metaphor and symbolic and not literal - but the message is still pronounced and significant.
Clive wrote:
Why does the christian god have himself eaten continually?
In some Christian Churches like Catholicism they claim to really eat the body and blood, but that was not the intended message from the Gospel.
The message of having His (Christ) body and blood as a "remembrance", Luke 22:15-20, was done at the Passover to replace the killing of a lamb (a sheep) and replace the violent food with bread and wine, and it was done to "REMEMBER" and not to keep eating human flesh and blood.
The body of Christ (the bread) was a symbol of physical presence and the blood (the wine) was a symbol of the spiritual, telling to REMEMBER that in later times we would find the Gospel broken and spread out into all corners of humanity.