As far as I know, the Catholic Church doesn't command people to abstain from meats - but you claim that God did until Noah.
First a set of shtupid questions, then a linguistic joke. Nah, first the joke:
In my Old English seminar four decades ago, the professor warned against false cognates with a joke from Catholic school. In the Latin class, the students had an exam where they were given sentences in Latin had to translate them into English. One was "Carpe diem", "Seize the day." One student knew what "diem" meant, but not "carpe" so he reasoned it out:
"Carpe" looks like the English "carp" which is a fish. Therefore "carpe diem" must mean "fish day", which every Catholic knows is Friday.
Our professor called making such a mistake a "howler", so this was a "double howler."
Now to the question.
My older sister is a member of Calvary Chapel, the original site of that chain of churches and Ground Zero of the Jesus Freak Movement circa 1970. In her Bible study class on Genesis, they're pushing the more recent YEC claims that there was no meat eating before the Flood -- all our present-day carnivores with their near-perfect carnivorous characteristics were actually vegetarians (while that may be complicated by the YEC claims of "basic created kinds", which was concocted ad-hoc to address a few of the basic logistical impossibilities of a literal biblical Ark, it still remains that many of those "basic created kinds" still start out fundamentally as carnivores). However, the earlier story was that meat eating started with
The Fall; when Mark Twain wrote a depiction of The Fall he describes Adam and Eve fleeing Eden surrounded by scenes of carnage as some animals suddenly became predators and others prey.
So the question, assuming the newer version in which meat eating didn't start until the Flood (which you appear to be referring to), is how do we explain Abel's burnt offerings to YHWH (AKA "God")? Yes, he got wool and possibly milk and other dairy products from his sheep, but why then kill them to make burnt offerings?
™ Version 4.2
