Religious opposition to the table fork
Still today in the Arab world people eat with their fingers and share food from a common pot. This is why Arabs are so much more scrupulous than Westerners about washing their hands before they eat. It’s also why they have the convention a clean (right) hand for writing, shaking hands and eating, and the left hand for, you know, wiping. Which also increases the punishment of having a hand cut off for theft. Then what? Would you want to have someone share a meal with you, if they’ve only got one hand – for everything?
So the medieval invention of the small fork for use at the table would seem like a good idea. (Industrial-size ones for cooking had been used by the Romans and others for centuries.) But you know what religious people are like when someone wants to introduce any sort of change – “It’s not sanctioned by Scripture! It’s the work of the Devil!”
Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article,“The Uncommon Origins of the Common Fork“:
Forks for dining only started to appear in the noble courts of the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire in about the 7th century and became common among wealthy families of the regions by the 10th century. Elsewhere, including Europe, where the favored implements were the knife and the hand, the fork was conspicuously absent.
Imagine the astonishment then when in 1004 Maria Argyropoulina, Greek niece of Byzantine Emperor Basil II, showed up in Venice for her marriage to Giovanni, son of the Pietro Orseolo II, the Doge of Venice, with a case of golden forks—and then proceeded to use them at the wedding feast. They weren’t exactly a hit. She was roundly condemned by the local clergy for her decadence, with one going so far as to say, “God in His wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”
When Argyropoulina died of the plague two years later, Saint Peter Damian, with ill-concealed satisfaction, suggested that it was God’s punishment for her lavish ways. “Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. . . . this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take his revenge. For He raised over her the sword of His divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy and all her limbs began to wither.”
And still today Christian fundamentalists think that gay marriage is causing hurricanes in the US, and Muslim fundamentalists think that women’s clothing is causing earthquakes in Iran, and it’s all caused by the Devil. And do you ever see the Devil with a hurricane or an earthquake? No! (But you see him with a fork…)
http://robinhl.com/2012/12/02/religious-opposition-to-the-table-fork/
= new reply since forum marked as read
... to a store regarding the insistence of Bryan Fischer (of the American Family Association) that not using oil is an insult to God:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014322273
Oh those fundies.... 
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Is it dinnertime yet? 
She only has full use of one limb, her left arm, because of a brain injury caused by being shaken as a toddler. She has actually complained to me about the bra thing! 
Thanks for clarifying why this upsets you! 
A few hundred years, I think. Just an FYI.
... his friends called him Furcifer ...
http://leitesculinaria.com/1157/writings-the-uncommon-origins-of-the-common-fork.html
furcifer <genitive furciferī>; m, second declension
yoke-bearer (a term of abuse, usually of slaves)
rascal, scoundrel, rogue
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/furcifer
... Coryat (sometimes also spelled "Coryate" or "Coriat"
conceived of the 1,975-mile (3,175 km) voyage to Venice and back in order to write the subsequent travelogue dedicated to Henry, Prince of Wales, at whose court he was regarded as somewhat of a buffoon and jester ... A custom of Renaissance humanists was to contribute commendatory verses that would preface the works of their friends. In the case of this book, a playful inversion of this habit led to a poetic collection that firstly refused to take the author seriously; and then took on a life of its own. Prince Henry as Coryat's patron controlled the situation; and willy-nilly Coryat had to accept the publication with his book of some crudely or ingeniously false panegyrics. Coryat, therefore, was jokingly mocked by a panel of contemporary wits and poets of his acquaintance. At the behest of the teenage prince, a series of verses was commissioned, of which 55 were finally included for publication ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coryat's_Crudities
