[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Religion and culture are often hard to tell apart.

There may well be a quranic sentence, or a hadith, that defines touching food with one's left hand as being sinful, but my take on things is that it's a Middle Eastern thing, one that arose long before the 6th century, and that a Jew or a Middle Eastern Christian (or even a Middle Eastern Zoroastrian) would be about as horrified at seeing food handled with the toilet hand as a Middle Eastern Moslem would (and likewise that a Moslem many generations removed from the Middle East might not be horrified at all, in fact might even notice it, same way few if any westernized Jews would).

So in GURPS terms it's a CF thing, not a Theology thing (although it should probably also be an OPH thing).

Or if you employ the CF/RF split that I've suggested as being useful for historical fantasy campaigns (that itself being a simplified version of what I do in Sagatafl, e.g. to simulate my Ärth setting) then the toilet hand thing belongs in the CF camp and not in the RF camp, according to my take on things.

The full comment to which you were replying is

Originally Posted by Otaku

According to RAW on p. B22 a -10 point Odious Personal Habit would be "Constant bad puns" or "Spitting on the floor".

Using the "wrong hand" to eat with could indeed get quite high depending on the culture. In this instance a cursory search indicates there may* be a religious aspect as well and there seems to also be a probable hygiene thing. Even if those cleansing themselves after defecating with their left hand and having no good way to clean said hand afterwards are throwbacks to a bygone era (like when you find that random person that still has an outhouse), it might take a while to shed the association from the mind of popular culture. Consider the sayings persist long after what inspired them has faded away.

If whswhs is correct about the serving practice of sharing food in a communal dish and the above two are also true, it is at least plausible (if not likely) that you just hit the -3 threshold. Some of the nastier OPH examples from RAW may be even worse, but it is a matter of the maximum being set at -3, even if something is hypothetically far worse.

*Given how often even self-professing "believers" of my own faith get things wrong, I don't know how relevant it actually is.

I have added emphasis in the hopes it clarifies what I was stating:

The "religious" consideration is apart from a more general "social" consideration though they may have a shared cause. This is actually quite common, though it can get muddied due to the various different faiths, the various different divisions within said faiths and perhaps most important personal understanding of said faith (not just how someone interprets something, but how competent they are in their faith).

Something can be viewed either negatively or positively by both the theist and the atheist, commonly held in the culture, but the exact reason why can differ. In most cases, something that both would agree is "wrong" will be because of natural consequences, but also because of something else for the theist like divine revelation. In this case, besides the practical reasons for a society responding poorly to using the wrong hand to eat, those belonging to a particular faith may have additional reason to respond poorly. The section of text you did quote was just me pointing out that I had not done in depth study and so passages of Muslim holy text that favor "right" over "left" that I encountered while barely looking into this could have been taken far out of context... but like similar Christian passages would be if used in a similar manner.

I also was pointing out that even if everyday life experience no longer contains the source of the original negative reaction, it may still persist for some time afterwards.