You have to be careful with such an argumentation. It may very well be that forbidding pork is the result of century-long observations that people who eat much pork will on average die earlier than the general population. It may even be that the only kinds of meat eaten in the culture that originally invented this rule were fish, chicken and pork, which would mean that forbidding pork was equal to the modern damnation of "red meat".

Arguments like "pigs are unclean and live in the dirt" may have been used to explain this effect and to rationalize the rule, but just because the rationalization of a rule has been proven incorrect, its original intention is not automatically wrong.

It may also be that the rule was never the "shadow" of some empirico-rational observation at all.

Like the milk and the calf rule from Judaism, which was pretty blatantly an authoritarian attempt to enforce social division.

How so? Do you mean the Toraic rule about "seething a kid in its mother's milk" or the Rabbinic fences around it?

You’re rationalizing religion.

The prohibition of pork has nothing to do with disease. We’ve rationalized it by telling ourselves, since there is no God that could make such a silly request, that maybe they did it to cement food safety. Theres as much evidence that it’s all just a fortuitous coincidence.

If you think long and hard enough you can come up with a rationalization for anything in the Torah (or anything, really).

Instead religion is to be enjoyed like Love is. You don’t talk about pheromones and dopamine levels when you embrace you wife. You talk about mountains, and blue skies, and soaring views. If, on a whim, your wife were to ask you to pretend you’re a hare, would you not entertain her?

If you’re a Christian you could rationalize the pork thing by saying: “the purpose of the prohibition was to set up a teaching moment for Peter about Universalism and humility 1000 years later”.

But that’s silly. Instead, for a believer, it’s a insignificant request for an opportunity to make a physical demonstration of Love to the Devine.

The Sufis aren’t dancing because they’re free of tape worms.

This is getting back to metis and episteme. I liked how this concept was explored in the Uruk Machine series if you want to read more.

Metis is "local accumulated knowledge" and episteme is "abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge".

Metis, tradition, is barely knowledge. It is more of a practice without any of the justification needed for knowledge. So if your community knows that it is best to plant seeds during a specific holiday, they might think a supernatural blessing is the reason. Knowing something for the wrong reason isn't knowledge.

Non-knowledge loses arguments to knowledge. When an agricultural scientist comes with theories and results it won't be difficult to say that the farming community actually doesn't know anything. That's fine. But we are too quick to throw out tradition vs knowledge because unless it is specifically measured against it, the practice of tradition may be superior to the practice of current knowledge. Their traditional planting date may be superior to all models. After all, they've successfully farmed here centuries or millennia.

The Sufis might be dancing because having community gatherings allows communities to survive. The dancing and rationalization is incidental but the actual gathering is a crucial matter of survival.

There are dozens of weird cleanliness rules in the Old Testament, it's pretty obvious to me that they were traditional learnings for avoiding disease.