We really don't know if the plants undergo any pains when we use them and their limbs for our purposes. Therefore, though willful killing of even plants is not approved in Hinduism ... eating herbal products is not seen as something of a hindrance to spiritual advancements.
We must have to have a sense of proportion otherwise this life won't be possible. We should not become extremists.
OM
"Om Namo Bhagvate Vaasudevaye"
I can't afford to waste more time with blundermirk so I shall leave this at here. But go figure, never heard a Hindu reason vegetarianism that way. It was always about the "not hurting creatures", or "its healthier" or "its cheaper" or "Bhagavan doesnt accept it" or "those who eat meat are more prone to sloth and disease" or other reasons of sorts. But cannibalism? That blew my nicely slick-backed hair forwards to a wild armani.
Responding to accusations I am making fun of Hinduism would provide respect to your accusation in the first place. So, lets park aside such childishness.
Here is my argument.
(1)If you eat meat of certain animals because the Quran/Torah says Allah/YHWH made such animals so you could slaughter them, and you couldnt eat some other meat because they are "impure"/Allah/YHWH expressly forbids you from eating them, etc., etc., you are a blind believer. There IS no argument possible with a person who believes Quran is the LITERAL word of God himself, yes?
Assuming you are not a blind believer in Torah/Quran, lets proceed.
(2)Chinese and Koreans eat dog meat, cat meat, pork, snakes, etc. Is there any research which establishes that they are worse of in some fashion than Muslims who avoid pork but eat beef?
(3)Assume you ARE a rationalist/atheist who believes in evolution, AND finds it ok to slaughter cattle for beef. Please explain WHY you find it ok to slaughter animals given we ourselves are a species of animals. You could say that it is ok for homo sapiens to slaughter another species of animals but it is evil to slaughter a member of your own species. In this case my rejoinder would be as following. Homo sapiens themselves could undergo speciation leading to homo sapiens A and homo sapiens B - two different species. What exactly prevents homo sapiens A from eating homo sapiens B?
(4)As pointed out, it is not at all clear that plants feel "pain" like animals do. Even if plants CAN feel pain, I would argue that in the tree of evolution, homo sapiens and plants are way way apart from each other than other animals and homo sapiens. Eating plants is therefore a much, muCH, MUCH less evil than eating animals.
Lets hear arguments against these instead of ad homs.
Last edited by wundermonk; 09 October 2011 at 04:27 AM.
Wundermonk, this thread was not supposed to be about my beliefs, but yours.
As for you evolution argument, it doesn't make much sense. I could claim that fish are much farther from humans, therefore it is okay to eat fish. If you see evolution as an indistinguishable flow over-time, than any place you put the moral line is arbitrary. Even land animals are millions of years apart from us. Maybe that's "enough time"? Maybe a lamb is so much farther from us than an ape, so we shouldn't eat an ape, but lamb is okay. I've never really heard anyone equate eating animals with cannibalism before, it doesn't make much sense.
My belief is very clear. Look at (4) in my previous post.
"Killing" plants <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<evil<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< killing animals. As simple as that.
Wundermonk, if I understood correctly your argument would be more in line with a speciesism argument?
I also thought the example you gave about cannibalism was a bit extreme, but what was the reasoning behind it?
That's what I get from this argument: We, as members of the animal kingdom, familiar with how a developed nervous body feels (both pleasure and pain) should not inflict pain to any being of the same stature in no way, since agreeing to inflict pain to a fellow being should not be decided in terms of how developed the being is, because a pig (e.g.) is going to feel a cut or a broken bone the same way that we do.
I think this argument is valid but it really doesn't come across that easily, specially in a society already desensitized about animal rights.
Why not eat meat from an animal that died of natural causes? Let them grow old and when you see them fallen on the ground, harvest away. You inflict zero pain that way.
Please let me know which species, if any, is NOT included in the class "animals" above and why?
You had earlier said:
Hmm...actually, if you DO believe in evolution, humans are just another type of animals. No escape route available there, sorry. Plus, remember per evolution, there is no reason to expect humans constitute a single homogeneous genus/species. Homo Sapiens could easily speciate into "Homo Sapiens A" and "Homo Sapiens B". They may already have. Folks living in Antartica may probably have speciated differently than those living in the hot deserts of Africa.I believe in evolution, but that doesn't mean I believe humans and animals are the same.
Sorry. No escape route available there either. Read this.The kosher slaughter is supposed to be painless,
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