Agenda for a New America
Part One
The Politics of Vegetarianism
By Vasu Murti
Chapter 16 - Voices Calling for Justice

In his book, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, author Mark Nathan Cohen
suggests that agriculture developed because the world was
overpopulated; the environment could no longer support any more
hunter-gatherer tribal populations. Humanity is once again at a
crossroads.

Since its founding over two hundred years ago, the United States has
been both a haven for the oppressed, yearning to breathe free, as well
as a nation with a liberal and progressive concept of "human rights."

The phrase "all men are created equal" once referred only to white,
male property owners. With the abolition of human slavery, it has
since been expanded to include women and minorities. Why should our
concepts of equality, rights and justice end with the human species?
Religion has traditionally been a tool of oppression, but there have
been voices calling for justice towards the animals.

From history, we learn that the earliest Christians were vegetarian.
For example, Clemens Prudentius, the first Christian hymn writer, in
one of his hymns exhorts his fellow Christians not to pollute their
hands and hearts by the slaughter of innocent cows and sheep, and
points to the variety of nourishing and pleasant foods obtainable
without blood-shedding.

St. Richard of Wyche, a vegetarian, was moved by the sight of animals
taken to slaughter. "Poor innocent little creatures," he observed, "If
you were reasoning beings and could speak, you would curse us. For we
are the cause of your death, and what have you done to deserve it?"

According to St. Francis of Assisi, "if you have men who will exclude
any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you
will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."

St. Filippo Neri spent his life protecting and rescuing living
creatures. A vegetarian, he could not bear to pass a butcher's shop.
On one occasion, he exclaimed, "If everyone were like me, no one would
kill animals!"

John Woolman (1720-72) was a Quaker preacher and abolitionist who
traveled throughout the American colonies attacking slavery and
cruelty to animals. "Where the move of God is verily perfected and
the true spirit of government watchfully attended to," taught Woolman,
"a tenderness toward all creatures made subject to us will be
experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen that
sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator
intends for them."

"Thanks be to God!" wrote John Wesley, founder of Methodism, to the
Bishop of London in 1747. "Since the time I gave up the use of
flesh-meats and wine, I have been delivered from all physical ills."
Wesley was a vegetarian for spiritual reasons as well. He based his
vegetarianism on the Biblical prophecies concerning the Kingdom of
Peace, where "on the new earth, no creature will kill, or hurt, or
give pain to any other." He further taught that animals "shall receive
an ample amends for all their present sufferings."

Wesley's teachings placed an emphasis on inner religion and the effect
of the Holy Spirit upon the consciousness of such followers. Wesley
taught that animals will attain heaven: in the "general deliverance"
from the evils of this world, animals would be given vigor, strength
and swiftness...to a far higher degree than they ever enjoyed." Wesley
urged parents to educate their children about compassion towards
animals. He wrote: "I am persuaded you are not insensible of the pain
given to every Christian, every humane heart, by those savage
diversions, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, horse- racing, and hunting."

In 1776, Dr. Humphrey Primatt, an Anglican priest, published A
Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute
Animals. This may have been the first book devoted to kindness to
animals. According to Primatt:

"Pain is pain, whether it is inflicted on man or on beast; and the
creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible of the
misery of it whilst it lasts, suffers Evil...

"It has pleased God the Father of all men, to cover some men with
white skins, and others with black skins; but as there is neither
merit nor demerit in complexion, the white man, notwithstanding the
barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right, by virtue of his
colour, to enslave and tyrannize over a black man...

"Now, if amongst men, the differences of their powers of the mind, and
of their complexion, stature, and accidents of fortune, do not give
any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of
these differences; for the same reason, a man can have no natural
right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the
mental powers of a man...

"We may pretend to what religion we please," Primatt concluded, "but
cruelty is atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity; but cruelty
is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy; but cruelty is the worst
of heresies. The religion of Jesus Christ originated in the mercy of
God; and it was the gracious design of it to promote peace to every
creature on earth, and to create a spirit of universal benevolence or
goodwill in men.

"And it has pleased God therein to display the riches of His own
goodness and mercy towards us; and the revealer of His blessed will,
the author and finisher of our faith, hath commanded us to be
merciful, as our Father is also merciful, the obligation upon
Christians becomes the stronger; and it is our bounden duty, in an
especial manner, and above all other people, to extend the precept of
mercy to every object of it. For, indeed, a cruel Christian is a
monster of ingratitude, a scandal to his profession and beareth the
name of Christ in vain..."

The "Quaker poet" and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92),
wrote: "The sooner we recognize the fact that the mercy of the
Almighty extends to every creature endowed with life, the better it
will be for us as men and Christians."

Roman Catholic Cardinal, John Henry Newman (1801-90), wrote in 1870
that "cruelty to animals is as if a man did not love God." Or another
occasion he asked: "Now what is it moves our very heart and sickens us
so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this: first, that
they have done us no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of
resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the
victims which make their sufferings so especially touching...there is
something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have
never harmed us and who cannot defend themselves; who are utterly in
our power."

General William Booth (1829-1912), founder of the Salvation Army,
practiced and advocated vegetarianism. Booth never officially
condemned flesh-eating as either cruelty or gluttony, but taught that
abstinence from luxury is helpful to the cause of Christian charity.

"It is a great delusion to suppose that flesh of any kind is essential
to health," he insisted.

Reverend Basil Wrighton, the chairman of the Catholic Study Circle for
Animal Welfare in London, wrote in a 1965 article entitled, "The
Golden Age Must Return: A Catholic's Views on Vegetarianism," that a
vegetarian diet is not only consistent with, but actually required by
the tenets of Christianity. (Genesis 1:29) He concluded that the
killing of animals for food not only violates religious tenets, but
brutalizes humans to the point where violence and warfare against
other humans becomes inevitable.

"Honourable men may honourably disagree about some details of human
treatment of the non-human," wrote Stephen Clark in his 1977 book, The
Moral Status of Animals, "But vegetarianism is now as necessary a
pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the
early Church." According to Clark, eating animal flesh is "gluttony,"
and "Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no
claim to be serious moralists."

"Clark's conclusion has real force and its power has yet to be
sufficiently appreciated by fellow Christians," says the Reverend
Andrew Linzey. "Far from seeing the possibility of widespread
vegetarianism as a threat to Old Testament norms, Christians should
rather welcome the fact that the Spirit is enabling us to make
decisions so that we may more properly conform to the original Genesis
picture of living in peace with Creation."

The Reverend Dr. Andrew Linzey's 1987 book, Christianity and the
Rights of Animals, may be regarded as a landmark in Christian theology
as well as in the animal rights movement. Linzey responds to criticism
from many of the intellectual leaders of the animal rights and
environmental movements - Peter Singer, Richard Ryder, Maureen Duffy,
Lynn White, Jr. - that Christianity has excluded nonhumans from moral
concern, that Christian churches are consequently agents of
oppression, and that Christian doctrines are thus responsible for the
roots of the current ecological Crisis.

"We do not have books devoted to a consideration of animals," he
acknowledges. "We do not have clearly worked-out systematic views on
animals. These are the signs of the problem. The thinking, or at
least the vast bulk of it, has yet to be done." Reverend Linzey, an
Anglican clergyman, has been called "the foremost theologian working
in the fiend of animal/human relations." Christianity and the Rights
of Animals, is a must-read for all Christians.

In Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Linzey not only
makes a sound theological case for animal rights, but states further
that animal slavery may be abolished on the same grounds that were
used in biblical times to abolish human sacrifice and infanticide:

"...it may be argued that humans have a right to their culture and
their way of life. What would we be, it may be questioned without our
land and history and ways of life? In general, culture is valuable.
But it is also the case that there can be evil cultures, or at least
cherished traditions which perpetuate injustice or tyranny. The
Greeks, for example, despite all their outstanding contributions to
learning did not appear to recognize the immorality of (human)
slavery. There can be elements within every culture that are simply
not worth defending, not only slavery, but also infanticide and human
sacrifice."

Reverend Linzey responds to the widespread Christian misconception
that animals have no souls by carrying the argument to its logical
conclusion: "But let us suppose for a moment that it could be shown
that animals lack immortal souls, does it follow that their moral
status is correspondingly weakened? It is difficult to see in what
sense it could be.

"If animals are not to be recompensated with an eternal life, how much
more difficult must it be to justify their temporal sufferings? If,
for an animal, this life is all that he can have, the moral gravity of
any premature termination is thereby increased rather than
lessened...In short: if we invoke the traditional argument against
animals based on soullessness, we are not exonerated from the need for
proper moral justification.

"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same were
inflicted on a human being?"

courtesy of http://www.all-creatures.org/article...-polveg16.html

"Mary Greer" wrote

"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same were
inflicted on a human being?"

Agreed. So let's be more equitable about it and bring back cannibalism.

I propose we start with you first.

/lee ( ...acquiring the power of my enemies through eating them... )

buddhashortfatguy wrote:

"Mary Greer" wrote


"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same were
inflicted on a human being?"

Best "proposed aim" is usually just behind the front shoulder.

DT

Agreed. So let's be more equitable about it and bring back cannibalism.

I propose we start with you first.

/lee ( ...acquiring the power of my enemies through eating them... )

"dt" wrote in message
...
buddhashortfatguy wrote:

"Mary Greer" wrote


"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same were
inflicted on a human being?"

Best "proposed aim" is usually just behind the front shoulder.

DT

Agreed. So let's be more equitable about it and bring back cannibalism.

I propose we start with you first.

/lee ( ...acquiring the power of my enemies through eating them... )



arrives with huge 55 gallon drum of bread crumbs

To hold in some of the moisture... makes 'em jucier!

shakes bottle of steak sauce, wiggles eyebrows at 'lunch'

-l

--
to email me, remove the 'burnt_crusty_bits' from the email addy

"buddhashortfatguy" wrote in message
...
"Mary Greer" wrote

"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same were
inflicted on a human being?"

Agreed. So let's be more equitable about it and bring back cannibalism.

I propose we start with you first.

/lee ( ...acquiring the power of my enemies through eating them... )




I like the Irish comedian who said that the worlds population problem could
be saved with cannibalism. If we each eat one person.........

I would like to eat Mary.

"Night_Seer" ecamacho4 at hotmail dot com wrote in message
...
Stavros of Pureshitland wrote:
"buddhashortfatguy" wrote in message
...
"Mary Greer" wrote

"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same
were inflicted on a human being?"

Agreed. So let's be more equitable about it and bring back
cannibalism.

I propose we start with you first.

/lee ( ...acquiring the power of my enemies through eating them... )




I like the Irish comedian who said that the worlds population problem
could be saved with cannibalism. If we each eat one person.........

I would like to eat Mary.

I would like to eat out Angelina Jolie...oh wait you said
eat...nevermind (although Rosie is nice and plump)


Yes! I am sure Angelina would be very tasty. I have noticed that the diet
affects the taste. I prefer Asian women because they do not eat so much
meat. In defense of Mary I have found Vegetarian Pussy to be a 5 star meal.

I'm a vegetarian and I hate you and your posts!


Agenda for a New America
Part One
The Politics of Vegetarianism
By Vasu Murti
Chapter 16 - Voices Calling for Justice

In his book, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, author Mark Nathan Cohen
suggests that agriculture developed because the world was
overpopulated; the environment could no longer support any more
hunter-gatherer tribal populations. Humanity is once again at a
crossroads.

Since its founding over two hundred years ago, the United States has
been both a haven for the oppressed, yearning to breathe free, as well
as a nation with a liberal and progressive concept of "human rights."

The phrase "all men are created equal" once referred only to white,
male property owners. With the abolition of human slavery, it has
since been expanded to include women and minorities. Why should our
concepts of equality, rights and justice end with the human species?
Religion has traditionally been a tool of oppression, but there have
been voices calling for justice towards the animals.

From history, we learn that the earliest Christians were vegetarian.
For example, Clemens Prudentius, the first Christian hymn writer, in
one of his hymns exhorts his fellow Christians not to pollute their
hands and hearts by the slaughter of innocent cows and sheep, and
points to the variety of nourishing and pleasant foods obtainable
without blood-shedding.

St. Richard of Wyche, a vegetarian, was moved by the sight of animals
taken to slaughter. "Poor innocent little creatures," he observed, "If
you were reasoning beings and could speak, you would curse us. For we
are the cause of your death, and what have you done to deserve it?"

According to St. Francis of Assisi, "if you have men who will exclude
any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you
will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."

St. Filippo Neri spent his life protecting and rescuing living
creatures. A vegetarian, he could not bear to pass a butcher's shop.
On one occasion, he exclaimed, "If everyone were like me, no one would
kill animals!"

John Woolman (1720-72) was a Quaker preacher and abolitionist who
traveled throughout the American colonies attacking slavery and
cruelty to animals. "Where the move of God is verily perfected and
the true spirit of government watchfully attended to," taught Woolman,
"a tenderness toward all creatures made subject to us will be
experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen that
sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator
intends for them."

"Thanks be to God!" wrote John Wesley, founder of Methodism, to the
Bishop of London in 1747. "Since the time I gave up the use of
flesh-meats and wine, I have been delivered from all physical ills."
Wesley was a vegetarian for spiritual reasons as well. He based his
vegetarianism on the Biblical prophecies concerning the Kingdom of
Peace, where "on the new earth, no creature will kill, or hurt, or
give pain to any other." He further taught that animals "shall receive
an ample amends for all their present sufferings."

Wesley's teachings placed an emphasis on inner religion and the effect
of the Holy Spirit upon the consciousness of such followers. Wesley
taught that animals will attain heaven: in the "general deliverance"
from the evils of this world, animals would be given vigor, strength
and swiftness...to a far higher degree than they ever enjoyed." Wesley
urged parents to educate their children about compassion towards
animals. He wrote: "I am persuaded you are not insensible of the pain
given to every Christian, every humane heart, by those savage
diversions, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, horse- racing, and hunting."

In 1776, Dr. Humphrey Primatt, an Anglican priest, published A
Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute
Animals. This may have been the first book devoted to kindness to
animals. According to Primatt:

"Pain is pain, whether it is inflicted on man or on beast; and the
creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible of the
misery of it whilst it lasts, suffers Evil...

"It has pleased God the Father of all men, to cover some men with
white skins, and others with black skins; but as there is neither
merit nor demerit in complexion, the white man, notwithstanding the
barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right, by virtue of his
colour, to enslave and tyrannize over a black man...

"Now, if amongst men, the differences of their powers of the mind, and
of their complexion, stature, and accidents of fortune, do not give
any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of
these differences; for the same reason, a man can have no natural
right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the
mental powers of a man...

"We may pretend to what religion we please," Primatt concluded, "but
cruelty is atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity; but cruelty
is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy; but cruelty is the worst
of heresies. The religion of Jesus Christ originated in the mercy of
God; and it was the gracious design of it to promote peace to every
creature on earth, and to create a spirit of universal benevolence or
goodwill in men.

"And it has pleased God therein to display the riches of His own
goodness and mercy towards us; and the revealer of His blessed will,
the author and finisher of our faith, hath commanded us to be
merciful, as our Father is also merciful, the obligation upon
Christians becomes the stronger; and it is our bounden duty, in an
especial manner, and above all other people, to extend the precept of
mercy to every object of it. For, indeed, a cruel Christian is a
monster of ingratitude, a scandal to his profession and beareth the
name of Christ in vain..."

The "Quaker poet" and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92),
wrote: "The sooner we recognize the fact that the mercy of the
Almighty extends to every creature endowed with life, the better it
will be for us as men and Christians."

Roman Catholic Cardinal, John Henry Newman (1801-90), wrote in 1870
that "cruelty to animals is as if a man did not love God." Or another
occasion he asked: "Now what is it moves our very heart and sickens us
so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this: first, that
they have done us no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of
resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the
victims which make their sufferings so especially touching...there is
something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have
never harmed us and who cannot defend themselves; who are utterly in
our power."

General William Booth (1829-1912), founder of the Salvation Army,
practiced and advocated vegetarianism. Booth never officially
condemned flesh-eating as either cruelty or gluttony, but taught that
abstinence from luxury is helpful to the cause of Christian charity.

"It is a great delusion to suppose that flesh of any kind is essential
to health," he insisted.

Reverend Basil Wrighton, the chairman of the Catholic Study Circle for
Animal Welfare in London, wrote in a 1965 article entitled, "The
Golden Age Must Return: A Catholic's Views on Vegetarianism," that a
vegetarian diet is not only consistent with, but actually required by
the tenets of Christianity. (Genesis 1:29) He concluded that the
killing of animals for food not only violates religious tenets, but
brutalizes humans to the point where violence and warfare against
other humans becomes inevitable.

"Honourable men may honourably disagree about some details of human
treatment of the non-human," wrote Stephen Clark in his 1977 book, The
Moral Status of Animals, "But vegetarianism is now as necessary a
pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the
early Church." According to Clark, eating animal flesh is "gluttony,"
and "Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no
claim to be serious moralists."

"Clark's conclusion has real force and its power has yet to be
sufficiently appreciated by fellow Christians," says the Reverend
Andrew Linzey. "Far from seeing the possibility of widespread
vegetarianism as a threat to Old Testament norms, Christians should
rather welcome the fact that the Spirit is enabling us to make
decisions so that we may more properly conform to the original Genesis
picture of living in peace with Creation."

The Reverend Dr. Andrew Linzey's 1987 book, Christianity and the
Rights of Animals, may be regarded as a landmark in Christian theology
as well as in the animal rights movement. Linzey responds to criticism
from many of the intellectual leaders of the animal rights and
environmental movements - Peter Singer, Richard Ryder, Maureen Duffy,
Lynn White, Jr. - that Christianity has excluded nonhumans from moral
concern, that Christian churches are consequently agents of
oppression, and that Christian doctrines are thus responsible for the
roots of the current ecological Crisis.

"We do not have books devoted to a consideration of animals," he
acknowledges. "We do not have clearly worked-out systematic views on
animals. These are the signs of the problem. The thinking, or at
least the vast bulk of it, has yet to be done." Reverend Linzey, an
Anglican clergyman, has been called "the foremost theologian working
in the fiend of animal/human relations." Christianity and the Rights
of Animals, is a must-read for all Christians.

In Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Linzey not only
makes a sound theological case for animal rights, but states further
that animal slavery may be abolished on the same grounds that were
used in biblical times to abolish human sacrifice and infanticide:

"...it may be argued that humans have a right to their culture and
their way of life. What would we be, it may be questioned without our
land and history and ways of life? In general, culture is valuable.
But it is also the case that there can be evil cultures, or at least
cherished traditions which perpetuate injustice or tyranny. The
Greeks, for example, despite all their outstanding contributions to
learning did not appear to recognize the immorality of (human)
slavery. There can be elements within every culture that are simply
not worth defending, not only slavery, but also infanticide and human
sacrifice."

Reverend Linzey responds to the widespread Christian misconception
that animals have no souls by carrying the argument to its logical
conclusion: "But let us suppose for a moment that it could be shown
that animals lack immortal souls, does it follow that their moral
status is correspondingly weakened? It is difficult to see in what
sense it could be.

"If animals are not to be recompensated with an eternal life, how much
more difficult must it be to justify their temporal sufferings? If,
for an animal, this life is all that he can have, the moral gravity of
any premature termination is thereby increased rather than
lessened...In short: if we invoke the traditional argument against
animals based on soullessness, we are not exonerated from the need for
proper moral justification.

"Indeed, if the traditional view is upheld, the question has to be:
How far can any proposed aim justify to the animal concerned what
would seem to be a greater deprivation or injury than if the same were
inflicted on a human being?"

courtesy of http://www.all-creatures.org/article...-polveg16.html