Re: little old meere might

Halla wrote: 
On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 23:27:40 GMT, Sergeant Tibbs
<gsapraemty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> blethered:


Perplexed Seal wrote: 

[...]

Whilst I agree in principle I think the point you made the other day applies; many people in contemporary society have no understanding of where the food they eat comes from. The secular contemporary meat eater doesn't equate the barn reared breadcrumb coated and garlic butter stuffed creation on their plate with a chicken they perceive as being upended and it's throat cut.

It doesn't have to make sense, it's 'different' to what they understand and as a consequence they'll reject it. The morality of ritual sacrifice is somehow less than the morality of intensive factory production of meat products (in the loosest sense of the word).

Alistair 

<transitory opinion>

Don't quite say that, please. I am happy to equate a great many forms of meat with their original, still-animal phases, and even with their slaughter. I have yet to have such a thing put me off my lunch and I doubt I will, although I won't build up enough pride about it to have one of the gods smack me for it.


Which gods punish pride? 

No clue, but I'd rather not call them up.



Anyway. So you're not one of the 'many people' on this one - good for
you. ;-) I admit to provoking loss of appetite on more than one
occasion, simply by saying 'mmm, dead cow!' (or whatever animal it
was) in the presence of those who would rather not think about it.


People get squeamish over cottage cheese. That one was always great fun to talk about when young, sitting at those giant, uncomfortable, ugly tables where 50 kids would sit crowded and talk about gross things.



Were the animals unavailable in stores, and I had the resources myself to raise, kill and process farm animals, I'd continue eating meat. Besides, what does it matter how any of us dies? It's not like our souls, or spiritual energy or whatever is really going anywhere.


It isn't? Elaborate?

I'm of a mind (of course it probably isn't widely shared) that even souls, which we seem to regard as a type of energy, are bound by the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy, stating that neither is created nor destroyed, only changed in form from mass to energy and vice versa.

Given that the universe seems to be a closed system (just a very diverse one, and very slow to entropy) the energy that is a soul has really nowhere to go. Special stuff may happen to it after death but the animal that is now on my plate has only lost its physical body.

Of course if it didn't have a soul, then where is the animal that can now care it's dead?





If I'm going to kick the bucket anyway it'd be more efficient for some predator to eat me before my body falls apart. 


How... kind of you... <g>

Plus, a natural predator for humans would be keeping the gene pool pretty clean, wouldn't it? 


<raises eyebrows> You'd think, huh? Define 'natural predator' then.
Personally I'd put 'anything that kills numbers of humans' in the
category 'cleaning the gene pool', whether that includes non-classical
predators or not. So, disease, bugs, that sort of thing... thoughts?



All of the above, including predators that actually consume us for food that we have no defense against except to run away. We don't have those yet but we might someday.

I find it interesting that here and there in Africa (so I've heard) rarely, some people simply don't die from AIDS, or even show symptoms. Their body resists it, from being in an environment where HIV simply doesn't work on them. They're infected, but not ill.



To continue previous thoughts... the only arguments pro-vegetarian that have really made me think hard about giving up meat were that it's terribly inefficient to eat meat (so much labor, cost, materials and time) and that the conditions that farms and slaughterhouses force upon the animals is leaning toward the far end of cruel.


Sergeant Tibbs

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