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I've admitted on more than one occasion that being emotionally driven is one of my biggest disadvantages where debate is concerned.

Emotions are a clear advantage for dudes like Edward Said. That man can ******* excoriate someone and make them feel bad about it afterwards.

I can't speak for anyone else, but my objections to the eating of meat stem from the harm that arises from the intensive farming of animals as a source of 'cheap' food. Some of these concerns are related to my personnel health, environmental damage arising from intensive farming practices and somewhere on the list comes animal welfare.

When lions start farming humans intensively, using millions of hectares of land for producing the food that the humans need to be fed, emptying water tables to water them, allowing steroid, hormone and effluent waste to run off into rivers, slaughtering them in deplorable conditions, processing whats left into artificially cheap and absolutely non-nutritious gack to be fed to lion communities the world over (transported on filthy oil guzzling/spewing and unseaworthy ships), when those lions are all sitting around getting obese and developing heart disease and man bewbs from all the chemical/hormonal additives, then I think you would have a point.

Until then nature disagrees with you.

Strong words from a man who used to work in the Growing Corn With Eyes division of Monsanto.


What if it's a potato?

Yeah, but he also said "You can say that it's morally wrong to eat meat of any kind, but Mother Nature disagrees with you."

Eating meat of any kind =/= factory farming. If you don't think that eating meat of any kind is morally wrong, you're not the intended target.

Are you adverse to eating meat of any kind? If I offered you some rabbit or squirrel fresh from my yard, would you object on moral grounds that I should have left it to scamper freely throughout my petunias?

Wich is why i said "I can't speak for anyone else,"



Yes. I am averse to eating meat of any kind.

Tho' I do sometimes eat fish if i know the person who caught it.



No. Do what you like with your rodents. Tho' why anyone would want to eat a rodent, unless you are really hungry and theres no alternative, is beyond my ken.

I stopped eating meat for health reasons 20 odd years ago. After some research I found out how processed meat was (i lived in the UK at the time) and at that point was unable to afford organic. I moved to a vegetarian diet and within a couple of weeks, i started feeling more energetic and less bloated after meals. I started sleeping better and people commented on how i seemed more relaxed and looked 'healthier'. My ability to concentrate seemed to improve as well. I lost weight. At no point at this stage did i have any great objections to other people eating meat....

As time went on, I learned more and more about intensive farming practices (not just of animals) and became even more sure of my decision. The more I travelled, especially in Asia, the more comfortable I became with a vege diet until I realised that eating meat, whilst not particularly harmful per se, does become harmful when it becomes routine and taken for granted. An awarenes of what eating meat really means, to us, the animals and the environment is very important and should never be taken lightly.

When i realised that, I decided that for me, the eating of meat was not only not essential to humans, but that it was detrimental to humans in a spiritual as well as a material way. Our desire to eat meat, as tho it is jsut another commodity with no consequences, comes imo from our disconnection from the rythms of nature. Our factory farming of animals and plants ignores natural rythms in pursuit of profit at the expense of 'quality' (in the 'zen' meaning of the word). After living in 'nature' a lot more than many get the chance (honour) to do, I began to understand how important an awareness of natural rhythms and cycles were to me, and to eat meat that was produced without an awareness of that was anathema to my place in the world as I see it.

For sure, cruelty to animals has a part in it, but i hate cruelty to animals always, wether its cows, dogs or other humans. There is no good reason imo, to eat meat. People say a good reason to eat meat is 'cos it tastes good', but really, that is the ONLY reason to eat it. Its not a bad reason, but it pales in comparison to the scores upon scores of reasons NOT to eat it.

Its a matter of balance. My wife eats a piece of organic steak once or twice a month due to heavy periods, but she avoids it if possible. Pretty much 80% of what we eat, if not more, is organic nowadays. Sure, we can afford it now, and we have enough land to grow a fair amount of our own stuff, and we keep chickens for the eggs and compost. I know we are lucky enough to be able to make decisions and have the options, and not everybody else does. But to go through life pretending that what you consume has no consequences to either your physical or spiritual health or the health of the planet as a whole and all the other life that shares it with us is in my opinion one of the things that humans as a species should really take a long hard look at. It diminishes us to carry on consuming at the rate we are, wether its our food or our other natural resources.

Its a choice that we all need to make at some point. I made it in my early 20's. Im now in my mid 40's. I am fit. I have no health issues. I never get sick. I surf daily on the West Coast of NZ, wich is known for its ability to smash surfers half my age, and tho it sounds 'up myself', I look 15 years younger than I really am. It may be down to some good genes and luck, but stopping my eating of meat 20 years ago has, I believe, played a major role in where I am now. I believe I made a good choice, and if i sometimes sound a bit 'evengelical' about it, its because I feel good about the choice I made.


Sorry thats all a bit long, but you did ask

I wont disagree. The last hundred years or so has bought an unheard of amount of variety to our (western)lives, enabled by the discovery and use of oil. But, unles we are careful, that endless supply of energy wont last forever, and that will mean we will be forced to re-evaluate our habits.

One of the things I find most ironic is how you can go to a 'health' shop in Auckland and buy Himalayan Goji berries (for example) that were packed in the UK and transported here on a giant container ship. And 'new agers' for want of a better term, are buying them because they are good for you, and packing them in their hessian 'Fair Trade' bag (hand made in guatamala) and driving home in their 3.5 litre Lexus.

My belief is tho, that until we, as individuals, educate ourselves, think about what we've learned, and then make our own decisions based upon the conclusions we as individuals make, as opposed to what various 'interest' groups tell us, then we will continue to be thoughtless 'consumers'.

Theres 6 billion people here on the planet, and I know that we cant just turn the clock back to some imaginary Golden Age where we lived in harmony with nature, but in this age of information, we can at least, be aware of the impact of our actions are having and at least attempt to do the best that we as individuals can.

Either way, some animals eat other animals for food.

You don't like it? Enjoy your Quorn burger.

Nature doesn't dictate morality, and any attempt to derive morality from nature is fallacious and preposterously stupid for anyone born after 1850 or so, you cnut.

Is that more succinct for you?

Well see, then that's bad, because I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you had something relevant to say.

If you have nothing to contribute to the conversation, why say anything? I mean if you want to claim that the words I use are too overdone, you could pick nearly any post out there to your liking. Now I'm still not sure why you have a hard time understanding simple english, but since that is the language in which I wright, you could pick any post and say the same. Why would you go to the trouble of offering some naturalistic fact up in a method that could only be charitably interpreted as an ethical justification of behavior, and uncharitably interpreted as completely irrelevant?

I mean seriously, either you're stupidly deriving imperative from nature, or you uttered a totally meaningless sentence.

Who cares? This isn't any more important or relevant to whether or not that is right than well.. I didn't think I was going to get to do this so soon.

- The lightning that we see actually goes from the ground to the sky in what is known as the "return stroke" at 1/3 the speed of light. We can't see the initial "stepped leader" that passes from the sky to the ground.

- From space, the brightest man-made place is Las Vegas, Nevada.

- The Carpenters signature song, We've Only Just Begun, was originally part of a television commercial for a California bank. The music played in the background of a scene in which a newlywed couple had, of course, just begun their lives together. Richard Carpenter saw the commercial and sculpted it into the classic song that we know today.



Okay, go ahead and give an example of something morality is "in," so we can expedite this naturalistic farce of an argument to it's inevitable self-contradictory conclusion.