Kevin: "I believe that the preparing and eating of food is sacred."Stuart: "Sacred, eh? Well I shouldn't wonder. If you mean to establish your own independent moral code it's no wonder you worship very odd things."
Food is, and has always been, considered sacred by cultures the world over. By "sacred" I do not mean "the godhead", and you know this Stuart, only you are too obtuse to let it pass. (Your own religious tradition considers some food sacred as well, does it not? Please don't answer, we all know about fish and bread etc...)
Likewise, you are too stuborn not to take a shot at my use of the words "superiority" and "sin". I only use them since I know respectively they are the 54th and 32nd most common words in your vocabulary, and it falls on you to define them. I am not superior to you or anyone else, Stuart, and I mean it. You (by your repeated silence) DO consider yourself superior to me and others, so why not create a list of those traits which make you superior, and stop playing silly games by throwing my questions back in my face. "Sin " is not my word of choice. Some ACTIONS I believe are wrong, but I do not believe there is such a thing as a "sinner". My use of the word "sin" was intended to render the conversation into language familiar to you and to those who know you here. Your arguments that homosexuality is wrong are based on religion as near as I can tell, and you offer no reasonable (as in using reason) explanation to back it up.
Stuart: "I disagree totally! When you open a package of meat blood comes out. I know it. My wife and kids know it. I think everybody knows it Kevin. I believe psuedo intellectuals discuss such things as interconnectedness and dissociation to keep their fertilized minds entrenched in dogma. Children who can tell me where meat comes from?"
It is a fact, Stuart, that MOST people, when taken to spend a day on a farm with an animal, will refuse to eat that animal when it is served to them for supper an hour later. Most people will stick with salad after having made a tour of a slaughter house. (Ranchers would be an exception to this, because unlike most of us, they are still connected into the food cycle.) Stuart, children will not easily wolf down 3 McD hamburgers if they have been prepared from scratch (beginning with the cows) right before their eyes. This (regardless of how much you insult my intelligence) is dissociation, and it is enshrined even in our language: cows and pigs become beef, burger, and steak, and pork, bacon, and ham. Deer becomes venison, fish becomes seafood. Yet lettuce is still lettuce, and carrots are still carrots and apples are still apples. The word meat did not always mean "dead flesh". It once meant hearty food of any type, but it has now become oure euphemism for dead animals.
Kevin: "In short, eating meat is not wrong."
Stuart: "That wasn't your viewpoint a while ago but thanks for that. It's all I ever wanted to hear you say 100 posts back."
You can try to make me out to be someone who waffles on his arguments, but I have been firm in my beliefs about meat eating LONG before I "met" you. In my other posts I have always qualified my arguments against meat-eating, and I'm sure those here who know me will remember this. Obviously you just have a poor, selective memory, and I know you haven't thoroughly read most of what I've written you, since you have a 100% failure rate in continuing these threads.
Stuart, here's a word or two about energy, seeing as you think there is an endless amount of it when it comes to food. All our food energy comes from the sun originally, and the only organisms that can turn that into food energy are plants. Hence there place in the food chain. 50% of the energy that reaches Earth is absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere. A further 47.5% of it misses plants, so only 2.5% of it is absorced by plants. Of the 2.5% absorbed by plants, 90% of it goes into growing the plant, so only 10% of it (or 0.25% of the original sunlight energy) is "stored" for consumption by other organisms. When a herbivore eats a plant, 90% of the energy goes into "running" the herbivorous organism, so only 10% (or 0.025% of the original sunlight energy) gets stored in the flesh of that animal. It is fairly simple mathematics to see that eating the plant is more energy efficient than eating the animal.
This is ONE reason not to eat cattle. The others (since you have purged them from your memory, no doubt) include: habitat depletion leading to species extinction; soil erosion; global warming from cattle methane and forest depletion; loss of land to indigenous subsistence farmers; and last but not least (in my books) the ethics of a proprietor/stewardship mentality over nature and animals, which are seen as resources not beings.
You say that the grain fed to cattle is not fit for human consumption. This is sometimes the case and it is sometimes not the case. Regardless, the land could EASILY be used to grow food fit for human consumption. I say EASILY because before it was forcibly taken from peasant farmers by corrupt governments to serve even more corrupt multinationals, it WAS growing food for humans. It was used for subsistence farming, sustainable farming in most cases. You can deny this if you want; for you that means only lying to yourself; for others it means starvation and poverty.
You argue that you should help those poor nearest you, which is certainly important to do. But you also deny any connection between the food you eat and the rest of the world. This is ignorance for most people, but for you, Stuart, it is selfish, wilfull denial, and it is actively contributing to the harm of others. You could change what you are eating Stuart, and it could make a difference, and no one in this room would be any the wiser, so you would not suffer your pride any. It would only help change the world for the better.
