:: 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'll use Webster's.
:: I am not superior to you or anyone else, Stuart, and I mean it.
I believe you!
:: You (by your repeated silence) DO consider yourself superior to me and others,
Big assumption.
:: 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.
Answer the questions directly.
::"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.
Except to note that quite a large portion of the male population of planet earth is repulsed by the act - but I suppose that means nothing.
": 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.
Say Kevin, did you make that up?
:: 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.
They would if they were hungry enough. They'd dig right into it if they hadn't eaten in a week. Maybe they are just generally overfed. I'll buy that.
:: 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.
Lettuce and carrots become salad. This dissociation of vegetables from their dirty beginnings is confounding our sensibilities.
: 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.
Actually, I made you out to be Mike. Sorry bud. I wish you were Mike so I could catch you being inconsistent.
:: 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.
First, you deride me for thinking there is an endless supply of it when it comes to food. Then you tell me it comes from the sun. Kevin, we don't need to be more energy efficient when it comes to the sun. We need to teach others how to be.
:: 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;
Don't care.
::soil erosion;
Can prevent this without going meat free.
::global warming from cattle methane and forest depletion;
Don't believe this. Not for a minute.
::loss of land to indigenous subsistence farmers;
As if the world should go on hold while they figure it out how to make a living. The world is changing Kevin.
:: 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.
Yes.
:: 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 could try proving it with reliable info that comes from places other than left-wing greens with ties to disenfranchised communists.
:: 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.
Yes, I recognize how evil it is not to believe fringe thinking just because it isn't backed up with evidence. I'm also very sorry that every step I take isn't scrutinzed ad nauseum to calculate the misery that step might impose on this planet and the entirety of its far, far less fortunate souls. I'm greatly distressed in contemplating the impact of my next breath when I just could die instead and fertilize the local fauna.
:: 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.
You might have made a good televangelist.
Stuart Gort
