The Dutch parliament has banned the unnecessary slaughter of conscious animals, requiring that they be stunned first instead. As tends to be the case when some kind of seemingly senseless cruelty takes its rightful place on the chopping block, the religious are up in arms, and their usual gags are sounding awfully shrill.("http://teapotatheism.blogspot.com/)
I would like to see our parliament do the same. Every year at Ramadan etc thousands of sheep, cattle and goats are ritually slaughtered to die a slow death. And then we had the hullabaloo about ritual cattle slaughter by Zulu/Xhosa etc. some time ago...ban it ban it ban it!
as the Teapot Atheist says:
The orthodox have to learn that the natural progression of civilization is to domestic and defang religious orthodoxy. The Orthodox Jews no longer have the right to murder their disobedient children (though they may still skin their genitals), just as Muslims who have fled the dictatorships that host their sacred places no longer have the right to murder their sexually individualistic daughters, or their homosexual anybodys. Civilization took away orthodoxy's right to burn heretics, or to put bounties on them, or to publicly censor them. Civilization made the same laws apply to clergy as applies to laity. Civilization is still working out some of the kinks, like subsidizing its orthodoxies with tax subsidies and exempting them from laws against genital mutilation and (as we see here) animal cruelty, but the orthodox are squarely in the path of the steamroller of modernity and they are scared shitless about it.
Not to mention the utterly revolting mutilation of human beings that happens at this time every year. We have to think of a way to end this sort of savagery. I’m deeply ashamed of my species.
in my mind, future generations (if humanity survive that long) will look upon consuming animal flesh, as much as we look upon eating another human. it is actually quite barbaric, to take away another living thing’s life, for the sake of your appetite. the progress towards ‘humanity’, away from ‘animality’, is respect for living things. alas, we are still in the early stages of our evolvement from apes, so our animal instincts is still to eat flesh, get into barfights, fuck around and drive fast cars to impress females.
to kill an animal for some ‘god’ is stupid beyond reconing. then kill a human rather. wouldnt that be the ultimate test of faith? preferrably, the head of your particular religious group. it should be him/her that has the honour to die for his god. not some poor goat minding his own business.
i love meat, i do. if my body wasnt so demanding for meat, i would gladly go veg. thing is, i hate veg. unless its covered cheese.
will i kill a cow for by beliefs? absolutely not. it proves nothing. at least (i hope) some farmer somewhere is making some money from the sale of said livestock.
Carrots are alive too. Eating living things is, for now, inseparable from being alive as a human being. Stop eating living things, die.
alas, we are still in the early stages of our evolvement from apes, so our animal instincts is still to eat flesh
We’ve had a go at this but what the heck…
So the “higher” a species is evolved, the less likely it is to chow meat? Why? Crickets don’t eat meat but I don’t consider them more advanced than humans.
Can anything be more highly evolved/advanced than any other thing, the term seems arbitrary. I would say sharks are more highly evolved than humans, they’ve had much more time to evolve, and hence would be “more evolved” than humans. But sharks rip apart other animals for their food, hence I propose we aspire to become more highly evolved like sharks, and eat only animals we rip apart using our own teeth, while they are still alive.
So what’s the difference between “humanity” and “animality”? I gladly kill a mosquito simply because it’s irritating. Should I rather not? What if termites start eating my rafters? And what about viruses and bacterial infections? Should we become more highly evolved and stop disinfecting stuff?
(The devil’s advocate is baaaack, no malice intended, but I’d really like to know how you categorize this)
as you say BM, where do you draw the line? may I put out poison for the hundreds of rats that chow my ducks and their food indiscriminately? Can we kill cockroaches, flies etc just because they are nuisances to us humans?
i’m a bad shopper. i nearly allways want to kill some huisvrou and her kids. and the meat section give me the grils.
i buy my dogs bones once a week, and i try not to look at what i’m hauling from the fridges. thus, i grab two bags, head home.
the dogs were very happy with their pig’s head cut in two. me, not so much.
