wfathiest wrote:
We evolved from primates that were omnivores just as we are now. We developed higher cognitive process around 250kish years ago and with a more advance communication than grunts and points we were eating meat. So, from generation to generation it's not seen as bad or taboo and has helped sustain and grow the population.
We owe a great debt to those unfortunate animals killed in our evolution. We may never have made it through long winters without them to get to this point.
We also may have never made it here if the strongest men didn't kill the weaker men, take the women as slaves, and rape them to bear the next generation.
Rising from our natural origins, we have a sordid and brutal past. But that doesn't have to be our future. We are now capable of thinking and living beyond that.
wfathiest wrote:Am I against veganism? No not at all I just am against people saying that they have the only moral way and others that don't follow it are immoral.
Hardly anybody is saying that.
Does doing something immoral make you an immoral person? We all do bad things, sometimes things we know we shouldn't. The point is to try to do better, and to look at the balance of actions, good and bad, in our lives.
Likewise, vegans in general don't even say that it's wrong for everybody to eat meat. People in developing countries don't always have a choice in the matter; they don't have access to the knowledge, nutritious agricultural products, and medicine we do.
Choice is a luxury of the first world; the ability to consider the effects of our actions upon others.
In the context of that choice, it is a morally wrong one to choose to eat meat.
wfathiest wrote:That is basically the religious argument in a nutshell.
No, that's pretty much the opposite of the religious argument.
The religious argument is "It's wrong because god says so, and that's absolute!"
This is sensitive to context and consequence, and doesn't appeal to authority but to the negative or positive effects on other beings.
Like miniboes said, the differences in the arguments are night and day.
In order to reject the moral argument of veganism for modern first world people, you'd have to reject the moral arguments for anything and everything, and become a nihilist.
"Rape? Well, I personally disagree with it, but it's not for me to say what's right or wrong for you. Sure mr. rapist, you're a good person! Go ahead and do whatever
you think is right!"
I don't think that's something you'd agree with, but it's something you'd have to agree with in order to absolutely reject all moral arguments- which is just as dogmatic as any religion (just a dogmatic rejection rather than a dogmatic acceptance).
In order to avoid dogma, you have to adopt a moral framework that is sensitive to evidence and reason. That's something most (though not all) vegans do. It's something almost no religious people are willing to do.
wfathiest wrote:
I'm not sure if the vegan diet has had substantial studying done to affirm it's rhetoric. If it's truly healthier for you than one day it will be proven and more people will be educated and then decide to make that change if they want.
There are misconceptions out there, but in the scientific consensus on nutrition, there's not much argument on the subject anymore.
The bottom line is that today we can MAKE the substances found in meat. And we can do so selectively, to produce and consume only the good ones as supplements if they are found to be useful.
You can't exactly remove the bad things from meat.
So, a plant based diet has a fundamental advantage, in that it needs not miss any of the positive qualities of animal products, but can avoid all of the negative ones.
The problem is that we have people going around with conspiracy theories and pushing pseudoscience and fads like the Atkins diet (fine for cats who have metabolisms optimized for protein, not suitable for humans). These things catch on despite evidence- just as religion is resistant to evidence.
Nutrition is a complicated subject, like evolution, like Physics. It's easier for people to buy into nonsense rhetoric that lets them guiltlessly eat unhealthy and harmful things than to actually understand the science, just as it's easier for people to appeal to "god did it" than understand our natural history.
