I always wonder where the myth that vegans don’t like food comes from. All day long I see vegans posting pictures of rich, complex and delicious looking meals on their FB walls. Get two or more vegans into a room and the conversation quickly turns to food. Trust me, we like food. We don’t like oppression, exploitation and violence.
A staggering 46% of Americans believe that god created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years, according to a USA Today/Gallup survey conducted this year from May 10th to the 13th. Not only has that number not changed much in the past 30 years since Gallup first asked the question on Creationism vs Evolution, it’s actually gone up 2%, from 44% in 1982 to 46% in 2012!
Gallup’s Frank Newport told CNN, “Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans’ views of the origins of the human species since 1982. All in all, there’s no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.”
So, why do I care what people believe? Why won’t I just let them have their fun?
Because such dogma can directly affect how non-humans are treated.
The literal belief that humans have some kind of god-given authority over every other species of animal bestows undeserved power into unreliable hands. Creationist claptrap that favors one species over another perpetuates speciesist doctrine devised to demean and control our fellow animals in the same way that notions of racial superiority were used against our fellow humans.
~ Jim Robertson (
June 3, 2012)
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I feel everyone has the right to do whatever it is they wish to do in life AS LONG AS what they choose to do doesn’t step on someone else’s rights. This is the core reason I am vegan.
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Being vegan is a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend.
~ Gary L. Francione (
May 13, 2012)
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All living beings are prisoners in the type body we reside in. We are actually held captive, and are at the mercy of the nature of the body we occupy. I am no different. I didn’t ask to be put inside the body of a flea, just as you didn’t ask to be put inside the body of a human being. Why are you defining me by my body, and then punishing me for it?
~ Marvin Lasco (May 16, 2012)
Black churches also embrace a literal reading of the scripture because of its unique history, says Blum, author of “W.E.B. DuBois, American Prophet.”
During slavery and segregation, many blacks saw the Bible as the one document they could trust. The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, state and local laws—all found some way to ignore their humanity, Blum says.
The Bible, though, was one book that told them that they weren’t slaves or three-fifths of a person, Blum says.
It said they were children of God.
“Throughout the 18th and 19th century, what document could they trust?” Blum says. “When the Bible says it’s so, it’s something that black people believed they could trust.”
Their enemies, though, used that same veneration of the Bible against them. Slaveholders had a simple but powerful argument when critics challenged them: Trust the Bible.
They cited scriptures such as Ephesians 6:5. (“Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling. …”) And they said Jesus preached against many sins, but never against slavery.
Since the Bible is infallible, and scripture sanctions slavery, it must be part of God’s order, slaveholders concluded.
“Slavery is everywhere in the Bible,” Blum says. “When Americans who were in favor of slavery defended it with the Bible, they had a treasure trove of clear biblical passages that accepted enslavement.”
Blum says abolitionists found it difficult to mount an effective counterargument. They couldn’t just say trust the Bible. They preached another approach to scriptures.
They said you couldn’t enslave people based on the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. (Obama cited the Golden Rule and his Christian faith in supporting same-sex marriage).
“The abolitionist turned to the ethics and spirit of the Bible,” Blum says. “They were theological modernists before modernism.”
~ John Blake (
May 12, 2012)
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In the spirit of July 4th----
I believe it’s a bit more complex than belief in talking snakes, though that was pretty funny. We all know the story about the Puritans and how they came here looking for religious freedom. Do a little digging and you’ll see that’s just as big a myth as the one about the English bringing all the food to the first Thanksgiving feast as depicted in the famous painting At any rate, from what I’ve been able to discern, there’s a inextricable link between religious faith and the notion of “manifest destiny” in this country. The conquest and slaughter of Native Americans was justified by religion. The enslavement of my ancestors was justified by religion. The notion of inherent white superiority is partially rooted in a belief that God and Jesus are white like the paintings we all see every Sunday (i.e. “created in His own image”). Religion justifies and underpins everything people claim as being inherently American. The Ku Klux Klan proports itself to be a “Christian” organization. Racial segregation was partially, if not fully, based on the Bible passage in Genesis that talks about “each after his own kind”. It’s “God’s will” for the US to be a great country. “God shed His grace on thee…” You see, without religion and it’s subsequent perversions, the US wouldn’t be the country that it is. I’d venture to say that those in power early in this country’s history understood the power of religion as being a “force multiplier”. If you look back, you’ll notice a heavy dose of “righteousness” and “God” in government propaganda through the years. Over the past eight years, you’ve seen the near ultimate manifestation of this notion in how Bush used religion to push this country to the brink of disaster. There were ministers, men of God, advocating for war in their churches on Sundays prior to the Iraq invasion when “war” is the complete antithesis of what Jesus stood for. They were no better than bin Laden issuing his “fatwas”. The ultimate manifestation will be when the US president orders a nuclear strike because he/she believes it’s God’s will, especially when her home church believes her home state will be a refuge during the “End Times”.
~ Ho Chi Daddy (
September 29, 2008)
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Isn’t it strange that we can see beef every single day, and yet it’s often situations like this, that allow us to connect our food with being an actual painful DEATH for someone.
If you wouldn’t want to walk up to this corpse and take a bite, then ask yourself, why do you order it at restaurants?
It may not seem like the same thing to you, but to the animal, it sure as hell is.
~ Shelley Williams (
May 1, 2012)
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Atheists do not
believe in supreme beings commonly referred to as gods.
Vegans do not believe other-than-human animals exist merely to serve human needs. That is, vegans believe nonhuman animals exist for the same reasons we do—their own.
From my perspective, the same goes for veganism. In a world where other-than-humans are routinely thought of as things to be bought, sold, used, and possibly even killed for mostly trivial human needs, folks who think differently are a rarity. Once again, doubt, I believe, is key to acquiring this currently uncommon worldview.
So, doubt or
skepticism, to me, is at the very core of most atheists, vegans, and other such
freethinking individuals. Thus, if this is true, it is my prediction that as time goes by and we move further away from the age of faith and into the age of doubt—where challenging the status quo is seen as a
noble act rather than an act of
heresy—we will see a significant rise in the numbers of atheists and vegans alike.
The way I see it, being vegan simply means not thinking of others as commodities that can be bought or sold. That is, being vegan means saying No to slavery.
Atticus