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Contrary to the beliefs of some, veganism is not a religion. Here are a few quotes on the matter from prominent atheists, skeptics, scientists, and freethinkers:
“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”
“I became vegetarian when I was nine because my mother cooked spare ribs in a manner that made the connection to meat from an animal particularly clear.” Greene explains. “So at that point I said I’m never eating meat again and proceeded to go to the refrigerator and make a salami sandwich, because, a city kid, you know, what is meat? You don’t know what meat is, really. And my parents said, ‘Well, that salami is meat,’ at which point I just put down the sandwich and never ate meat again.”
"I am totally grossed out by the idea of eating an animal. Started when I was 9 yrs old and my mom cooked spare ribs. I was a city kid and to me meat was just another thing that you bought at the supermarket. Had no idea meat was from animals. But when I saw those ribs, tasted that flesh--I was done with meat."
"I deplore the tendency to treat the human species as if it were unique or on a pedestal, as though somehow there are people and there are animals, and the big divide is between people and animals. It's a matter of mere historical accident that the intermediates that link us to chimpanzees are extinct. If those all happened to be still alive or we discovered reliced populations of them, such that we could interbreed with a chain of intermediates all the way to chimpanzees, then immediately the pedestal would crumble. I suspect that in a hundred or two-hundred years time we may look back upon the way we treated animals today in something like the way we today look back on the way our forefathers treated slaves."
"In many ways I aspire to be a vegetarian."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znMBG5DQn14
"I have to confess that [veganism](see context) is morally superior."
"I think ideally I would like to see in the future, a world in which we are all vegetarian"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgmjh7bh7Ks
"You are a much more moral person than I am, and I have to say that […] You're perhaps the most moral person I've ever met" (Discussing the ethics of eating animals with philosopher and atheist Peter Singer, writer of Animal Liberation and vegetarian for 40+ years.)
"I don't find any good defense. I find myself in exactly the same position as I might have been 200 years ago talking about slavery."
“…the fact that I participate in a system that does this knowingly (animal factory farming) more or less condemns me as a hypocrite… We are two people who have admitted to participating in a system that is not only in some sense objectively bad, but perhaps so bad as to be the kind of thing that would be on the short list as to be an embarrassment to our descendants.”
"One of us asked the other, what would be on the short list of things that will just mortify our descendants on our behalf. You know the way we look back on Thomas Jefferson and are just agast that he couldn't see the wrongness of slavery; we have this supremely ethical and intelligent person who still couldn't see what an abomination slavery was. So what analogous blind spots do we have? And what will our descendants be scandalized by when they look back on us? On both of our short lists was the horror show of factory farming. None of us can defend it."
"I'm a vegetarian and an aspiring vegan."
"There is a moral high ground to the position [vegetarian/veganism] that I find very attractive, because I felt like a hypocrite as a meat eater."
"When you read the details of how our dairy and eggs are gotten, it's arguably as bad if not worse than much of the meat production."
"The details about chicken farming is almost the most horrible."
"Suffering is one component of it, but there's just the question of what sort of experience can this creature be deprived of?"
"Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish. Our genealogical connectedness, demonstrated through evolutionary biology, provides a scientific foundation from which to expand the moral sphere to include not just all humans—as rights revolutions of the past two centuries have done—but all nonhuman sentient beings as well."
“Ugh. Watched The Earthlings [animal agriculture documentary] last night researching moral progress. Feels like moral regress when it comes to animals,”
https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/388364946611793921
"What I think is almost more powerful as an argument for vegetarianism is not the cruelty we do to animals […] the main reason to be a vegetarian is not for the animals but for humans, because the production of the kind of food that we eat is destroying the environment for humans."
"The point is, it's the unnecessary-ness of the act. The standard argument that is given, which I gave at one point and I think you convinced me out of when I was reading [Animal Liberation] is that this is natural.
"If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - in so far as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient, if not strictly accurate, shorthand for the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary way. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin colour?"
"Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."
"There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.… The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery."
"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."
"The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end. Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. It is, I think, impossible to read the account given by Sir E. Tennent, of the behaviour of the female elephants, used as decoys, without admitting that they intentionally practise deceit, and well know what they are about."
"There is no impersonal reason for regarding the interests of human beings as more important than those of animals. We can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us; that is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority."
Submitted June 19, 2017 at 10:36PM by Omnibeneviolent http://ift.tt/2rNGys3 vegan
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