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Take
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Christian Vegetarian Association Presents:
Take
Heart!
Will Tuttle
author of The World Peace DietPracticing veganism means practicing respect and sensitivity toward others, especially those who are vulnerable and without social privilege, and is precisely the practice required to bring healing to our corrupt and wounded culture.
Veganism is a call to renounce the core practice of our culture—reducing beings to mere harvestable and abuseable commodities—and to practice, in every aspect of our lives, its opposite: mindfulness, inclusiveness, equality, and respect.
There is no force more subversive to our culture than practicing vegans, no force more challenging, healing, transformative, and uplifting than people living the truth that all life is sacred and interconnected.
The pollution of our shared consciousness-field by the dark agonies endured by billions of animals killed for food is an unrecognized fact that impedes our social progress and contributes gigantically to human violence and the warfare that is constantly erupting around the world.
How could it ever be to our purpose to rob another living being of his or her purpose?”
In reference to the newborn calves taken away from their mothers shortly after birth...
He cannot fight the hands that take him from his mother or speak to us in human words, telling us how deeply it hurts. But it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. For us to ignore the suffering is to ignore and deny our own decency.
Enslaving and eating animals is relentlessly polluting our mental and bodily environments, hardening our hearts and blocking feelings and awareness, instigating fear, violence, and repression in our relationships, laying waste our precious planet, gruesomely torturing and killing billions of terrorized beings, deadening us spiritually, and profoundly disempowering us by impeding our innate intelligence and our ability to make essential connections.
Compassion is ethical intelligence: it is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others.
Veganism is, I’ve found, a litmus test of religious teachings and religious teachers.
To the degree that religious teachings do not explicitly encourage veganism, which is the practice of nonviolence and lovingkindness, to that same degree these teachings are hypocritical and disconnected from their spiritual source.
As we make connections and become open to feedback, it will be increasingly obvious that one of the greatest gifts any of us can give to the world, to the human family, to future generations, to animals, to ourselves, and to our loved ones is to go vegan and dedicate our lives to encouraging others to do the same.
The inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vital to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening.
With every baby calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and with every baby chick killed or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine within ourselves.
By ordering and eating products from the industrial herding complex that dominates the feminine with an iron fist, we squelch our opportunities for maturing to higher levels of understanding, sensitivity, and compassion. We remain merely ironic in our quests.
What goes around comes around. We must as a species stop the violence that is inherent in our meat habit. This should be of paramount importance for all religious movements and teachers. It is the call of spirituality. If our religions don’t hear this call, we must revitalize them or create new ones that do.
The great philosopher Schopenhauer, in criticizing how some Christians treat animals, wrote, “Shame on such a morality that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun.” All of us are celebrations of infinite mysterious Spirit, deserving of honor and respect.
Every day, we cause over thirty million birds and mammals and forty-five million fish to be fatally attacked so we can eat them, and it’s universally considered to be good food for good people. With these meals, we feed our shadow, which grows strong and bold as it gorges itself on our repressed grief, guilt, and revulsion.
Jesus’ exhortation that we love one another and not do to others what we wouldn’t want done to us is the essence of the vegan ethic, which is a boundless compassion that includes all who can suffer by our actions.
Your question and comments are welcome
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