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A Mary T. Hoffman Commentary from All-Creatures.org

 

"Joyful Curmudgeon" An oxymoron?
No! I see all the beauty of God's creation and I'm joyful.  At the same time, I see all the suffering and corruption going on in the world, and feel called to help expose and end it so that we may have true peace and compassion.

 


Expose the Truth – 7 January 2007
By Mary T. Hoffman

I read about a pastor who says he “would qualify as a vegan” but will never call himself a vegan because he immediately and always loses his audience. He said that he was “pressured out of the vegetarian lifestyle” in churches: the first time in a church he was attending and the second time in a church where he served as pastor. He says that he has “led dozens of people into a plant-based diet based on the health advantages.” He believes that people “become more sympathetic to the animals’ plight when it isn’t forced on them….”

Reading this, I began to wonder if fear of criticism isn’t the real reason some people avoid telling the truth about why they eat a plant-based diet. I also wonder if it isn’t being cowardly and dishonest to be silent about the suffering that animals endure. This hiding of the truth plays right into the hands of the exploiters and prolongs the suffering.

Over the years we have observed that people lose respect for those who buckle under to the pressures of the animal abusing industries and their customers. For whatever reason, many people are misled into believing lies about farmed animals: you know – happy cows, smiling pigs, non-existent idyllic farmlands, etc. But those who live their ideals without compromise, refusing to hide the truth, gain and retain their respect.

We try as far as possible to “tell it the way it is” and have found that there are many who appreciate this honesty. The number of hits our website receives, 5,600,000 hits just last week, proves this; and every week we are seeing dozens of people changing to a compassionate lifestyle.

I will end this Blog with something I wrote on 29 January 2001:

True joy and peace result from a life lived with the knowledge that we are using our God-given abilities to further His kingdom. Pretending to not know in order to escape responsibility is dishonest. Turning our backs on injustice and pretending it doesn’t exist corrodes our conscience and undermines our true peace with God.

When God exposes the truth of animal exploitation to us, we should thank Him for revealing it to us and then use whatever resources He has given us to do something positive for His kingdom. We should not attack the messengers, from whatever source, because we don’t want to hear the message.

For the complete text, see:
http://all-creatures.org/heart/29jan2001.html

See also:
http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/index.html 

Here’s an afterthought: No doubt if a person were to be asked “Would you torture an animal?” they would respond emphatically with something like “Of course not!” Then why do they pay to have someone else do it? After all, that’s exactly what they’re doing when they use animal-derived products.  

Go on to: Happy? – 8 January 2007
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